Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/336

326 mun, the chief at Lac du Flambeau, was highly enraged against this village, and in open council, he addressed the ringleaders with the most bitter and cutting epithets. It came near being the cause of a bloody family feud, and good-will became eventually restored only through the exertions of the kind-hearted Michel Cadotte, who, by this stroke, became crippled in his means as an Indian trader, and who from this time gradually curtailed his business, till in the year 1823 he sold out all his interests in the Ojibway trade to his two sons-in-law, Lyman M. and Truman A. Warren, and retired to a quiet retreat at La Pointe, after having passed forty years in the arduous, active and dangerous career of a pioneer fur trader. In 1784 we find him wintering with a small outfit of goods on the Num-a-ka-gun River, and year after year moving his post further westward, leading the Ojibways into richer, but more dangerous hunting grounds. In 1792 we find him wintering on Leaf River of the Upper Mississippi, and in company with his elder brother, opening a vast area of Indian country, to the enterprise of fur traders.

The marks of his wintering posts are pointed out at Thief River, emptying into Crow Wing, at Leech, Winnipeg, and Cass Lakes, at Pokaguma Falls, and at Oak Point, on the Upper Mississippi, where he is said again to have narrowly escaped the bullets of the wild Indians. Yellow Lake, Snake River, Po-ka-guma (in the St. Croix region) and at different points on the Chippeway and Wisconsin Rivers, the marks of this old pioneer are still visible. Like all other traders who have passed their lifetime in the Indian country, possessing a charitable heart and an open hand, ever ready to relieve the poor and suffering Indian, he died poor, but not unlamented. He was known among the Ojibways by the name of Ke-che-me-shane (Great Michel).