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Title: Daniel du Lhut
Date of first publication: 1929
Author: Blodwen Davies (1897-1966)
Illustrator: C. W. Jefferys (1869-1951)
Date first posted: November 8, 2025
Date last updated: November 8, 2025
Faded Page eBook #20251107
This eBook was produced by: John Routh & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net
THE RYERSON CANADIAN HISTORY READERS
Are designed to meet a real need of the schoolroom. Every wide-awake teacher has long recognized the value of supplementary readers, simple and interesting enough to be placed in the hands of the pupils.
Each reader contains a wealth of historical information, and completely covers the history of our country through its great characters and events. These books are written in a charming and vivid manner, and will be valued, not only as history readers, but also as lessons in literary appreciation, for the teaching of history and literature ought to go hand in hand.
“I am very interested in these booklets and should like to place a set in every school in the province.”—Henry F. Munro, M.A., LLD., Superintendent of Education, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
“We have prescribed several of the Ryerson History Readers for use in our elementary schools . . . I believe they will become more and more popular as time passes.”—S. J. Willis, LL.D., Superintendent of Education, Victoria, B.C.
“These little books are admirably adapted for use in our schools. They provide a fund of interesting information arranged in very readable form, and should prove a real help in arousing and maintaining interest in the events that constitute the history of our country.”—A. E. Torrie, M.A., Principal, Normal School, Camrose, Alta.
“From my point of view these little booklets fill admirably the purpose for which they were designed. They say enough—but not too much. Big books are tiresome to young people. There are so many outside distractions for them these days and we must conform to circumstances. Your booklets are excellent in every way and will, I hope, be very cordially received.”—M. Pierre Georges Roy, Provincial Archivist, Quebec.
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“Children will really know and learn to love Canadian History when it is introduced by such charming booklets. They meet the real need of the schoolroom.”—The Canadian Teacher.
Copyright, Canada, 1929, by
The Ryerson Press, Toronto
DANIEL DU LHUT
The King of the Coureurs De Bois
By Blodwen Davies
ILLUSTRATED BY C. W. Jefferys
In the King’s bedroom of the palace of Versailles, a few miles out of Paris, there hangs a great white wig. Once, about two hundred and fifty years ago, this wig was worn by Louis the Magnificent, King of France and of Canada. He built the palace, with a front a quarter of a mile long, and diverted a river for ninety miles to water its gardens. He built enormous mirrors into the walls of the great rooms and, to satisfy his love of luxury, he actually had furniture made of solid silver. Everything about the king had to be magnificent.
The bodyguard of this luxury-loving king was made up of noblemen, for no man could enter its ranks who did not have a record of at least two hundred years of noble ancestry.
Among the young men who wore the handsome uniform of this celebrated bodyguard was one who was distinguished even there for his keen and intelligent eyes, the dignity of his carriage and the forcefulness of his personality. Though the king himself could scarcely read or write, this young man did both very well indeed, and there is no doubt but what he made use of his leisure at court to talk to the celebrated musicians and painters, writers and architects, scientists and philosophers that Louis was wise enough to gather about him to add lustre to his magnificent court. Among the men who came to court at times were soldiers and administrators and missionaries from New France.
Presently among the soldiers who came to court were officers of the celebrated Carignan regiment that had been sent out to New France to fight the Iroquois. They not only had tales of adventure to tell, but they reported that quite a few of their aristocratic fellow officers had decided to settle in New France. It is quite possible that all these tales came to the ears of the interesting young guardsman, for presently we discover that he is getting tired of the stateliness and formality of Versailles and seeking the permission of the King to set out across the sea to this place of adventure—New France.
DU LHUT RESCUING FATHER HENNEPIN FROM CAPTIVITY AMONG THE SIOUX.
The young guardsman was Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut. That is, he was the son of the family of Greysolon, but in the manner of the day, he took his title from one of the family estates of Lhut. Henceforward he was to be known as Du Lhut.
