In the fall of the following year, these Indians went off raiding into the south, where the Dutch had settled in the present State of New York. At Fort Orange, or Albany, Radisson escaped again. From the Dutch town of New Amsterdam, now New York, he took ship for Europe; but after a few months in his native land of France he got back to his family in Canada, where he had long been given up for dead. He had another narrow escape from Indians when they attacked the fort of Onondaga; but nothing could satisfy his appetite for adventure. Two of his fellow-countrymen had travelled up the lakes as far as Green Bay in Wisconsin, where Indians had told them of other tribes who hunted great beasts on a treeless plain still farther west, and wandered in summer to a northern sea—no doubt our Hudson Bay. A big lake named Winnipeg also, they said, lay up there in the north. Eager to explore, young Radisson and his sister’s husband, Médard Chouart des Groseillers, set off with a party of Algonquins in 1658, paddled up the Ottawa, through Lake Nipissing, across Lake Huron, and down Lake Michigan to Green Bay, where they spent the winter. Early in the following year they crossed Wisconsin, and came to a great brown river, worthy to rank with the green St. Lawrence. They had discovered the Mississippi. They crossed the river; and for the first time the red man of the West looked on a white man’s face. The meeting was quite friendly. The Sioux were a warlike tribe, always breathing slaughter against their northern neighbors, the Crees; but as yet they had no quarrel with the whites. It mattered nothing to them if bearded white men were fighting Indians down in the south, as they had heard. The white men were evidently ready to trade as well as fight, for these Sioux were already wearing European beads which must have been brought oversea by the Spaniards and passed up north from tribe to tribe. The two young Frenchmen travelled for months over the plains. They saw the buffalo and hunted them; the swift and graceful antelope as well. How far west they got we do not know. They heard from the Indians of a range of mountains beyond the sunset; but then, circling south and east again, they set out for home. There they arrived, after two years’ absence, and had a tremendous welcome, not only from their families, but from the Governor of the Colony at Quebec. That was because they had brought home with them a wealth of furs; and skins were very scarce, for the Iroquois so infested the country around that friendly tribes dared not venture down to the settlement with their catch. The Iroquois themselves had no trouble in selling all they caught to the English, who had been settling in New England for thirty years and more.