They may have been
Pierre Radisson and his brother-in-law, Menard des Grosseilliers,
who are alleged to have covered the long portage from Lake
Superior to the Mississippi in or about 1665; but the matter
rests entirely on how one interprets Radisson's vague account of
their western perambulations. At all events, in 1680--seven years
after the descent of the river from the Wisconsin to the Arkansas
by Marquette and Joliet--Louis Hennepin, under instructions from
La Salle, explored the stream from the mouth of the Illinois to
the Falls of St. Anthony, where the city of Minneapolis now
stands, five hundred miles from the true source.
There the matter of exploration rested until the days of Thomas
Jefferson, when the purchase of Louisiana lent fresh interest to
northwestern geography. In 1805 General James Wilkinson, in
military command in the West, dispatched Lieutenant Zebulon M.
Pike with a party of twenty men from St. Louis to explore the
headwaters of the great river, make peace with the Indians, and
select sites for fortified posts. From his winter quarters near
the Falls, Pike pushed northward over the snow and ice until,
early in 1806, he reached Leech Lake, in Cass County, Minnesota,
which he wrongly took to be the source of the Father of Waters.
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