Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/331

Rh Cadotte at Lac Coutereille, while under charge of a clerk named John Baptiste Corbin. From the lips of Mons. Corbin, who is still living at Lac Coutereille, at the advanced age of seventy-six years, and who has now been fifty-six years in the Ojibway country, I have obtained a reliable account of this transaction:—

Michel Cadotte, after having fairly opened the resources of the fur trade of the Chippeway River district, and having approved himself as a careful and successful trader, entered into an arrangement with the Northwest Fur Company, who at this time nearly monopolized the fur trade of the Ojibways. Mons. Cadotte located a permanent post or depot on the island of La Pointe, on the spot known at the present time as the "Old Fort." He also built a trading house at Lac Coutereille, which in the year 1800, was first placed in charge of J.B. Corbin. To supply these posts, he procured his outfit from the Northwest Company at Grand Portage. It is said that his outfit of goods each year amounted to the sum of forty thousand dollars, which he distributed in different posts on the south shores of Lake Superior, Wisconsin, Chippeway, and St. Croix Rivers. He resided himself at La Pointe, having taken to wife the daughter of White Crane, the hereditary chief of this village. Cadotte, though he continued to winter in different parts of the Ojibway country from this time, always considered La Pointe Island as his home, and here he died in 1836, at the advanced age of seventy-two years.

In the year 1808, during the summer while John B. Corbin had charge of the Lac Coutereille post, messengers, whose faces were painted black, and whose actions appeared strange, arrived at the different principal villages of the