The government tried to stem the rush of young men into the wilderness by requiring licenses for trading with the Indians and limiting the number to seventy-five a year; but the country was too large and remote and the government too feeble to carry out any such policy. In the end the rulers turned their attention instead to providing fortified trading posts for these wanderers, first to afford defence against the Indians, and more especially to concentrate and monopolize the trade, protecting it from the rival Englishmen. These forts also made a claim of possession in the regions which they commanded. Thus Mackinac, Detroit, Niagara, Green Bay, Oswego, and a dozen minor posts sprang up. Travellers of the eighteenth century were likely to meet on any one of the lakes fleets of fifty or sixty canoes, heavily laden with beaver, otter, mink, and marten skins, and paddled by Indians in their paint and feathers, or by hardly less picturesque coureurs de bois in their blanket coats, leathern moccasins and leggings, and scarlet sash and cap. These men were no mere traders whose knowledge was limited to prices and profits. They were experts not only in the science of the woods but also in the arts of diplomacy. The success of the trade depended on the maintenance of peace between the various Indian tribes and groups of tribes; and the life of the individual trader, as well as his earnings, depended on his own adaptability. There came in time to be leaders to whom the most difficult negotiations with the Indians were left. Daniel de Greyselon Du Luth, a prince among coureurs de bois, was the chief hero of the early French period in the upper country. In the summer of 1679 he made a tour of Minnesota, planting with all ceremony the arms of France in the leading Indian villages, many of which he was the first Frenchman to visit. At the end of the summer he held on the shores of Lake Superior, near the site of the present city of Duluth, a great Indian council of chiefs from all these villages, and negotiated a treaty of peace. The city that bears his name may well be proud of the fact that after ten years among the Indians he entered a written protest, still preserved in the archives of Canada, with his disapproval of the sale of whiskey and brandy to the natives. These leaders were very important to the success of the administration in Canada and were relied on and treated with all respect. Their names were even sent across the ocean, as we see in the laconic but warm commendation of Du Luth sent by the Governor of Canada in his colonial report of 1710: “Captain Du Luth died this winter; he was a very honest man.”