His father had chosen for his wife the daughter of a wealthy merchant of Lyons, the famous silk city. They were living in the old royal town of Ste. Germaine-en-Laye when Daniel was born about 1650. Later they moved back to Lyons, where he grew up, and we discover him as a teen-age boy, an ensign in La Compagnie Lyonnaise. Seven years later we find him transferred from the silk manufacturing city to the splendor of Paris and Versailles as a royal guardsman, and the next thing we know about him is that he has reached Montreal and is taking his first communion in the Roman Catholic Church at the altar of the chapel of the Hotel Dieu, the hospital which had been founded a quarter of a century before by Jeanne Mance. It was used as a parish church in the little frontier city, so by his side we see three other boys, all much younger than Du Lhut. They were brothers and all three were to become famous in manhood. They came from across the river at Longueuil. They were LeMoyne d’Iberville, LeMoyne de Ste. Helene and LeMoyne de Maricourt.
After that, Du Lhut returned to France on business affairs, and when he got there discovered a pressing need for soldiers in a fresh war, so he rejoined his old regiment and went to fight against William of Orange in Holland. He was in the battle of Seneffe, when twenty-seven thousand men were killed. During that battle a young Dutch priest was helping to nurse the wounded and comfort the dying. His name was Hennepin, and nothing delighted him so much as to listen to tales of adventure in the new world. Presently he got across the sea himself, and a few years later Du Lhut was to rescue him from a band of savages in the heart of America.
Du Lhut wasted no time after the battle in getting back to New France, and the same autumn he is in Montreal, retired on half pay and renting a house on Notre Dame street with every intention of settling down for the rest of his life, perhaps to become a merchant, since the king had decreed that even noblemen might go into trade without losing their rank in society. Presently he bought land on Jacques Cartier Square, in front of the city hall of to-day. There he built himself a fine house with great gardens from which he could watch the romantic St. Lawrence flowing down to the sea. It was perhaps the finest home in Montreal, and there he lived with Jacques Bizard, once an officer of the Governor’s Guard, and Daniel’s younger brother, Claude Greysolon, Sieur de la Tourette. It was a very gay and comfortable bachelors’ hall.
Du Lhut had other relatives in New France. A sister was married to another of the Governor’s officers, Louis Tayeon, Sieur du Lussigny. An uncle, Jacques Patron, was a rich Montreal merchant. He had three Italian cousins also, one named Delietto, one Alphonse Tonti, and the last the greatest of all the relatives, Henri Tonti—Tonti of the Iron Hand, the loyal friend and follower of La Salle in the discovery of the Mississippi route to the Gulf of Mexico.
One lovely May, when New France was uncurling itself from its long winter sleep and the river banks were green with new foliage, Du Lhut and his uncle went down the river to visit Pierre Boucher of Boucherville, who lived in a house which still stands in that quaint old Quebec town. All of this time Du Lhut had been hearing more and more of adventure farther west, for Montreal was the headquarters of the coureurs de bois and the great market to which the fur fleets came from the far western trading posts.
At that time, when the population of all New France was not more than eight thousand, there were between five and six hundred young men living in the wilderness as carefree as the Indians themselves. Why were all these young and useful citizens living like outlaws far beyond the reach of the law?
On the St. Lawrence were living the hard-working settlers turning virgin land into good farms. In the towns of Quebec and Montreal were men who had come out, not to settle and work at colonization, but to trade and make fortunes, and who had been promised the exclusive right to trade by the king and his advisors. Now, nothing was so profitable as trading in furs, buying them for cheap geegaws like combs and glass beads, and selling them for gold in France. On the other hand nothing was so badly paid as the daily toil on the farms. The hard-working farmers included most of the seigneurs, or land owners, for though they owned many square miles of property, it was worth nothing until it was producing food, and the seigneur had to work in the fields along with his sons, and sometimes his daughters, just like his tenants, the habitant farmers.
It was the most natural thing in the world for the ambitious sons of these families, high and low alike, to envy the traders and ask why they could not share in the fur harvest. When they realized that the law would never permit them this share, they decided to share without the consent of the law. They stole away into the woods, lived with the Indians, spoke their tongues, paddled and snowshoed with them and bought their bales of rich furs. Then they sold them, also secretly, sometimes to friends in Montreal, where there was a tax of twenty-five per cent. taken off for the government, and sometimes they took them to Albany or Boston to the English, where prices were higher for furs, lower for the goods of trade, and there was no tax.
Naturally the official fur traders made a great row about it. They appealed to the king, representing the coureurs as the most undesirable of men, and the king passed laws for fining and banishing coureurs who were caught, and finally provided for sending them to the galleys, where they would be chained among slaves and criminals at the oars of the great ships which still depended upon human aid for power. It was the vilest fate that any man could know.
