Here, Dreuillettes learned much of the Unknown from an old Nipissing
chief. He heard of six overland routes to the bay of the North, whence
came such store of peltry.[3] He, too, like the two Frenchmen from
Green Bay, heard of wandering tribes who had no settled lodge like the
Hurons and Iroquois, but lived by the chase,--Crees and Sioux and
Assiniboines of the prairie, at constant war round a lake called
"Ouinipegouek."
[Illustration: A Cree brave, with the wampum string.]
By one of those curious coincidences of destiny which mark the lives of
nations and men, the young Frenchman who had gone with the Jesuit,
Dreuillettes, to Lake Nipissing when the other Frenchmen turned back,
was Medard Chouart Groseillers, the fur trader married to Radisson's
widowed sister, Marguerite.[4]
When Radisson came back from Onondaga, he found his brother-in-law,
Groseillers, at Three Rivers, with ambitious designs of exploration in
the unknown land of which he had heard at Green Bay and on Lake
Nipissing. Jacques Cartier had discovered only one great river, had
laid the foundations of only one small province; Champlain had only
made the circuit of the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, and the Great Lakes;
but here was a country--if the Indians spoke the truth--greater than
all the empires of Europe together, a country bounded only by three
great seas, the Sea of the North, the Sea of the South, and the Sea of
Japan, a country so vast as to stagger the utmost conception of little
New France.
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