There were six principal canoe routes between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi: one by way of the Maumee and Wabash rivers, another by way of St. Joseph River and the Kankakee and the Illinois, another by way of the St. Joseph, Wabash, and Ohio rivers, still another by way of the Chicago River and the Illinois, and we have already seen that from Lake Superior there were used the Bois Brulé and the St. Croix routes. But the easiest of all, the favorite gateway, was the Fox-Wisconsin route, for all the others involved considerable hardship; this is why Wisconsin was so necessary to the French military officers in holding control of the interior of the continent. Affairs went well enough so long as the French were on good terms with the warlike and crafty Fox Indians, who held control of the Fox River. But after a time the Foxes became uneasy. The fur trade in New France was in the hands of a monopoly, which charged large fees for licenses, and fixed its own prices on the furs which it bought, and on the Indian goods which it sold to the forest traders. On the other hand, the fur trade in the English colonies east of the Alleghanies was free; any man could engage in it and go wherever he would. The result was that the English, with the strong competition among themselves, paid higher prices to the Indians for furs than the French could afford, and their prices for articles which the Indians wanted were correspondingly lower than those of the French. The Indians were always eager for a bargain; and although the French declared that those trading with the English were enemies of New France, they persisted in secretly sending trading parties to the English, who were now beginning to swarm into the Ohio valley. The Foxes, in particular, grew very angry with the French for charging them such high prices, and resented the treatment which they received at the hands of the traders from Quebec and Montreal. At one time they told Perrot that they would pack up their wigwams, and move in a body to the Wabash River or to the Ohio, and form a league with the fierce Iroquois of New York, who were friends and neighbors of the English. Had they done so, the French fur trade in the West would have suffered greatly. The Foxes began to make it disagreeable for the French in Wisconsin. They insisted on collecting tolls on fur trade bateaux which were being propelled up the Fox River, and even stopped traders entirely; several murders of Frenchmen were also charged to them. The French thereupon determined to punish these rebellious savages who sat within the chief gateway to the Mississippi. In the winter of 1706-07, a large party of soldiers, _coureurs des bois_, and half-breeds, under a captain named Marin, ascended the Fox River on snowshoes and attacked the Foxes, together with their allies, the Sacs, at a large village at Winnebago Rapids, near where is now the city of Neenah.