But nothing stopped the coureurs de bois. They laughed at laws and punishments. Frequently they were caught and fined, but usually they escaped any worse fate, for they had so many friends in the colony who also resented the privileges of the official fur traders.
These gay coureurs were the men who travelled in lands that had never before known a white man. They met tribes of Indians that no Frenchman or Englishman had ever seen. They got furs that had been trapped thousands of miles away from Montreal and made friends with the savages in order to build up a trade. Yet when New France was in danger and sent out a call for help these wilderness rovers, descendants of the Vikings, the sea rovers, came streaming back with their savage friends, to defend the colony. After fighting their foes they would dash off again to the far west, singing their gay songs, carrying the French flag, the white banner and the golden lilies, farther and farther into the unknown continent, building up a colonial empire many times as great in size as old France itself.
The greatest of all these men, the wisest, and the best beloved, was Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut. For during that visit to Pierre Boucher he suddenly made up his mind to leave the colony behind him and to go with the gay adventurers into the wilderness. Right there, in the house of Pierre Boucher, he sold his Montreal house to the uncle and laid his plans for his first journey. Farther and farther was he taking himself from the stately show, the pomp and magnificence of Versailles. He had replaced the blue and gold of the king’s bodyguard with the fringed buckskin and the homespun of the coureur de bois. A servant of the king in Versailles, he was to make himself a king by virtue of his own strength of character, steadfastness of will and his gifts of personality in the unexplored empire in the west.
The route of the coureurs de bois for a hundred and fifty years or more was the same. They started out from Montreal in canoes loaded with goods for trade, and they turned into the Ottawa. They followed it until, over portages and past rapids, they came to Lake Nipissing and across that they went to the French River and by that route down to Georgian Bay. Following the north shore they came to a choice of routes. They might turn aside to Sault Ste. Marie where there was a mission and a trading post, and so make their way into Lake Superior and the southern and western hunting grounds, or they might turn south to Michilimackinac, the greatest of all the trading posts, and from there into Lake Michigan, to Green Bay, the Illinois and Mississippi rivers down to the Gulf of Mexico.
But most of these distant routes were still untrodden when Daniel du Lhut waved his hand in farewell to his friends who stood on the river bank at Montreal on that early morning when he first started westward on the trail of adventure. The coureurs who set off so were bound for a journey of at least eighteen months. Frequently they did not return for years at a time.
It was the first day of September, 1678, that Du Lhut and his brother, six other young Frenchmen and three Indian slaves, given him by friendly Indians, dipped their paddles into the silver St. Lawrence. It was twenty-nine years later before Du Lhut, wise and well beloved, returned by the same picturesque route for the last time and stepped ashore after his final adventure.
Du Lhut was bound for a part of the country that was almost legendary. No white man had ever seen the Sioux or Dakotas, or their hunting lands. They were said to be ferocious and daring and New France had been gossiping about them for thirty-five years. Du Lhut’s party had two large canoes, piled high with cargo. It was a perfect time for travel, for the air was crisp and clear, the forests turning to ochre and crimson. It was a golden October by the time they got to the north shore of Lake Huron, and there they lingered for the winter, trading and travelling with the Indians. In the following spring they set out for Michilimackinac, and under the bluffs of the island they drew up their canoes to make the acquaintance of that picturesque and romantic place.
It was not a large island, but it had bluffs rising as high as three hundred feet and proving excellent lookouts, and it was far enough from the mainland to be safe from attack by Iroquois war canoes which could not battle with high seas. Father Marquette, the missionary explorer, founded a mission there and started from it to explore southward, and he was brought back for burial in the church there two years before Du Lhut arrived. There were many Frenchmen living there in log cabins built in a row like a single street, and the Algonquin Indians had a village on the Lake Huron side of the island and the Ottawas a village on the Lake Michigan side, with a palisade between them. In 1695 there were sixty houses outside of the fort and mission station, a garrison of two hundred, chiefly coureurs de bois and between six and seven thousand Indians, so it was an exceedingly important place. The Indians cultivated enough corn both for themselves and for the white men.
