Houston County, Minnesota - Chapter 5: Early Exploration, 1919

The first civilized men to gaze upon the towering bluffs of Houston county were probably Father Louis Hennepin, a priest of the Recollects of St. Francis, and his two companions, Antoin du Gay Auguel, known from his birthplace as "le Picard," and Michel Accault. They were sent out by Robert Cavelier de La Salle from Fort Crevecoeur near Lake Peoria, Illinois, Feb. 28, 1680. On their way up the Mississippi they were captured by a band of Dakota warriors on the warpath against the Illinois and Miami nations. These Dakota took the white men to the Mille Lacs region in northern Minnesota. After spending a while in the Mille Lacs region, Hennepin and Auguel, leaving Accault as a hostage, were brought southward again by the Indians looking for supplies which La Salle was to have sent to the mouth of the Wisconsin. On their way down the Mississippi River, guarded by a Chief Ouasicoude (Wacoota) and a company of Indians, Hennepin and Auguel came to St. Anthony Falls, near Minneapolis, which Hennepin named. Later the party was overtaken by Aquipaguetin, a Sioux chief who had taken Hennepin into his family as an adopted son. Some time was spent in hunting between the mouth of the Chippewa and the mouth of the Wisconsin, and as the Root River country was an excellent hunting country, rich in elk, buffalo, deer and bear, as well as smaller game, it is permissible to conjecture that Hennepin may have set his foot on Houston county soil. Again the party started northward and about July 25, 1680, encountered DuLuth and a bodyguard of French soldiers.

Daniel Greysolon, better known as Sieur Du Luth (variously rendered), had started out from Montreal, Sept. 1, 1678, explored the Lake Superior region and the territory westward, met the Dakota in the Mille Lac region, and on July 2, 1779, set up the standard of New France at their village. He returned to Lake Superior from that lake the next summer, ascended the Brule River, made the portage to the Saint Croix, and was on . his way down the Mississippi when he learned that Hennepin and his two companions were in captivity among the Dakota. Hastening to the rescue, Duluth journeyed down the Mississippi with two Frenchmen and an Indian, and after a canoe trip of two days and two nights overtook Hennepin and about 1,000 Indians. This meeting probably took place about opposite Houston county, Du Luth fearlessly took Hennepin in his own canoe, and started up the river to the Mille Lacs region, which they reached Aug. 14, 1680. There at a council he upbraided the Indians in scathing terms. He told them that Hennepin was his brother ; he denounced them for making Hennepin and his two companions slaves and taking away Hennepin's priestly robes ; he taunted them that after being associated with Frenchmen for a year they should have kidnapped other Frenchmen on their way to make them a friendly visit. As a climax Du Luth returned the peace calumets which the Indians had given him. The Indians began to make excuses, but this did not deter Du Luth from his determination to take Hennepin away. Hennepin himself was rebuked by Du Luth for takihg insults without resentment as such conduct lowered the prestige of the French. Toward the end of September, Du Luth, Hennepin and their party once more descended the Mississippi River, passed Houston county and reached Canada by way of the Wisconsin River, the Portage, the Fox River and Green Bay. Thus in the fall of 1680, Hennepin, Du Luth and their companions beheld for the last time the picturesque surroundings of Houston county.

Hennepin's account of his adventures makes no particular reference to what is now Houston county, but describes the bluffs and scenery in this region in a general way, and mentions the Black River. Many interesting incidents are told of life on this portion of the Mississippi in that fardistant time. The meat captured spoiled quickly, and the Indians were evidently not good fishermen, as they were thankful whenever they could secure a fish dropped on the land by an eagle. At times they secured turtles, but the capture was difficult as the turtles would plunge into the water and thus evade being taken. Hennepin was especially interested in the appearance of the shovelnose sturgeon. He saw one which an otter caught, and Auguel declared that it reminded him of a devil in the paws of a beast. But after frightening the otter away, they cooked and ate the fish, and found it very good.

