In 1615 Champlain brought some Franciscan missionaries to Quebec, one of whom made his way up the Ottawa to Lake Huron a little before him. In 1626 came the Jesuit Fathers,[4] who brought the zeal of their order to the cause of evangelizing the Indians. Then Richelieu,[5] who held the reins of the monarchy in his hands, founded his famous Company of New France, to whom the King not only granted full powers of government, but also a monopoly of the fur trade, so turning Canada over to private hands. An unprosperous beginning, however, awaited the new order of things. Civil war had broken out in France. Richelieu was beleaguering the heretics of La Rochelle when England mingled in the fray. In 1629 the English took Quebec from the French, and did not restore[6] it again till 1632. At this time the conquerors had carried Champlain to England, a prisoner of war. He returned to Quebec in 1633, again in chief command, though soon (1635) to die at his post, greatest among all the explorers of his time. With Champlain's death,[7] a new force came into the cause of discovery and conversion, for since the coming of the Jesuits the two were henceforth to go hand in hand. At the pleasure of the general of the order, its missionaries might be sent with scrip, staff, and wallet to the uttermost parts of the earth. Like John the Baptist in the wilderness, we find them living on such scant fare as nature supplied. Their beds were the bare ground. Under a canopy of green boughs they reared the altar of their humble missions for the worship of the ever-living God. Thus in exile and in want, they began their ministrations among the rude peoples of the wilderness because God and the Blessed Virgin had given them this pious work to do. Their food was often more nourishing to the imagination than the body, yet when compared with what they might expect at the hands of the Iroquois, hunger counted for little, since these barbarians of the New World burnt a missionary alive with the same zest that Christians of the Old did a heretic. Men willing to undertake such duties, undergo such hardships, live such lives, are sure to leave their impress on any country. We shall find they did so on ours. On their part the savages truly wished for knowledge of the white man's God, who they were told, and believed, was able to raise them up out of their lowly condition and make them rich and powerful like the whites. So much, at least, of the Jesuits' teachings they could comprehend. No long time elapsed before these Jesuits made their way to the Hurons of the lake, and here (1634) they established their first missions. Some say that in this same year a French trader, named Jean Nicolet,[8] made his way as far west as the Green Bay of Lake Michigan. There is hopeless confusion about the date, but none as to the fact of his being the first white man to set foot in what is now the State of Wisconsin.