In the year that Du Lhut came to Michilimackinac there also came the little ship Griffin, the first ship built west of Niagara, which La Salle planned to use on the lakes, but which was lost on its first journey. However, Du Lhut was not there when it arrived, as he did not tarry long because of his anxiety to get to the land of the Dakotas. So we find him in July 19, 1679, planting a cross bearing the arms of King Louis in the newly discovered lands he was claiming for France. Du Lhut had indeed become a discoverer, within eleven months of his departure from Montreal. He was now many thousands of miles from Versailles and the king would have had some trouble in recognizing the fashionable young guardsman in the bearded man in buckskins.
Then began Du Lhut’s remarkable career among the savages. He travelled fearlessly among the most ferocious of them, made friends with them, and even persuaded them to make friends among themselves, reconciling rival tribes and arranging marriages between braves of one tribe, and Indian maids of another, in order to promote peace among the red men and friendliness towards New France. While many of the coureurs became as primitive as the savages in their wilderness lives, Du Lhut never lost his dignity as a Frenchman and a gentleman. He never let the Indians forget that he demanded respect from them, and it was partly through this dignity that he exerted his remarkable influence over them. He dared do things that no other Frenchman dared, but he did it all with such gravity and justice that the savages recognized in him a great and generous personality.
In the summer of 1680 he was wandering about in the south-west when he heard that there was a white prisoner with a certain tribe on the Mississippi. Was he a Frenchman in distress, or an Englishman trespassing on the French territory? Du Lhut decided to find out. Leaving two Frenchmen to guard his camp, he set out with the rest of his party, and by travelling day and night, scarcely stopping to eat, in a little over two days he reached the tribe he sought. There, badly used, hungry and dirty, he discovered Hennepin. It was a camp of two thousand Sioux, proud and savage. Into their midst he strode, bronzed, his eyes flashing with indignation, and scolded them for abusing a Frenchman! If he had shown any signs of fear they would have dispatched him, torturing him for the sport of the camp, but instead the chiefs all began to apologize and attempt to explain why they had done it. Proud and scornful, Du Lhut called them unfaithful friends. When finally he relented in his attitude there was great joy and they made him a great feast. They also told him that they would take him on a twenty days’ journey to a great salt lake in the west. That was a temptation to Du Lhut, for it would have made him the discoverer of Great Salt Lake in Utah, but he felt he had to get Hennepin safely back to Montreal; so he reluctantly declined their offer. The chief Ouasicoude gave him a map of the direct route home and so he set off. No sooner had he got Hennepin back to Montreal than he set off in a great hurry for France to write a book in which he gave Du Lhut scarcely any credit at all for his great exploit.
In the three years he had been away Du Lhut had explored a vast new territory and won over several great new tribes to the French trade. It would have cost the government a fortune to send out official expeditions to attempt the same thing; nevertheless when he arrived home he was promptly arrested for taking part in the illegal trade, and the Governor, Count Frontenac, imprisoned him in Chateau St. Louis. However, this was not quite so bad as it sounds, because the Governor and the Intendant were at loggerheads over the coureurs de bois, Frontenac defending, Intendant Duchesneau attacking them. So Frontenac apparently arrested Du Lhut in order to keep him out of the hands of the antagonistic Intendant, for the imprisoned coureur de bois had a place at the Governor’s table every day in the vice-regal chateau at Quebec.
Du Lhut decided to go home to Paris to ask the pardon and help of the king; so we see him once more in the velvet coats and lace ruffles of Versailles; but though the king would not grant him the right to trade for himself in the wilderness, when he returned to Quebec we see him being called into the council, to discuss the war against the Iroquois. Presently we see him engaged by the government to go back to the far west as post commander, where he could gather his coureurs de bois about him as garrison and explorers and go on trading under permit on his own account.
Du Lhut was not a man of marked ambition or avarice. If he had been there were great opportunities both for fame and fortune. But he was content with his adventures, with his services to the land of his adoption, and with the fascination of his experiences with the strange, savage people he discovered.
Du Lhut was the founder of a new post where the city of Fort William now stands, nearly three months’ journey by canoe from Montreal. There he lured the tribes who hunted for still another thousand miles to westward, so that he drew to French trade the furs from all western Ontario and Manitoba, and parts of what is now the United States. It was an extraordinary addition of territory to New France, making the fur lands for two thousand miles inland pay tribute to France. To-day the journey from Montreal to Fort William is a long journey, by rail or steamer. But what a stupendous adventure it was in those days to make it in a birch bark canoe! Yet year after year Frenchmen did it until it was a familiar highway. After the Frenchmen came the British traders and adventurers over the same route until canoes gave way to ships and railways.