Nicolas Perrot was the next white man to become familiar with the region embracing Houston county, and maintained an actual occupancy further up the river. Perrot was for some twenty years a trader and interpreter in the Northwest for the French. Perrot arrived at Green Bay, where he was already weU known, in the late summer of the year 1685. He found the Indians restless and inclined to inter-tribal warfare, so that some time was spent in their pacification. It was later than he had planned, therefore, when he set out for the country of the Sioux, where he hoped to secure a good harvest of valuable furs. After crossing the Wisconsin portage and proceeding down that river to its mouth, he turned his little fleet of canoes boldly upstream, and as the weather was growing cold and traveling difiicult, they "found a place where there was timber, which served them for building a fort, and they took up their quarters at the foot of the mountain, behind which was a great prairie abounding in wild beasts.'' This camp is believed to have been at Trempealeau Mountain, in Wisconsin, and Perrot thus passed Houston county. Later he left this wintering place, possibly in the summer of 1686, and established himself near the foot of Lake Pepin. He was continuously in the upper Mississippi region until the' spring of 1687, when he was ordered to proceed eastward with such Indian allies as he could enlist and join the French in a war against certain Indians of New York State. In the meantime he had amassed a stock of furs worth 40,000 livres. In his absence on the war path these were left at the mission house at Green Bay, which was burned by hostile Indians, with a loss of all his peltry.

In the autumn of 1687 he set out once more for the Northwest to retrieve his ruined fortunes. After the ice had begun to form on the Fox River, he passed down the Wisconsin to the Mississippi, and ascended the Mississippi to this region. At Fort Antoine, at the foot of Lake Pepin, on May 8, 1689, he took possession of the Dakota country in the name' of the King of France, annexing the Minnesota and St. Croix River districts and all head waters of the Mississippi, as well as all the region drained by the whole upper course of the Mississippi.

It is possible that Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron La Hontan, accompanied Perrot on one of his expeditions to the upper Mississippi. La Hontan's name in this region is connected with the "Long River," which he claimed to have ascended for some five hundred miles. When later exploration revealed no such river. La Hontan was discredited and his statements condemned as fiction. However, efforts have been made to identify the Long River as an exaggerated account of the Minnesota, Cannon or Root rivers. La Hontan came to Canada as a French soldier in 1683 when a youth of seventeen. In the course of his military duty he came more or less in contact with the fur traders and voyageurs of the upper Mississippi. His published works may be the result of a vivid imagination strung upon a slender thread of actual facts, or they may be wholly fiction based upon stories he had heard from real travelers. Certainly there is no five hundred mile river falling into the Mississippi from the west in this region, though it is true that the description of the mouth of the Root River with its rushes and its plentiful trout agrees with the description of the mouth of the Root River left by other early explorers.

N. H. Winchell in his "Aborigines of Minnesota," says: "It (the Long River of La Hontan) comes nearest to the region of the Root River. The Mozeemlek are far west on a river that flows west, separated from the sources of the Long River by a mountain range. In the Journal (Travels) , La Hontan says he entered the mouth of Long River November 3 (1688), and that on the ninth he reached the viUages of the Eokoros (that is, after six days' travel) ; therefore, the Eokoros were likely to be lowas. They were then at war with the Esanapes, sixty leagues (180 miles) higher up the river. They had 20,000 warriors, which number was greater before the war which they had waged with the Nadouesses (Sioux), the Pinamoha and the Espanapes. They lived in long huts, round at the top, made of reeds and bull-rushes, interlaced and cemented with a sort of *fat-earth' (that is, clay).

"The.Esahapes were very numerous and powerful. The village was large and like a city, the houses ahnost like ovens, but large and high, and constructed as above described. The Gnaesitares were not acquainted with the peace pipe. The Long River had 'little trouts' which they fished out for food."

Professor WincheU further writes: "After having read attentively the narrative of La Hontan, and examined his map accompansring it, I reached the following conclusions: at its mouth, and also large and long enough to give basis to his story, and having trout; though I do not feel satisfied that he entered any stream at alL

**2. There is a naturalness in the yam, in its general course and in its details, that almost preclude disputing its truthfulness, except what he says about the Mozeemlek slaves, which convinces me either that he is tnring to sketch a veritable trip up the Long River or is an adept at mixing facts and fiction, making the whole to appear fact.

