TWO SIDES OF THE RIVER Before the Packers, there was Green Bay. Before Curly Lambeau and Vince Lombardi, before Ray Nitschke and Reggie White, before Johnny Blood and Don Hutson, and before Arnie Herber and Bart Starr and Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers, there was the river and the bay and the forest that surrounded them both. Before the football team that defined the place to the world, there was the place from which it came. And that place defined the team. The final retreat, about 10,000 years ago, of the glacier that covered much of North America carved--in the soft, reddish soil of what is now northeastern Wisconsin--a river that fed into an estuary of one of the continent's enormous inland seas. For thousands of years after, the valley was home to a number of Native American tribes, which sustained themselves on the rice that flourished in the marshes near the water's edge and thrived on the protein factories of the river and the bay. The water and the land provided life in abundance. According to most accounts, the first European to lay eyes on Green Bay was a 36-year-old French explorer by the name of Jean Nicolet de Belleborne. The son of a postman from the Norman port city of Cherbourg, Nicolet was one of several adventurous young men recruited by Samuel de Champlain, founder of the city of Quebec, to learn the customs and languages of the native people who lived in the western wilderness of the colony of New France. Nicolet arrived in Quebec in 1618, when he was 20, and Champlain soon sent him into the wild to live among the Algonquin Indians on the Ottawa River. Champlain had once written to King Louis XIII that, by way of New France, a traveler could easily reach "the Kingdom of China and the East Indies, whence great riches could be drawn." In 1634 he dispatched Nicolet to seek out the "People of the Sea," who lived on the unexplored shores of one of the Great Lakes. It was Champlain's hope that the People of the Sea were the Chinese, but they were actually the Winnebago Indians, who were known to the Algonquin as the Ouinipegou, a derivation of the word ouinipeg , which was used by the Algonquin to refer to brackish water. The Ouinipegou were so named because they inhabited an area alongside a large body of water--there was nothing foul-smelling about them. Nicolet met the Winnebago (known today as the Ho-Chunk) when he made landfall, supposedly near the future site of the city of Green Bay. Nicolet's mission failed in its primary purpose: to make peace between the Winnebago and the Huron, who were then at war. Hostilities between the two tribes continued, and it was a generation before the French dared to return, at which point Green Bay became an essential way station for fur traders and missionaries. Its location at the mouth of the Fox River made it ideal for the first European settlement in what would eventually be Wisconsin. By traveling southwest on the Fox, traders from Canada could--by way of a marshy two-mile portage to the westward-flowing Wisconsin River--continue on to the Mississippi River, and from there to the Gulf of Mexico. At first the French trappers and traders who inhabited the area hewed to the Algonquin way of referring to the bay--though with a crucial misinterpretation--calling it "la Baie des Puants," which roughly translates to "the bay of the stinkards." They later began referring to it as simply "la Baie." The name stuck for the next century, through Catholic missions and westward exploration and the French and Indian Wars, near the end of which the area fell under the control of the British, who called it Green Bay, perhaps because of the algae-tinged color of the water. As settlement of the area increased, the British established Fort Edward Augustus--renaming an armed encampment they had seized from the French--on the western side of the Fox. They had won vast territory but struggled to govern it, and they also failed to establish friendly relations with the local tribes, who began attacking western garrisons. In the early 1760s, the British abandoned Fort Augustus. The United States took control of the area after the War of 1812 and, in 1816, established a military presence at the deserted fortification. The job of the troops at the woodland outpost, which the Army renamed Fort Howard, was to protect trade routes, construct roads, and negotiate treaties with the local tribes. Among the post's most notable residents was future president Zachary Taylor, who assumed command at Fort Howard in 1817 and served there for about two years. Excerpted from The People's Team: An Illustrated History of the Green Bay Packers by Mark Beech All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
