The French growth in America was as steady as it was early in starting. Five years before the Pilgrim fathers and mothers landed at Plymouth, French missionaries had erected bark chapels in Maine, and consigned by devout rites the Pine State to the Virgin’s protection. While the Calvinists of Massachusetts Bay, the Plymouth Colony, and Connecticut were sturdily settling, by wordy argument, the grounds of their religious belief, Fathers Brebeuf, Lallemand, and other Gallic Jesuits were steadily and stealthily acquiring new grounds for the Pope and the French king. Barefooted emissaries, in serge, and girded, like the Baptist in the Judæan wilderness, with girdles about their loins, patiently and slowly travelling twelve hundred miles westward, foot-weary yet sustained by spiritual zeal, skirted those inland seas, Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Michigan, crossed the head-waters of the Hudson, the Ohio, and Wisconsin, hauled their birch canoes over regions now boiling with oil-wells, hissing with steam-driven factories, or lit up by the passing splendors of palace rail-cars, and had thus, as early as 1650, planted the Roman cross and the French lily side by side, as far west as Fond du Lac, and the cool head-fountains of Lake Superior. Fur-traders followed the Jesuit missionaries. These sought to clothe the Indians with a warm belief in the teachings of the Society of Jesus, and in the supremacy of his Catholic Majesty of France; those hastened after to unclothe the otter, the beaver, and other living fur-dealers of the small packs which they carried on their own backs, and to obtain possession of those which their fellows had yielded up to the sharp persuasions of the cinnamon-stained hunters and trappers. Religious zeal, inflaming French blood, and glowing through a patriotic national emulation with the English settlements along the Atlantic slope, within the next twenty-five years, launched canoes upon and traversed the great lakes pushed down the principal rivers running southward from Quebec to St. Paul, gathered proselytes by preaching, and skins by trading, and encompassing the needs, instincts, and revenges of the various Indian tribes scattered through this vast region,—excepting always the Five Nations, which uniformly adhered to the English,—established a cordon of French alliances and influences, which in time of peace stretched its protecting line between them and their English rivals, and in war vibrated to their touch, and twanged quivers full of arrows on their hereditary foes. These unwearying teachers and traders were now to take possession, in the name of France and Rome, of the valley of the Mississippi, and to scatter the seeds of Gallic civilization all down its prolific breadth, and over its wide deltas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. In 1673, the Jesuit, James Marquette, having previously penetrated from Quebec through the intervening wilderness to Sault St.