The principal rendezvous in the west was Mackinac or Michillimackinac. Few places possessed a more interesting history than this old headquarters of the Indian tribes and French voyageurs. Mackinac may be considered, in some respects, the key of the upper lakes. Here the tribes from the north to the south could assemble at a very short notice and decide on questions of trade or war. It was long the metropolis of a large portion of the Huron {175} and Ottawa nations, and many a council, fraught with the peace of Canada, was held there in the olden times. It was on the north side of the straits that Father Marquette--whose name must ever live in the west--some time in 1671 founded the mission of St. Ignace, where gradually grew up the most important settlement which the French had to the northwest of Fort Frontenac or Cataraqui. The French built a chapel and fort, and the Hurons and Ottawas lived in palisaded villages in the neighbourhood. The _coureurs de bois_ were always to be seen at a point where they could be sure to find Indians in large numbers. Contemporary writers state that the presence of so many unruly elements at this distant outpost frequently threw the whole settlement into a sad state of confusion and excitement, which the priests were at times entirely unable to restrain. Indians, soldiers, and traders became at last so demoralised, that one of the priests wrote, in his despair, that there seemed no course open except "deserting the missions and giving them up to the brandy-sellers as a domain of drunkenness and debauchery."