HISTORICAL SKETCH. 15 



1688, La Hontan.) 



Hennepin's account of the capture and captivity among the Nadoue- 

 sioux is more circumstantial than that of La Salle, but in the main similar 

 to his. Hennepin, however, recounts various indignities and deprivations 

 to which they were subjected, regarding himself as a prisoner and a slave 

 while at lake Buade. 



" In the beginning of July" the Frenchmen set out with the Indians on 

 a grand buffalo-hunt down the Mississippi. In four days they reached the 

 mouth of the St. Francis, or Rum river,* where they halted for the purpose 

 of making more canoes; while Hennepin and the Picard proceeded down the 

 Mississippi alone in a poor canoe intending to reach the Wisconsin river, 

 where La Salle had agreed to send messages to them. It is probable, there- 

 fore, that Hennepin first saw the Falls of St. Anthony on the 5th day of 

 July, 1680,f in company with the Picard alone. On the llth they were not 

 far from the Wisconsin, after some adventure and delay. 



It is plain, also, that Hennepin saw the Falls of St. Anthony before he 

 encountered Du Luth, and may be accredited with the first recorded exam- 

 ination of the Mississippi between the Wisconsin river and the Bum river, 

 and Du Luth with the first visit to the St. Croix river, which he prob- 

 ably descended from the headwaters of the Bois Brule, known then as the 

 Nemissakouat. (Plate-pages 5 and 6.) 



LA HONTAN IN MINNESOTA. 



Baron La Hontan's work, in which he describes a voyage on the river 

 Long, made by himself in the winter of 1688-89, is largely fictitious. He 

 states that he traveled sixty days in winter on a river 500 miles long, at 

 the mouth of which are many rushes, which entered the Mississippi from 

 the west. Mr. J. N. Nicollet regards the river that La Hpntan entered as 

 the Cannon river. It has also been suggested that on ascending this river to 

 its source he passed into the Minnesota river, through some of the canoe 

 routes and lakes which cause the headwaters of the Cannon to interlock 

 with those of the Le Sueur. Keating, the chronicler of Major Long's 

 expedition to the sources of the St. Peter, supposed that the Root river 



* On modern maps the name of St. Francis is applied to the next stream above the Rum, and that may have been 

 the river to which Hennepin referred in his Journal, since by a portage the route by it to lake Buade is much less than 

 the course of the Rum river, and the Indians may have followed that route. 



t The Minnesota Historical Society celebrated July^S, 1880. as the Bi-centennial of the discovory of the Falls of St 

 Anthony. 



