Suppose him to have built his log dwelling in 1778, the very year when Colonel de Peyster luckily makes a note of his existence; all about him must have been a waste place so far as human occupation is concerned. Bands of roaming Indians from time to time appeared and disappeared. French trappers and voyageurs doubtless made his house their halting-place. Fur-traders' canoes, manned by French "voyageurs," "engages" and "coureurs des bois," paddling the great lakes and unconsciously laying the foundation of the Astor fortunes, called, from time to time, to buy the stores of peltry which he had collected, and leave him the whisky of which he was so fond, but the rest of his time was spent in patriarchal isolation and the society of his Indian wives and their half-breed offspring. So far as we know, scarcely a civilized habitation stood nearer than Green Bay on the north, the Vermilion branch of the Wabash on the south and the Mississippi on the west; a tract of nearly fifty thousand square miles. Pointe de Saible's occupation ended about with the century, when he sold the cabin to one Le Mai. Before this time, however, other settlements had been begun nearer than those above mentioned; and even in the very neighborhood there were a few neighbors. One Guarie had settled on the west side of the North Branch; and Gurdon Hubbard (who came here in 1818) says that that stream was still called "River Guarie" and that he himself saw the remains of corn-hills on what must have been Guarie's farm. (The South Branch was called "Portage River" because it led to the Mud Lake connection with the Des Plaines and so onward to the Mississippi). Pointe de Saible, Le Mai and Guarie have died and left no sign, but there was another pioneer of pioneers in the beginning of the present century who was more lucky. He was Antoine Ouillemette, a Frenchman who took to wife a Pottowatomie squaw and thus obtained a grant of land on part of which the pretty suburb of Wilmette now stands. He did not die till 1829, six years before the final departure of the Pottowatomies for the further West. [Illustration: WILLIAM WHISTLER.]