It was quite a surprise therefore to the British colonials when their penetration of the interior had hardly begun before Frenchmen were harassing their right flank. Their coastal border on the St. Croix River was forced back once more below the Penobscot, while in the interior the Mohawk valley itself was raided by French troops trying to wrest more southerly routes from the Iroquois. And this was only the beginning of a bloody rivalry between the English and the French for fur and dominion in America, a rivalry that would keep the evershifting borders aflame for almost a hundred years--to culminate finally in the decisive French and Indian War of the eighteenth century. * * * * * The Frenchmen of the seventeenth century who followed the paths blazed by Samuel de Champlain had extended those paths farther and farther into the hinterland. Fur traders, explorers, soldiers, and Catholic priests who not infrequently bent to the paddles for discovery entirely on their own, all took part in this invasion of America. Of course the Frenchmen who came to America were not colonizers, not true empire builders. There were few farmers among them. In the main they were adventurers. But they had grand plans, and they knew how to strike bargains and make treaties with the natives. So, although their lines of communication were much too thinly held, they kept pushing their birch-bark canoes deeper into the wilderness for trade and dominion. In 1634, one of Champlain’s interpreters, Jean Nicollet, voyaged across the waters of Lake Michigan to establish trade with the natives in the Wisconsin region. He had supposed they would be an Oriental people, and his appearance at Green Bay in a damask gown richly embroidered in the Chinese manner impressed the Dacotahs no less than the thunder and lightning of his pistol. Believing him to be a white god, the savages were humbly acquiescent to Nicollet’s demand for skins, and he took full profit from the situation. In another twenty-five years two intrepid fur-traders, Pierre Exprit Radisson and his sister’s husband Medard Chouart, Sieur des Grosseilliers, had looked upon the waters of the upper Mississippi River. Trading and hunting with the Sioux, they explored much of the vast country between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. On this same expedition, it would appear, while his partner was ill in winter camp, Radisson investigated the region about Lake Superior and learned of Cree trade routes from that lake to the Great Bay of the North (Hudson’s Bay). In the end, after many blood-curdling adventures, he and his brother-in-law returned home to Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence with a fortune in beaver skins.