Washington Irving has well said that two leading objects of commercial gain have given birth to wide and daring enterprise in the early history of America. The precious metals led the Spaniard to Mexico and Peru, while, as he puts it, the “adroit and buoyant Frenchman” and the “cool and calculating Briton” pursued the “less splendid, but no less lucrative traffic in the rich peltries of the north.” The pioneer fur traders were followed only after many, many years, by what Irving has characterized as “the slow and pausing steps of agriculture.” Apart from the land which agriculture might in times of settled peace make profitable, the white man found three great natural sources of wealth. These were animals bearing fur of great value, enormous deposits of copper and iron, and primeval forests filled with trees suited to the uses of civilized man. Profits from these financed many an enterprise, from the earliest voyages and the building of the _Griffon_ to the days of the railroad and the “Soo” Canal. For two centuries, from 1634 to 1834, the fur trade was the leading interest and source of profit of the Great Lakes. During Champlain’s governorship the French, through Nicolet, first opened an active system of trade and barter with the Indians of the lakes, and the history of French control thereafter is the history of the fur trade. It paid the bills of many of the voyages we have chronicled. In 1660 Radisson and Groseilliers returned to Quebec from their Lake Superior voyage with sixty canoes loaded with furs valued at two hundred thousand pounds, in return for which they had distributed among the Indians kettles, graters, awls, needles, tin looking-glasses, ivory combs, and knives. Even the official expedition of Saint Lusson to take possession of the Northwest for France was to be paid for by gifts to the Indians and return offerings of fur. The fur trade of the Great Lakes supported not only those who took up their dwelling on these shores, but the struggling settlements of Canada as well. It kept up home interest in the support of these colonies by the rich profit that it brought across the seas. In 1703 La Hontan wrote that Canada subsisted only on the trade of skins and furs. The profits and the fascination of this pursuit robbed Canada of its young men while it supplied it with money. An official reported, in 1680, that eight hundred men out of a population of ten thousand had vanished from sight into the wilderness, and that there was not a family of any condition or quality that had not children, brothers, uncles, or nephews among the traders. There came to be in the woods a distinct class of men known as coureurs de bois, or rangers of the forest, who had escaped from the restraints of civilized life and reported themselves only once or twice a year at the trading posts.