Du Lhut stood so high with the administrators now, that eventually he was put in command of the great post of Michilimackinac and while he was there he heard that two Frenchmen had been murdered. Prompt as ever, Du Lhut set out with a handful of French for Sault Ste. Marie where, all told, he had just forty-two followers. Nevertheless he secured the accused murderers, and after many hours of conference with four hundred Indians, he condemned two of the red men to death in penalty for the slaying. Depending once again on his dignity and reputation, Du Lhut actually proceeded to execute the condemned men in view of all their countrymen and maintained the prestige of the French intact.
Next Du Lhut was sent to Detroit to build a post to prevent the ambitious English from coming up to the great lakes to trade, it was thirty miles from the present site of the city of Detroit, and operating from that point, with his garrison of thirty reckless coureurs, Du Lhut captured as many English traders. When his cousin Tonti came north and camped actually on the site of Detroit, Du Lhut went down to meet him, joined forces with him and on a journey along the western shores of Lake Erie, they captured another thirty Englishmen and put a stop for the time to the English plans for trade expansion.
So we see Du Lhut, prompt, efficient, adventurous, keeping the loyalty of his coureur de bois and the friendship of the Indians, travelling incredible thousands of miles by canoe and snowshoe through uncharted wilderness, in the service of New France.
Meantime, however, Du Lhut had not been making very much money for himself, for though he had the privilege of trading for furs, for instance, at Detroit, yet he had to pay the wages of the garrison which was apparently there in the service of the king, but which the Governor neglected to meet. So Du Lhut’s uncle in Montreal had been lending him money to meet his expenses. Being a shrewd business man Uncle Jacques decided to make a trip out and see what Du Lhut was doing with the money. What he saw at the post of Detroit apparently did not impress him very much, for he returned to Montreal and sued Du Lhut in the courts for what he had lent him, and was awarded a favourable decision. Years afterwards when Jacques Patron died he left all his money to Claude Greysolon and ignored Du Lhut.
Du Lhut had now been ten years in the country. Seven of those years had been hard and unhappy ones because they covered the period during which the Fighting Governor, Frontenac, was in France, and two very weak and inefficient Governors followed one another in his place. Whereas Frontenac had impressed the Indians with his strength and dignity, both La Barre and Denonville did weak and foolish and treacherous things, making the work of Du Lhut and other of the great coureurs de bois many times as difficult in maintaining right relations with the savages who were only learning how to estimate the white men. Du Lhut had fought loyally for each of the weak Governors, but he had often been indignant and wrathful over their folly. Worst of all, Denonville had treacherously taken a number of Indian prisoners at Fort Frontenac and sent them to France to serve as galley slaves in the king’s ships. It was relief indeed to Du Lhut to hear not only that the great old Governor was returning but that those that survived of the Indian galley slaves were also being returned to their tribes. The Governor and the Indians were sailing together from France, but while their ship was still skipping over the sea under its great sails, the sombre tragedy of the Lachine massacre came to prove to Denonville the gross folly of his policy with the Indian people.
The Iroquois who put torch and tomahawk to the sleeping town of Lachine escaped exultingly, laughing at the weakness of the French. The first man to extract payment from the savages was the noble and dependable Du Lhut.
Du Lhut selected thirty trusty coureurs de bois for his expedition. They travelled five or six to a canoe, and when they got up the Ottawa where they expected the Iroquois to be hiding they kept careful watch. At the first glimpse of the enemy, half the men bent over so that their backs looked like bales of merchandise. Then the paddlers, pretending to be alarmed, turned as if to fly away. However, they allowed the Iroquois to gain upon them, and when, shouting with mad glee, the red men were close upon the Frenchmen, at a signal from Du Lhut, all the canoes turned, all the crouching Frenchmen shot up into position with their muskets levelled, and peppered away at the amazed Indians. They shot or drowned all but three, and these, helplessly bound, Du Lhut carried off to Montreal. Imagine the cheering and the glee in Montreal over this retaliation. Du Lhut handed over his prisoners, and so fierce was the hatred of these invaders that the colonists decided that the Iroquois should have a taste of their own medicine and be burned at the stake.
