They were picturesque in their dress and fond of striking colours. A bright cotton shirt, cloth trousers, leather leggings, deer skin moccasins and a small scarlet cloak or capot made up their attire with a wide worsted belt with flowing ends (such as we see worn with the blanket suit of the snowshoers of to-day) a stout knife and a tobacco pouch. Cheerful, careless, heedless of danger and fond of adventure the hardy descendants of the Breton or Norman fishermen sang their chansons, keeping time with their paddles, the quickened notes for the dangerous places, the slower for the easy passage across the placid lake. One of the greatest of all these coureurs des bois and voyageurs was Nicholas Perrot who, at the age of sixteen, was the companion of the missionary priests on their journeys from Quebec to the Indian tribes, and thus gained for himself not only experience in woodcraft and knowledge of the country, but what was still more important he developed his natural aptitude for languages by close study of the Indian dialects, and thus made himself valuable, not only to himself but to his country. Many other coureurs had had similar opportunities but did not improve these opportunities and so remained mere coureurs des bois, and average ones at that, until the end of their days. This ambitious youth soon became an independent trader, but without the selfishness that was usually attached to that name. He was a man of some education and certainly of vision. He saw clearly that it was to the interests of New France that there should be united feeling and action among Indians and French against their common enemy, the Iroquois, and this was ever in his mind in the negotiations which at various times took him to the tribes of the Chippewas, the Foxes, the Hurons, the Dakotas, the Iowans, the Mascoutens, the Miamis, the Pottawatomies and the Sioux, as well as the Iroquois.