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 from that determination, effectually blocked a game which France had begun to play more than a century before the events described in this chapter, viz: the occupation of the interior of the vast continent which the English for a long time thought so narrow and of which they seized only the Atlantic coast. The fur traders of the French early pushed up the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, and later the ardent and courageous missionaries went much farther. Later still a French colony occupied the lower Mississippi, and the natural result would have been a final union of these colonies by the pathway of the Mississippi, Ohio, and the great lakes. But the settlements of Aristopia blocked the way.

In 1673 a party composed of Marquette, a missionary who had spent several years in the region of the great lakes, Joliet, a Quebec trader, five other Frenchmen, and two Algonquins, ascended a river flowing into Lake Michigan to a place where a short portage enabled them to launch their canoes in another broad but shallow river flowing southwestward. This river was named by the French Ouisquondsen (later spelled Ouisconsin). Here the Indian guides deserted the party, and the