the Falls of the St. Louis River, when in fact Aitkin, Morrison, Sayer, and a host of others as white as he, had visited, and resided for fifty years within sound of those same falls.[1] It is thus that a man who travels for the purpose of writing a book to sell, and who, being a man of letters, is able to trumpet forth his own fame, often plucks the laurels due to more modest and unlettered adventurers. Mr. Bancroft in his standard "History of the United States," mentions that in the year 1665, the enterprising and persevering Jesuit missionary, Claude Allouez, with one companion, pushed his way into Lake Superior and discovered the Ojibways congregated in a large village in the Bay of Shag-a-waum-ik-ong, and preparing to go on a war party against the Dakotas; that he resided two years among them, and taught a choir of their youths to chant the Pater and Ave.
This is the first visit made by white men to this point on Lake Superior, of which we have any reliable written testimony. The account as given in Bancroft's "History" is not altogether corroborated by the Ojibways. It is only through minute and repeated inquiry, that I have learned the fact from their own lips, of this early visit of a "black gowned priest," but not of his having resided with them for any length of time. And they assert positively that it was many years after the first visit of the white men to their village in the Bay of Shag-a-waum-ik-ong, that the "priest" made his appearance among them. And I am disposed to doubt that as long a stay as two years was made by Father Allouez among their people, or that any of them learned to chant canticles, for the reason that the Ojibways, who are so minute in the relation of the particulars of any important event in their history, comprised within the past eight generations, do not make any mention of
- ↑ The allusion is to Lanman's Summer in the Wilderness, published in New York, 1847.—E.D.N.
