Wisconsin Historical Collections, Volume XIII (1895)

              1 634 the story of chequamegon bay 397 the story of cheouamegon bay by the editor we commonly think of wisconsin as a young state in a certain sense she is there are men now living two or three of whom i meet almost daily who were blazing paths through the wisconsin wilderness only sixty years ago : men who cleared the forest and broke the prairies who founded frontier communities which have developed into cities who upon this far-away border sowed the seeds of industries which to-day support tens of thousands of their fellows who threw up their hats when the territory was erected and who sat in the convention which gave to the new state a constitution the wisconsin of to-day the wisconsin which we know is indeed young for the lively octogenarians who were in at the birth will not admit that they are now old but there was an earlier a less prosaic wisconsin — the french wisconsin and it had flourished in its own romantic fashion for full two centuries before the coming of the anglo-saxon who brusquely crowding the contented creole to the wall made of his arcadian home an american commonwealth in 1634 when the child born upon the " mayflower " had reached but her fourteenth year jean mcolet sent out by the enterprising champlain as far as wisconsin — a thou sand miles of canoe journey west from quebec — made trading contracts such as they were with a half score of squalid tribes huddled in widely-separated villages through out the broad wilderness lying between lakes superior and michigan it was a daring laborious expedition as notable in its day as livingstone's earliest exploits in