For adventurers bold enough to diverge from the line of lakes, and to pass overland within reach of the dreaded Five Nations, there was yet a third route, more direct than the other two, to the great river. It was a route well known in after years, and followed the course of the Ohio. The Ohio, the 'beautiful river,' for such is the meaning of its name,[1] is formed by the junction of two rivers, the Alleghany and the Monongahela. At their junction, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the French founded Fort Duquesne, and where Fort Duquesne stood is now the city of Pittsburg. The northern branch, the Alleghany, takes its rise near the southern shore of Lake Erie. One of its affluents flows out of Lake Chautauqua, about eight miles south of Lake Erie, at the point where there is now the small town of Portland; {151} another, the Rivière aux Boeufs, now called French Creek, is very little further from the lake, over against Presque Île and the present town of Erie. A day's march through the forest would therefore bring a traveller from Lake Erie to a stream which, when in full volume, would carry his canoe into the Alleghany, the Ohio, and so to the Mississippi far down its course. No wonder the line of the Ohio became, when geographical knowledge had made some way, a central feature in French politics and French strategy in North America. [Footnote 1: The name was given it by the Iroquois.] [Sidenote: _The head waters of the Mississippi closely adjoin the St. Lawrence basin._] From the above it will be seen how closely the head waters of the Mississippi adjoin the St. Lawrence basin, how short the land journey was from the one to the other. The natives of North America made exploration difficult, but from a geographical point of view, the discoverer's path was comparatively easy. [Sidenote: _Early exploration on the upper lakes._] The upper lakes, Lakes Huron and Superior, were visited and explored before there was any adequate knowledge of Lakes Ontario and Erie, and there is no record of white men passing from Lake Erie to Lake Huron by the strait of Detroit before the year 1670. The Five Nations barred the upper St. Lawrence, and the Niagara river and portage; but they did not control to the same extent the alternative route from Montreal to Lake Huron by the Ottawa river. Thus it was that the Jesuits found their way to the Hurons, on Georgian Bay, long before any mission enterprise was attempted on the lower lakes, and as early as 1640 there were Jesuit missionaries at the outlet of Lake Superior, the Sault St. Marie. Later, after the dispersion of the Hurons, there was for a while a mission at the western end of Lake Superior, the place being known as La Pointe, and the mission as the mission of St. Esprit. [Sidenote: _Jean Nicollet._]