It is said that the first white man to launch his canoe on Lake Chautauqua was Étienne Brule, a French voyageur. Five years before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, with a band of friendly Hurons he came over the portage from Lake Erie, and sailed down from Mayville to Jamestown, thence through the Chadakoin to the Allegheny and the Ohio, showing to the French rulers in Canada that by this route lay the path to empire over the continent. Fifteen years later, in 1630, La Salle, the indomitable explorer and warrior, passed over the portage and down the lake to the river below. Fugitives from the French settlements in Nova Scotia, the Acadia of Longfellow's _Evangeline_, also passed over the same trail and watercourses in their search for a southern home under the French flag. In 1749, Captain Bienville de Celoron led another company of pioneers, soldiers, sailors, Indians, and a Jesuit priest over the same route, bearing with him inscribed leaden plates to be buried in prominent places, as tokens of French sovereignty over these forests and these waters. Being a Frenchman, and therefore perhaps inclined to gayety, he might have been happy if he could have foreseen that in a coming age, the most elaborate amusement park on the border of Tchadakoin (as he spelled it on his leaden plates) would hand down the name of Celoron to generations then unborn! [Illustration: Steamer in the Outlet] In order to make the French domination of this important waterway sure, Governor Duquesne of Canada sent across Lake Erie an expedition, landing at Barcelona, to build a rough wagon-road over the portage to Lake Chautauqua. Traces of this "old French road" may still be seen. Those French surveyors and toilers little dreamed that in seven years their work would become an English thoroughfare, and their empire in the new world would be exploited by the descendants of the Puritan and Huguenot!