You may still see the spot, near Nelson’s monument in Montreal, where the great bonfires were built and where the painted savages were tied to stakes. Some French hand set a torch to the kindling, and horrible as it seems to us to-day, the colonists stood about and watched the great yellow flames mount around the sweating, stoic prisoners until they consumed them.
For twenty-nine years Du Lhut served New France. Now as commander of a trading post, in turn at Lachine, Fort Frontenac, Michilimackinac, Detroit, and others even farther afield, and again as an officer on expeditions against both red and white enemies, Indians and English. Countless thousands of miles he travelled, by canoe and snowshoe, always dependable, always loyal, always energetic and resourceful. His was one of the most remarkable records in the history of New France.
He was not the sort of man to acquire or to hold wealth. He might be called a practical dreamer. No man in New France ever equalled him in authority over the Indians. Probably no man had more opportunities to make a fortune for himself from furs. Yet at his death Governor Vaudreuil wrote the sincerest tribute he could pay him, in an age when Quebec and Montreal knew many men with the lust for wealth, well-gotten or ill-gotten, when he wrote “he was a very honest man.” No journey was too great, no task too hard for him, though he might face cold, hunger, hardship in its doing. Gay he must have been, too, to ease the time with laughter, and a man of large and resourceful mind, to bear the solitude that the work often imposed. Altogether I think Daniel du Lhut was the sort of man we would meet to-day with intense delight, if we had the chance to peep into that storehouse of his memories and listen to his tales of high adventure.
In 1707 we find Du Lhut handing over command of the post at Detroit to his cousin, Nicholas Tonti, and turning his canoe eastward for the last time. Up along the shore of Lake Huron, in at the turbulent mouth of the French river, across the silver lake of Nipissing and down the picturesque Ottawa, home again, to Montreal.
He was an old man now, perhaps not so old in years, for he was still on the sunny side of sixty, but broken and bent by hardship and suffering, as he had suffered for twenty-five years with gout. He must look for a permanent home now, and so, not far from the great house he had built three decades before, he rented the ground floor of a big stone house owned by a leather merchant, Charles de Launay. Charles had a young wife who was kind to the old adventurer, and they had a little lad, whose name was also Charles, who delighted the king of the coureurs de bois. Probably little Charles sat on a footstool near Du Lhut and begged for tales of Indians in the far west.
Du Lhut’s old friends dropped in to see him, too, for all the great men of the colony knew and respected him, and a great many of them loved him. One of them was Baron Le Moyne de Longueuil, whose great stone chateau-fort Du Lhut could see with his keen eyes across the St. Lawrence, on the lovely southern shore. LeMoyne was among the friends who were with him when he made his will, leaving some of his money to little Charles and all his furniture and other things to Charles’ mother.
On warm and sunny days he walked out along St. Paul in his suit of fine brown cloth embroidered in gold, with gilt buttons, and buttonholes worked in fine gold thread, and over it all a scarlet cloak. He had a plumed hat upon his great peruke and a cane with a silver handle, and though he cared little for fashion, yet he looked what he was, a great gentleman.
One February day in 1710, when the St. Lawrence lay frozen all the way across to Longueuil, and snow lay deep upon the roofs of Montreal and blue wood smoke curled up from row upon row of Canadian homes, safe at last from savage invasion, then came Baron LeMoyne and others of Du Lhut’s old friends, many of them old coureurs like himself, into the quiet rooms upon St. Paul street sadly. The house was hushed. In an inner room lay Daniel Du Lhut, his vigorous hands folded quietly, his keen, commanding eyes closed for the last time. He had gone on his last adventure. They were not ashamed of tears in their eyes for one who had been a loyal fellow countryman, a trusty friend, a gallant adventurer.
When Baron LeMoyne sealed up his old friend’s papers and letters there were among them many volumes of diaries. Where they are now nobody knows. Perhaps they went back to France to Claude Greysolon along with Du Lhut’s other legacies to him. Perhaps they may have been burned with some old house or thrown out carelessly by those who knew not their value. Perhaps—just perhaps—they are still lying somewhere safely enough, in some old library, or stowed away with forgotten books, to come to light some day and tell us in Du Lhut’s own words, of thirty years of adventure in the wilderness of mid-America.
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.
[The end of Daniel du Lhut, by Blodwen Davies]