"3. All that he says, and the map which he draws of the Gnaesitares and the Mozeemlek, seems to me to be largely fictitious, or having for a basis of fact only some general and crude statements of the natives, and could have been framed in with imaginary fiction by any unscrupulous reporter who cared not for the truth and expected that his lies would not be detected, at least not until after his death, but was determined to weave a wonderful and book-selling yarn.

**4. He could not have been beyond the limits of Minnesota and, so far as his facts are amenable to geographic verification, they are limited to Minnesota. They can be verified in that area. He had a compass and an 'astrolabe,' and he makes a map that shows a stream nearly direct from the west. He shows many islands, but the Root River is almost free froni islands, and does not issue from a lake. Its distances are enormously toe great and cannot be condensed into the limits of Root River.

"5. The names given the Indian tribes are probably invented or manufactured by the adventurer in some such manner as Schoolcraft obtained Itasca,' but from the natives' dialects instead of from Latin.

"6. This fictitious character being forced upon the reader by the perusal of his Long River trip, is necessarily extended, though with much regret on the part of the student of early northwestern travels, to his trip down the Mississippi, up the Missouri to Osages, and to the Arkansas, and thence to the whole book. In short, the reader is more than once compelled to doubt the statements made as to the lives and customs of the 'savages,' and hence to class the work as a tissue of falsehood, strung on so much fact as the author could command from his knowledge of the country/'

One of the witnesses of Perrot's proclamation at the foot of Lake Pepin was Pierre Charles Le Sueur, an explorer and trader whose work added to the knowledge given to the world by Perrot. He was brought to Canada as a youth and spent practically his whole life in trading with the Dakota of the upper Mississippi and Minnesota. It has been claimed that he reached the Mississippi by way of the Wisconsin as early as 1683, three years after Hennepin's voyage. He appears to have been identified with several of Perrot's ventures, and, as stated, was with him at the post at the foot of Lake Pepin in 1689. The next year he made a voyage far up the Mississippi above St. Anthony FaUs. In 1695 Le Sueur built a fort on Pelee Island, a short distance above Red Wing, which was maintained four years during his own absence in France. He later returned and conducted an expedition in search of copper in the Blue Earth country. In ascending the river on this expedition he passed Houston county in the early part of

September, 1700. He descended the river to the Gulf of Mexico in 1702. In these various trips to this region Le Sueur had ample opportunity for observing the beauties of Houston county, and a river Quincapous mentioned in the accounts of his travels may mean the Root River which appears on early maps as Quicapous and Quicapoux.

More than a quarter of the eighteenth century passed away before another attempt was made to establish a post on the upper Mississippi. The Fox Indian wars had made the Fox-Wisconsin waterway untenable, and any approach to the Dakota had to take the difficult route from the end of Lake Superior through the tangled marshes and lakes at the head of the Mississippi.

In 1727, however, the French Government determined to establish a post among the Sioux. In September of the same year the new fort was erected near what is now Frontenac, on the Minnesota side of Lake Pepin, and dedicated amid imposing ceremonies as Fort Beauhamois. The failure of the expedition against the Foxes the foUowing year made this post untenable, however, and it was hastily abandoned by the alarmed garrison. In writing from Fort Beauhamois, May 29, 1727, Father Michel Guignas describes the bluffs, islands and scenery of this region.

In 1727, however, the French Government determined to establish a build a Dakota post was placed in charge of Rene Godef roy, Sieur de Linctot. With him went his son, Louis Rene; Augustin Langlade and his brother; Joseph Joliet, grandson of the explorer ; one Campeau, a skiUed blacksmith, brother of the one at Detroit ; and Father Michael Guignas, chaplain of the expedition. They arrived on the Mississippi in the autumn of 1731, and built a fort near Trempealeau.

