While the modern romance of the Great Lakes, the vast commerce that has grown upon them, the great cities along their shores, and the part they have played in the history of the last generation form, to my mind, one of the most absorbing and at the same time one of the most fruitful subjects for the writer of to-day, it is to the “dim and mysterious ages of long ago” that one must allow his imagination to be carried, if he would understand, in its fullest measure, the part that our Inland Seas should hold within the hearts of the American people. It has been my desire, in this volume, to establish between our people and our Lakes that bond of friendship which unfortunately has never existed except upon their very shores. In the years in which I have studied the Lakes, their commerce, and their people, I have been astonished at the dearth of material which has been published about them, and not until this discovery came upon me forcefully did I understand that our own glorious Inland Seas, holding in perpetual inheritance for the American people one half of the fresh water of the whole globe, are, indeed, “aliens in the land of their birth.”

For this reason, I am adding to my preceding chapters a brief history of the Lakes. It is not what might be called a history in detail, for such a story of the Inland Seas would fill volumes in itself. No other portion of the globe has been fraught with more incident of historical and romantic interest than these fresh-water heritages of our nation. The dramas that have been played upon them or along their shores would fill libraries. Their unrevealed pages of romance and tragedy would furnish rich material for the writers of a century. About them lie the dust of three quarters of the aboriginal inhabitants of North America. Along their shores were fought some of the world’s most relentless wars of absolute extermination. Upon their waters occurred the most romantic adventures of the early exploration of the continent. Every mile of these waters, now clouded with the smoke of a gigantic commerce, is fraught with the deepest historical interest. And yet, as I write this, there comes to my mind a thought of those countless thousands of Americans who, travelling afar for their pleasures, seek in every quarter of the globe that their feet may tread in awesome respect upon spots hallowed because of their historical associations, whether those associations be of fact, of legend, or of song. The romance of the Lakes does not begin with their early discoverers; neither does it begin with the primitive inhabitants along their shores. It dawns with their making. Unnumbered thousands of years ago, before the glaciers of the Ice Age crept over the continent; when prehistoric monsters, still living in a tropical world, roamed throughout what is now the Lake region; and when man, if he existed at all, was in his crudest form, the Great Lakes were still unborn. Where their ninety-five thousand square miles of surface now afford the world’s greatest highways of water commerce there were then vast areas of plain, of highland and plateau, rising at times to the eminence of mountains. Those were the days when the North American continent was completing itself, when the last handiwork in the creation of a world was in progress. In place of the Lakes there were then a number of great rivers in these regions—rivers, which despite the passing of ages, have left their channels and their marks to this day. These rivers were all of one system and were all tributary to one great stream, the Laurentian River, whose channel to the sea was that of the St. Lawrence of to-day. Were it possible for one to conceive himself back in those primitive times a journey over this first great river system of the continent would have carried him, first of all, from the still unfinished ocean along the south shore of what is now Lake Ontario. He would have travelled within ten miles of where scores of towns and cities now flourish, and almost directly opposite what is now the Niagara River he would have encountered another great stream pouring into the Laurentian from the south and west. This river continued almost through the middle of what is now Lake Erie, and opposite where Sandusky is now situated divided itself into two branches, which still exist in the Maumee and the Detroit. The Laurentian continued northward close along the southern shore of Georgian Bay, turned southward to the centre of the Lake Huron basin, where the Huronian River, sweeping across central Michigan, joined it from Saginaw Bay. The Laurentian itself passed northward through the Straits of Mackinaw and terminated in what is now Lake Michigan. The story of this vast water system has been left in clearly defined outlines; its indelible marks are ancient valleys, sand-filled channels of the great streams, and worn escarpments. Seldom has science had an easier story to read of ages that are gone.

Then came the second step in the creating of the Lakes of to-day. Slowly life changed as the Glacial Age approached, and with the sweeping back of life the rivers, too, passed out of existence. During the slow passing of centuries, their channels were filled, and the valleys were obstructed with drift, so that when the Ice Age had come and gone their channels no longer ran clear and unobstructed to the sea. As a consequence, great areas were submerged, and hundreds of thousands of square miles of what is now fertile land, populated by millions and dotted by cities, became an ocean. But the continent was still in process of formation. The land in the Lake region began to rise, and continued in its elevation until out of the chaos of sea the Lakes were formed. To the north-east, as the centre of the continent rose, there was a tilting of the land oceanward, and this warping dropped Lake Ontario below the level of the other Lakes, thus interposing a barrier to free communication to the sea and giving birth to Niagara Falls.

