What Do You Mean, This Isn't China?
Dressed in the silk mandarin robes that he had brought for this historic occasion, Jean Nicolet stepped into the birch-bark canoe. He was about to cross the Pacific Ocean to visit China.
Or so he thought.
Actually, he was about to cross Lake Michigan to become the first European to visit land that eventually became part of the State of Wisconsin.
Nicolet realized his mistake soon after he landed because the people he found on the other shore didn't understand any of the Mandarin words he had learned in preparation for his trip to China.
He also realized that roast beaver was the entrée at the banquet he'd been invited to …and beaver pelts were selling at very high prices in Europe. So he set up a trading post.
That was in 1634. Skipping over two hundred eighty-five years of history, the football team that became known as the Green Bay Packers was organized in 1919 and joined the American Professional Football Association in 1921. The following year, the APFA was renamed the National Football League.
When I was a kid in Green Bay, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were Packers all around.