Of these routes, the first two were not at first available, owing to the
hostility of the Iroquois.
Of all the colonies that fell to the English, as we have seen, New York
alone had a water-system that favored communication with the interior,
tapping the St. Lawrence and opening a way to Lake Ontario. Prevented by
the Iroquois friends of the Dutch and English from reaching the
Northwest by way of the lower lakes, the French ascended the Ottawa,
reached Lake Nipissing, and passed by way of Georgian Bay to the islands
of Lake Huron. As late as the nineteenth century this was the common
route of the fur trade, for it was more certain for the birch canoes
than the tempestuous route of the lakes. At the Huron islands two ways
opened before their canoes. The straits of Michillimackinac[63]
permitted them to enter Lake Michigan, and from this led the two routes
to the Mississippi: one by way of Green bay and the Fox and Wisconsin,
and the other by way of the lake to the Chicago river. But if the trader
chose to go from the Huron islands through Sault Ste. Marie into Lake
Superior, the necessities of his frail craft required him to hug the
shore, and the rumors of copper mines induced the first traders to take
the south shore, and here the lakes of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota
afford connecting links between the streams that seek Lake Superior and
those that seek the Mississippi,[64] a fact which made northern
Wisconsin more important in this epoch than the southern portion of the
state.
We are now able to see how the river-courses of the Northwest permitted
a complete exploration of the country, and that in these courses
Wisconsin held a commanding situation,[65] But these rivers not only
permitted exploration; they also furnished a motive to exploration by
the fact that their valleys teemed with fur-bearing animals. This is the
main fact in connection with Northwestern exploration. The hope of a
route to China was always influential, as was also the search for mines,
but the practical inducements were the profitable trade with the Indians
for beaver and buffaloes and the wild life that accompanied it. So
powerful was the combined influence of these far-stretching rivers, and
the "hardy, adventurous, lawless, fascinating fur trade," that the
scanty population of Canada was irresistibly drawn from agricultural
settlements into the interminable recesses of the continent; and herein
is a leading explanation of the lack of permanent French influence in
America.