In this way, so far as science can tell, the Great Lakes of to-day were brought into existence. How early human life existed along their shores it is impossible even to guess, but that the earliest life of the continent should first of all gather in the valleys of the vast water system that gave them birth, and afterward reassemble along their shores, is highly probable. The earliest discoverers to penetrate into the wildernesses of the West found these shores inhabited by powerful nations. Other nations were facing extermination. Still others had ceased to exist and were forgotten except in legend. Along the Inland Seas have been found evidences of a superior race to the warlike aborigines of the days of La Salle. But only these evidences, utensils of copper and stone and clay, remain as proof of their existence. What they were, when they lived, and how they died, is one of the mysteries that will remain forever unsolved.

By the time the known history of the Lakes really begins their inhabitants had degenerated into warlike, ferocious savages, bent upon battle and extermination, and for the most part constantly embroiled in war of one kind or another. From Lake Ontario to the end of Superior the Lake regions were one great battle-ground, and this sanguinary history had extended so far into the past that with the coming of the first French explorers the Indians could give no comprehensive idea of when it had begun. At this time, early in the seventeenth century, the Lake country was the bone of contention among three quarters of the aborigines of North America. There was hardly a tribe that was not fighting some one of its neighbours, and the remnants of vanquished nations were constantly fleeing from their enemies and escaping total extermination by seeking safety in the West and South. In Northern Michigan and in Wisconsin there lived three branches of the Algonquin tribe, the Ottawas, the Ojibwas, and the Pottawatomies. The Ottawas had been driven westward, and the Ojibwas at this time were invading the hunting grounds of the Crees, who were entrenched on the northern shore of Lake Superior, their territory extending northward to Hudson Bay. On their west, the Ojibwas were also at war with the powerful Dakotas, who, fighting eastward from the Mississippi, had secured a foothold on Superior. To the eastward, encroaching upon the tribes of Lake Ontario, were the Iroquois, or Five Nations, consisting of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and the Senecas. Between these and the fierce Algonquins of the Upper Lakes were wedged the Hurons and the Eries, fighting vainly against the almost total extermination which became their fate a little later. It was in the war between 1650 and 1655 that both the Eries and the Neuters, on the southern shore of Lake Erie, were wiped out of existence by the Iroquois, and it was about this same time that the Hurons received their death-blow. The few that escaped fled to the Mississippi and promptly became involved in a war with the Sioux. Reduced to a pitiable remnant the once powerful Sacs and Foxes were awaiting their end along Green Bay.

In these days, the Lakes were already playing a part in commerce as well as in war. Great fleets of Indian canoes made annual voyages from the Upper to the Lower Lakes, and war fleets were common spectacles from almost every coast. The greatest of these fleets, so far as is known, was that of the Iroquois, which in 1680 carried six hundred selected braves across Lake Erie, up the Detroit River, through Lake St. Clair, Lake Huron, the Straits of Mackinaw, and down to the foot of Lake Michigan, where the adventurous navigators were utterly repulsed by the warriors of the Illinois. Another Iroquois fleet was annihilated near Iroquois Point, in Lake Huron. In 1600, according to stories told by the Indians, a fierce naval battle in which several hundred war canoes were engaged was fought in the middle of Lake Erie by the Wyandots and the Senecas. Only one Seneca canoe escaped.

It was at this time, when the Lake country and the Lakes themselves were the stage upon which were being played the most thrilling dramas of aboriginal history, that the Inland Seas were first visited by their white discoverers. In 1615, the Franciscan friar, Joseph Le Caron, in company with three other Franciscans and twelve Frenchmen, invaded the seat of the Huron nation on Matchedash Bay, where Champlain joined him a few days later. The Hurons were preparing to attack their old enemies, the Iroquois, and Champlain accompanied them on their expedition. The campaign was unsuccessful but it led to the Frenchman’s discovery of Lake Ontario. Stephen Brule, an unlettered and reckless adventurer, was the first white man to rest eyes upon Lake Superior, his voyage up Lake Huron being made some time in 1629. Brule, however, was more interested in ingots of copper which he found than in the greatest body of fresh water on the globe, and he returned south almost immediately, while it was left for Raymbault and Jogues, two hopeful missionaries in search of a passage to China, to make the first navigation of Superior. This they did in 1641. Five years after Brule’s discovery, another adventurer, Jean Nicolet, paddled in a birch canoe from Georgian Bay across Lake Huron and through the Straits of Mackinaw, and thus discovered Lake Michigan. As surprising as it may seem, Erie was the last of the Great Lakes to be found by white men, and although its existence was known to the French as early as 1640, it was not until 1669 that Joliet, its discoverer, made his voyage upon it.

