So, though the French civilization still smells and sounds of the sea, and followed the streams that kept its first men in touch with it, it had finally, in its pioneering, to take to the trails and the forests. And these runners of the woods were the amphibious ambassadors from this kingdom of the sea to the kingdom of the land. They were, as Étienne Brûlé of Champlain's time, the pioneers of pioneers who, often in unrecorded advance of priest and explorer, pushed their adventurous traffic in French guns and hatchets, French beads and cloth, French tobacco and brandy, till they knew and were known to the aboriginal habitants, "from where the stunted Esquimaux burrowed in their snow caves to where the Comanches scoured the plains of the south with their banditti cavalry." They were a lawless lot whom this mission, not only between water and land but also between civilization and barbarism, "spoiled for civilization." But they must not be judged too harshly in their vibrations between the two standards of life which they bridged, making periodical confession to charitable priests in one, of the sins committed in the other, which, unforgiven, might have driven them entirely away from the church and into perdition. The names of most of these coureurs de bois are forgotten by history (which is rather particular about the character of those whom it remembers--other than those in kingly or other high places). But they who have followed immediately in the trails of these men of the verges have written these names, or some of them, in places where they are more widely read than if cherished by history even. Étienne Brûlé--who, as interpreter, led Le Caron out upon the first western mission--after following trails and waters for hundreds of miles back of the English settlements, where the timid colonists had not dared to venture, suffered the martyrdom of fire, and is remembered in a tempestuous stream in the west and perhaps in an Indian tribe. The name of Jean Nicolet of Cherbourg (the ambassador to the Winnebagoes, from the record of whose picturesque advent in the "Jesuit Relations" the annals of the west really began) has been given to a path now grown into one of the most populous streets along the whole course of the Mississippi River--in Minneapolis. And Du Lhut, the cousin of Tonty, a native of Lyons--a man of "persistent hardihood, not surpassed perhaps even by La Salle," says Parkman, "continually in the forest, in the Indian towns, or in the remote wilderness outposts planted by himself, exploring, trading, fighting, ruling lawless savages, and whites scarcely less ungovernable," [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 274] and crossing the ocean for interviews with the colonial minister, "amid the splendid vanities of Versailles"--he is remembered for all time in that city, built up against the far shores of Lake Superior, bearing his name, Duluth, the city that has taken the place of London in the list of the world's great harbors.