The succeeding years were replete with danger and difficulty for the officers and traders of the little post. The various tribes of Indians were at war, and the situation of the French among the fierce beligerents was almost that of prisoners. In the summer of 1735, Linctot finally made his way to Canada with an immense quantity of beaver skins and other peltry.

To succeed Linctot in the post of the Dakota, the Governor-General of New France chose Jacques le Gardeur, Sieur de St. Pierre, sending him with a party of twenty-two men to the upper Mississippi. This small convoy reached its destination late in 1735, and early the following spring St. Pierre determined to remove the post about sixty miles higher up the Mississippi. There for a year they held a hostile tribe at bay, employing every device of strategy and dissimulation, and finally on May 30, 1737, abandoned the post with all its goods and belongings in order to save their lives.

Thirteen years later, in 1750, the French Government established another Sioux post, under the leadership of Capt. Pierre Paul Marin, a wellknown Wisconsin commandant. He was recalled two years later to serve on the Allegheny frontier, and his son, Joseph, succeeded to the command. The later maintained his post for three years, but during the French and Indian Wars was obliged to withdraw the garrison and destroy the post - :he last under French occupation upon the upper Mississippi.

Feb. 10, 1763, when the Mississippi nearly to its mouth became the boundary line between the possessions of England and Spain. Three years later, in 1766, Jonathan Carver, a native of Connecticut, set out to explore the new British domains in the Northwest. Starting from Boston in June, 1766, Carver traveled to the Strait of Mackinaw and Green Bay, and thence by the canoe route of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, to the Mississippi. Then he ascended the Mississippi, accompanied by a French-Canadian and a Mohawk Indian. He spent the winter of 1766-67 among the Sioux of the Northwest. In the spring of 1767 he descended the Mississippi to the present location of Prairie du Chien, in the hope of securing goods. Disappointed there, he ascended the Mississippi to the Chippewa, and reached Lake Superior by way of that stream and the upper tributaries of the St. Croix. It was afterward claimed that he made a treaty with the Sioux, granting him a tract of land about a hundred miles wide along the east bank of the Mississippi from the Falls of St. Anthony to the southeastern end of Lake Pepin. It did not take in any of Houston county. On the strength of this alleged treaty many claims were from time to time presented to the United States Government, but Congress has always refused to recognize the claim of Carver's heirs and successors.

At the close of the Revolutionary War the land east of the Mississippi became a part of the new United States by the Treaty of Sept. 3, 1783. Spain continued in possession of the land west of the Mississippi from 1762 to Oct. 1, 1800, when the tract was receded to France, which nation, however, did not take possession until 1804, at which time a formal transfer was made from Spain to France, in order that France might formally transfer the tract to the United States under the Treaty of April 30, 1803.

Two years later the Government determined to send an expedition into the Northwest in charge of Zebulon M. Pike. He was given orders to negotiate treaties with the Indians, to secure a conformity with laws of the United States by the Northwest Fur Company and others engaged in the fur trade, to secure the site for a fort near the head of the Mississippi River navigation, and to extend geographical exploration. He started from St. Louis in a keel boat Aug. 9, 1B05, with twenty soldiers, spent the winter in northern Minnesota, started down the river April 7, 1806, and again reached St. Louis the latter part of that month.

Pike reached Houston county on Sept. 10, 1805. He that day spent a while in conference with Wabasha and a compiany of his warriors who were encamped at the mouth of the Upper Iowa. That night Pike encamped somewhere in the southeastern comer of Houston county. The next day, in the rain and cold, he made poor progress, and stopped to camp on the present site of Brownsville. Still continuing in cold and rain, he passed Root River, which he calls the Racine River, passed La Crosse, and camped somewhere near the present site of La Crescent, on the night of September 12. On his trip down the river Pike, on April 16, 1806, camped at ft-ownsvilie, within a few hundred yards of where he had camped on the ascending trip,' Sept. 11, 1805. He kiUed a wild goose and roasted it for supper. Although the snow still lay thick on the sides of the hills, the trees were in bloom. While hunting after pigeons, he and his men exchanged gun signals with some Indian hunters in the distance but did not see them. April 17 they found Wabasha still encamped at the mouth of the Upper lowtf, and received from him a present of a kettle of boiled meat and a dressed young deer.

