This coureur de bois Nicolet presents a grotesque appearance as he mounts
the rims of the two valleys where the two bowls touch each other, bowls so
full that in freshet the water sometimes overflows the brim and makes one
continuous valley.

Nicolet would not be recognized for the Frenchman that he was, as he
appears yonder; for, having been told that the men whom he was to meet
were without hair upon their faces and heads, and thinking himself to be
near the confines of China, he had attired himself as one about to be
received at an Oriental court. Accordingly, he stands upon the edge of the
prairies in a robe of Chinese damask embroidered with flowers and birds--
but with a pistol in each hand. Having succeeded in his mission to these
barbarians (for such he found them to be, wearing breech-clouts instead of
robes of silk), he was impelled or lured over into the great valley, it is
believed. He passed from the lake on the border of Champlain's map
[Footnote: Lake Michigan.] up a river (the Fox) that by and by became but
a stream over which one might jump. He portaged from this stream or creek
across a narrow strip of prairie, only a mile wide, to the Wisconsin
River, a tributary of the Mississippi. The statement over which I have
pondered, walking along that river, that he might have reached the "great
water" in three more days, is intelligible only in this interpretation of
his course.

The next Europeans to look out over the edge of the basin of the lakes
were two other sons of France, one a man of St. Malo, Radisson, a voyageur
and coureur de bois, the other his brother-in-law, Groseilliers (1654). It
is thought that these companions went all the way to the Mississippi and
so became the discoverers of her northern waters. The journal of the
voyage is unfortunately somewhat obscure. The great "rivers that divide