It is little wonder that, at a time when the river and lake
surfaces were frozen over and the whole country heavily blanketed
with snow, he should have found it difficult to disentangle the
maze of streams and lakes which fill the low-lying region around
the headwaters of the Mississippi, the Red River, and the Lake of
the Woods. In 1820 General Cass, Governor of Michigan, which then
had the Mississippi for its western boundary, led an expedition
into the same region as far as Cass Lake, where the Indians told
him that the true source lay some fifty miles to the northwest.
It remained for the traveler and ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft,
twelve years later, to discover Lake Itasca, in modern Clearwater
County, which occupies a depression near the center of the rock-
rimmed basin in which the river takes its rise.
It was not these infrequent explorers, however, who opened paths
for pioneers into the remote Northwest, but traders in. search of
furs and pelts--those commercial pathfinders of western
civilization. There is scarcely a town or city in the State of
Wisconsin that does not owe its origin, directly or indirectly,
to these men.
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