Major Stephen H. Long led an expedition up the Mississippi in 1817. The voyage was made in a six-oar skiff. He camped in Houston county, a little above the mouth of the Root River, on the night of Thursday, July 10. In his journal he mentions the scenery of this region, especially the bluff formations. Near the southeast comer of the county was a small encampment of Dakota consisting of a war party of ten or twelve. These Indians hoisted an American flag and fired a salute. Several of them, in a canoe, overtook the skiff, and were rewarded with some small gifts. The Root River at that time was navigable in high water, forty or forty-five miles, and in low water about twenty. No Indians were then living in its valley, though Long says that it was a favorite hunting ground and that hunting parties frequently encamped in the neighborhood. A small band of Winnebago were encamped a little above La Crosse on the Wisconsin side. On the trip down the river, Houston county was passed, July 20-21.

With the establishment, in 1819, of Fort Snelling, Trempealeau county was placed within the pale of civilization and thereafter soldiers, traders and visitors were frequently passing. The expedition which established the fort, headed by Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Leavenworth and accompanied by Major Thomas Fors3rth, the Indian agent, reached what is now Houston county Wednesday, Aug. 11, 1819.

That same year, on November 2, a sawmill was established on the falls of the Black River, "not much inferior to any in the United States." Seven chiefs of the Dakota nation granted the original permission to do this, and later Wabasha, the head chief, made the permission permanent. The mill was soon destroyed by the Winnebago.

Governor Lewis Cass, with his party, including Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and James D. Doty, passed Houston county in 1820. They reached the upper Mississippi by way of Lake Superior, and after leaving the region of their explorations came down the Mississippi. On this trip down the river, Cass and Schoolcraft and their men, landed on the present site of Winona, and camped for the night on the Minnesota bank of the Mississippi some five miles below Trempealeau Mountain, not far north of Houston county.

A mill was built in 1822 on the Menominee branch of the Chippewa River by permission of Lawrence Taliaferro, the Indian agent at Fort Snelling, and with the consent of the Dakota. Joseph Rolette and Judge James Lockwood, both of Prairie du Chien, were the financial backers of the proposition, and Wabasha's band of the Dakota were also interested in it. With this beginning, the rafting of lumber past Houston county to Prairie du Chien and other river points became a familiar sight.

On his expedition to Lake Winnipeg, in 1823, Long again passed Houston county accompanied by a part of his followers. From Prairie du Chien, a part of the expedition under James F. Calhoun made the trip on

The first steamboat to ascend the upper Mississippi, the "Virginia," passed Houston county on May, 1823, and arrived at Fort Snelling, near the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, May 10. A number of prominent people were aboard. Steamboat trafiic thus being established, the region of the mouth of Root River became widely known. J. Constantine Beltrami, who explored the Red River of the North and the sources of the Mississippi River, was one of the passengers aboard the "Virginia" when it made its first trip to Fort Snelling.

The period of exploration really ends in 1835, when this region was visited by George William Featherstonhaugh and William Williams Mather, by George Catlin, and by a military expedition under Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen W. Kearney, the topographer of the expedition being Albert Miller Lea.

The military expedition reached Winona overland from Iowa, entering the State southwest from what is now the city of Albert Lea. In July, 1835, the soldiers camped in Minnesota, opposite Trempealeau. They crossed a comer of Houston county.

Thus the bluffs of the Mississippi and Root rivers in Houston county, which had watched the first white man penetrate these solitudes, were now known to the world, and the activities of civilization were soon to be throbbing at their feet. Frenchmen, Englishmen and Americans had examined their formations, the whistle and chug of the steamboat had become f amiliar» the rich land over which for so many years the solitudes had kept watch awaited the axe of the pioneer and the plow of the husbandman.