Few of us realize that the early history of Wisconsin is as romantic as any our eastern seaboard states can boast. The area that is now the State of Wisconsin became the gateway into the Middlewest and the meeting place for the French and the Indian tribes of what was then regarded as the West. This early period of French control was an era in which Jesuit missionaries carried the doctrine of Christianity from village to village, often visiting tribes that had never before seen white men. It was a time when the French traders, lured by the love of adventure and romance as well as the wealth to be obtained in the fur trade, pushed through the forests and followed strange rivers until they reached the villages of unknown Wisconsin Indians. It was in these villages that such traders, including the “noblest” youth of New France, lived with the Indians, sat in their councils, took part in their war dances, accompanied their war parties to battle, and often married their women. It was in this early French Regime that Wisconsin’s Indian tribes underwent great changes in their manner of life due to contacts with the white man’s civilization, It was a time of warfare and a struggle for supremacy in North America between the British and the French, and their Indian allies, with Wisconsin’s tribes espoused to the cause of the French. It was the heyday of the fur trade with literally millions of beaver and other skins being taken from Wisconsin to enrich the trader and obtain white man’s goods for the Indians. Despite the fact that Wisconsin’s Indians all lived in pretty much the same manner, most of us are aware that there were different tribes in our state at various times, and that they spoke different languages in some instances. If we use a comparison from European languages, we might better understand the character of these Indian languages. German, English, and Swedish all originated from the same parent tongue and belong to the same basic language division. English and Chinese are unrelated tongues belonging to different basic language stocks. Thus, while many words are very similar in English and German, in English and Chinese no apparent similarity exists. Three basic language divisions, Algonkian, Siouan, and Iroquoian, were represented by Wisconsin’s Indians. Algonkian was represented by such tribes as the Menomini, Potawatomi, Chippewa, Mascouten, Sauk, Fox, Ottawa, and Kickapoo. Relatively late arrivals to Wisconsin (in the 1800’s), also speaking Algonkian tongues, were the Munsee, Brotherton, and Stockbridge tribes. The Siouan group included the Winnebago, and the Santee division of the Dakota Sioux. The Huron and the Oneida (the latter also arriving in the 1800’s) were Wisconsin representatives of the Iroquoian language stock. The differences become more apparent when we realize that languages in the Iroquoian division would be as different from those in the Algonkian stock as English is from Chinese.