Wisconsin Historical Collections, Volume VII (1876)

              220 state historical society pany acceptable and engaging with the most cultivated and polite and insuring in their intercourse with each other the preservation of friendly feeling and good will they had been sought out by the catholic ministers their children were all baptised christians had been taught the creed and commandments and grew up sim ple-hearted trusting people they were strict observers of the seasons of festivals and feasts from christmas to ash-wednesday the whole settlement was rife with feasting dancing and merry making but on the approach of lent it was suddenly suspended till easter the lenten fast was strictly observed by these good catholics i e they ceased gormandizing ducks venison and porcupine only to feast in more epicurean style on trout sturgeon and wild rice the dressing of which in a manner to tempt the most fastidious they understood and practised they went for marketing pur poses about forty miles down the bay on the west shore to the indian fishing grounds with their pony horses before the train and furnished with an outfit of potatoes salt a few yards of coarse calico and a few plugs of tobacco they bartered for sturgeon and trout and loading it into the train in the manner of cord wood they returned to their cabins with abundant food of rare delicacy for the winter and spring then the lenten fast commenced with them in good earnest the easter festival was the most joyous of the calendar with most of them it was celebrated in the deep forests where they had before repaired for one of their chief industries the making of ma ple sugar which requires a little more special notice it was a source of the greatest amusement as well as profit occupying two or three months of every year and engaged nearly the whole popu lation male and female children and all they probably gob the art from the indians and greatly improved on the savage mode about the first to the fifteenth of february preparations were made throughout the settlement for repairing to the sucrerie or sugar bush — for moving from their home cabins on the river bank into the deep wood often many miles distant ; taking generally most of their household treasures even to their chickens and they made the business worthy of their preparations some of them had as many as five hundred eight hundred and someone thousand sugar trees tapped a few of their sugar-houses were quite large and as