In regions south of the St. Lawrence, Pere Druillettes was the first European who passed overland from that river to the eastern Atlantic seaboard, ascending the Chaudifere and descending the Kennebec in 1646. He did good service to the colony by preserving for it the amity of that brave nation, the only one which the Iroquois were slow to attack. In another direction, the traffickers and missionaries, constantly moving onward toward the sources of the St. Lawrence, had reached the upper extremity of Lake Huron. Peres Brebeuf, Daniel, Lalemant, Jogues, and Raimbault founded in the regions around its waters the Christianized settlements (_villages_) of St. Joseph, St. Michel, St. Ignace, and Ste. Marie. The last-named, seated at the point where Lake Huron communicates with Lake Erie, was long the central point of the northwestern missions. In 1639 Jean Nicholet, following the course of a river flowing out of Lake Michigan at Green Bay, was led within three days' navigation of "the Great Water," such was the distinctive name the aborigines gave to the Mississippi. In 1671 the relics of the Huron tribes, tired of wandering from forest to forest, settled down in Michilimackinac, at the end of Lake Superior, under the care of Pere Marquette, who thus became the earliest founder of a European settlement in Michigan. The natives of the vicinity were of the Algonquin race; but the French called them _Sauteurs_, from their being near to Sault Ste. Marie. Between the years 1635 and 1647 communication with the region was little attempted, the hostile feeling of the Iroquois making the navigation of Lake Ontario perilous to adventurers, and obliging them to pass to and from the western mission field by the valley of the Ottawa. The Neuters' territory, visited by Champlain, and the southern lakeboard of Erie beyond Buffalo, were as yet almost unknown.