The situation as it existed in the entire Lake country at the time of the coming of these first explorers was so unreasonably tragic that, viewed from the present day, it approaches dangerously near to having a touch of the comic about it. As one early writer says, “It was as if a pack of dogs were fighting over a bone. Only—where was the bone?” There was hardly an Indian tribe that was not at war with some other tribe, and in most instances, according to the discoverers, there were no evident causes for the sanguinary conflicts. “It was as if all the savages were impelled by a bad spirit, and a rage of extermination was sweeping over the land,” wrote one of the early Fathers. It is a popular superstition that the extinction of the red man must be ascribed to the coming of the white, but nothing shows more graphically the error of this belief than these conditions of the seventeenth century in the Lake country. The aborigines were exterminating themselves. They were doing the work completely, mercilessly. Nations had already been put out of existence. The Eries and Neuters were but lately annihilated. The once powerful Hurons were reduced to a remnant. The Sacs and Foxes were doomed. Existing tribes were weakened and scattered by ceaseless war. And sweeping down from the east the all-powerful Iroquois, the Romans of the wilderness, were coming each year to add to the completeness of the extermination.

Now came the whites, and with their presence there developed slowly a check to the indiscriminate slaughter. At no time in the world was the missionary spirit more active, and scores of the disciples of the Church plunged fearlessly into the wilderness of the Lake regions, daring their perils of starvation and torture and death that the word of God might reach the hearts of the savages. And with them there came hundreds of adventurous spirits, trappers employed by the “Hundred Associates,” fortune-hunters, and reckless souls who had no other object than the excitement of exploration and discovery, but all of whom were staunch Catholics. The very fearlessness of these white invaders acted as a governor on the hostile energies of the savages, and their interests, in a small way at first, began to be diverted into other channels than those of war. Among the neutral nations on the Niagara River, Father Joseph de la Roche d’Aillon formed a mission early in the seventeenth century. As early as 1615, the Recollects had established a mission among the Hurons, which was later continued by the Jesuits. For more than thirty years, the missionaries had laboured among the Hurons when, in 1648, the Senecas and Mohawks fell upon their country, razed twenty of their villages, killed most of their 3000 fighters, and totally destroyed them as a people. Two of the Jesuit Fathers, BrÉbeuf and Daniel, gave up their lives in the fearful massacres of those days. It was only five years later that the Iroquois, destroyers of the Hurons, requested the French to send missionaries among them, and for nearly twenty years the zealous Jesuits brought about a lull in the sanguinary conflicts of the Five Nations, but at the end of that time when war flamed out anew they were compelled to abandon their missions. Meanwhile, along the Upper Lakes, the missionary movement was being prosecuted with extreme vigour. Garreau and Claude Allouez, with other missionaries, worked along the shores of Superior, establishing missions among the Sacs and Foxes and Pottawatomies. In 1668, Marquette established his famous mission at Sault Ste. Marie, and three years later founded the mission of St. Ignace on the Straits of Mackinaw.

It would take a volume to describe the adventures of these early Fighters of the Faith, their trials and sacrifices, their successes and failures. The briefness of our sketch compels us to move quickly from these absorbing scenes to the first great event in the history of Lake navigation, and to the beginning of that encroachment of the English which was to develop a hundred years of war along the Inland Seas. While the Jesuit Fathers were sacrificing their lives among the savages and while the Indian wars of extermination were still in progress, the French farther east had already begun to feel the hostile influence of the English. To check this influence La Salle and Count Frontenac brought about the erection of Fort Frontenac, in 1673, on the present site of Kingston. At this time, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, a young man of eminence and learning, was of the supreme faith that he was destined to discover a water passage through the American continent to China and Japan, and the building of Fort Frontenac was only the first step in the gigantic scheme which he planned to carry out. A part of this scheme was the building of a vessel of considerable size in which La Salle planned not only to make a complete tour of the Lakes but in which he hoped to discover the route that would lead to the Orient. Five years later, the young adventurer made the portage around Niagara Falls, and at the mouth of Cayuga Creek, in Niagara County, New York, where is now located the town of La Salle, he began the construction of the first vessel ever to sail the Inland Seas.

