or, Adventuring on the Great Lakes
by Everett Mcneil.
Being the Tale Told by Young Paul Douay of the Long Journey He Made in Indian Canoes in the Company of Daniel Greysolon Du Luth, from Montreal through the Great Lakes to Lake Superior, in Quest of his Sister Stolen by the Indians when a Babe, Together with an Account of the Perilous and Thrilling Adventures that Befell Them and How the Long Quest Ended on the Island of Wanawatanda at the House of the White Medicine-Girl of the Issati.
Whew! How's that for a subtitle! From the Forward: "Daniel Greysolon Du Luth was one of the most picturesque characters in the early history of French exploration in America, particularly in the region of the Great Lakes. He has been called the Robin Hood of Canada, because of the romantic and adventurous life that he, a gentleman of France and a former member of the King’s Musketeers, lived among the Indians and in the rude settlements of the then almost unexplored wildernesses of New France. Francis Parkman, the historian, thus writes of him: “Famous leader of coureurs de bois. . .who with a persistent hardihood, not surpassed perhaps even by La Salle, was continually in the forest, in the Indian towns, or in remote wilderness outposts planted by himself, exploring, trading, fighting, ruling lawless savages and whites scarcely less ungovernable . . . laboring to foil the rival English traders of Hudson bay. . . . His services were to the colony and the crown and his name deserves a place of honor among the pioneers of American civilization.” Channing and Lansing call him, “A prince among coureurs de bois and the chief hero of the early French period in the Upper Country.” Frank H. Severance, in "An Old Frontier of France", says he was “the greatest of the coureurs de bois.” In September, 1678, Du Luth started from Montreal on a mission for the King and the Governor of Canada to the Indians of the Lake Superior country and the region west and north of that lake. He and his companions paddled all of that distance—probably considerably over two thousand miles—in Indian canoes, through a wilderness inhabited by savage tribes of Indians and almost unknown to white men. It is this long and adventurous journey of Du Luth that I have taken as the basis of my tale; and, in the tale itself, I have attempted to show what an expedition of that kind at that period meant and the hardihood, the courage and the endurance it required of those who made it. "
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