There are different estimates as to the size of the ship, but that it was somewhere between fifty and sixty tons there is little doubt. Assisting in this work were Tonty and Hennepin, and it took all of the persuasive powers of the three to keep the Griffin, as the vessel had been named, from the hostile hands of the Senecas as she lay in her stocks. The ship, when launched, was completely rigged, found with supplies for a long voyage, and armed by seven pieces of cannon and a quantity of muskets. She carried two masts and a jib, and was decorated with the usual ornaments of an ancient ship of war, including a flying griffin at the jib-boom and a huge eagle aft. For hundreds of miles about, the Indians came to see this wonderful “floating fort” before she set sail. Thirty-two souls were to form the crew of the Griffin in her adventurous search for the route to Cathay, and on the day that she turned her prow up the Niagara River, La Salle and his followers fell upon their knees, invoking upon themselves the mercies of God in an undertaking which, they believed, was to be one of the most venturesome of their age. With all on board singing the Te Deum Laudamus, the Griffin passed into Lake Erie, and while at the sight of the great water ahead of them the priests again invoked the blessings of God, the first ship to sail the Lakes boldly headed into those “vast and unknown seas of which even their savage inhabitants knew not the end.”

According to the historian Hennepin, who was a member of the expedition, days and nights of the wildest speculation, of hope, of fear, and of anxious anticipation now followed. Rumour filled the seas ahead of them with innumerable perils. The hardy navigators knew not at what instant destruction might overtake them in any one of a dozen ways in which they supposed themselves to be threatened. Each morning and night the entire crew joined in prayers and in singing the hymns of the Church. Lake Erie was crossed in safety, and on the eleventh of August the Griffin entered the Detroit River. Hennepin was enthralled with its wonderful beauty. “The river was thirty leagues long,” he says, “bordered by low and level banks, and navigable throughout its entire length. On either side were vast prairies, extending back to hills covered with vines, fruit trees, thickets, and tall forest trees, so distributed as to seem rather the work of art than nature.” Passing between Grosse Isle and Bois Blanc Island, the Griffin sailed slowly up the river, frequent stops being made along its course; it passed the present site of Detroit, and on the day of the festival of Saint Claire the navigators entered the lake which they gave that name. On the twenty-third of August, the Griffin entered into Lake Huron, the Franciscans chanting the Te Deum for the third time, and the entire crew joining in offering up thanks to the Almighty for the smiling fortune that had thus far accompanied them on their voyage.

Crossing Saginaw Bay the Griffin lay for two days among the Thunder Bay islands and then continued her way into the North. Almost immediately after this, La Salle and his companions were caught in a terrific storm, and in the height of its fury, when it was thought that the end had come and that all the demons of this mysterious world were working their destruction, La Salle made a vow that if God would deliver them he would erect a chapel in Louisiana to the memory of St. Anthony de Padua, the tutelary saint of the sailor. As if in response to this vow, the wind subsided and the storm-beaten Griffin found shelter in Michilimackinac Bay, where a mission had been built among the Ottawas. Early in September, the Griffin sailed into Lake Michigan and continued to Washington Island, at the entrance to Green Bay. Here a party of missionaries and traders had been established for a year. They had collected a large quantity of furs, valued at about twelve thousand dollars, and La Salle changed his original plans and sent the Griffin back to Niagara with this treasure, with the idea of continuing his own exploration by canoe.

On the eighteenth of September, 1679, La Salle bade adieu to the Griffin and her crew, and from the point of a headland watched her white sails until they dropped below the horizon. It was the last he ever heard or saw of the ship. No sign of her was ever afterward found, no soul who sailed with her lived to tell the story of her tragic end. In the years that followed, it was rumoured that Indians boarded and destroyed her, and massacred her crew. Hennepin was of the opinion that she was lost in a storm. Others believed that some of her crew had mutinied and that after murdering their companions they had joined the Ottawas, where they met their own fate. From time to time in recent years, relics have been found along the Lakes which have revived stories of the mysterious disappearance of the Griffin, but none of these finds have yet thrown reasonable light upon the tragic end of this first vessel to navigate the Inland Seas and of the venturesome spirits who manned her. By all but a few the Griffin is forgotten, or has never been known. Yet by the millions who live along the Great Lakes she should be held in much the same reverence as are the caravels of Columbus by the whole nation.