We left Duluth in his fort at the mouth of Pigeon River in the fall of 1679. He wintered there, and, as he relates, dissatisfied with his discoveries of the previous summer, resolved on a new adventure. When the season of 1680 opened he set out with four Frenchmen and two Indian guides, ascended the Bois Brulé River, portaged over to the head of the St. Croix, and followed that down to Point Douglass, where he doubtless recognized the great river. Here he learned that but a short time before two Frenchmen had passed down in a canoe. He instantly followed, and after forty-eight hours of lively paddling met the Sioux hunters and with them Accault, Auguelle, and Hennepin. All the French now traveled with the Indians to their villages on Mille Lacs, this time up the Mississippi and Rum rivers. The season was now far advanced and Duluth was obliged to give up his project of a journey to “the ocean of the west,” which he believed to be not more than twenty days’ march distant. Furnished with a rude but truthful map sketched by one of the Sioux chiefs, and promising the Indians to return to trade, the eight white men took their departure for home by Prairie du Chien and Green Bay. Hennepin returned to France and in 1682 published his “Description of Louisiana.” He knew how to tell an interesting story, and stuck as close to the truth as most annalists of his day. He assumed to have been the leader of the exploring party. Fifteen years later there was published in Holland a book under the title of “A New Discovery of a Great Country.” It contained all the matter of Hennepin’s “Description,” and some one hundred and fifty pages more. These interpolated into the original story a journey of more than three thousand miles in thirty days, from the mouth of the Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico and back, before ascending the Mississippi. If Hennepin himself wrote the injected pages, he was the shameless liar which he has been frequently declared to be. There is room, however, for the suggestion that the added pages were the work of some literary hack employed by dishonest publishers to give the book the appearance of a new one; but a good degree of charity is necessary to entertain this theory, as there is no record of any disavowal by Hennepin. Granting Hennepin to have been the leader, it must be remembered he was an agent of La Salle. La Salle’s foresight and enterprise sent him to the land of the Dakotas and to the Falls of St. Anthony. It was not till the winter of 1682 that La Salle was able to embark from his fort at Peoria. Sixty days of easy canoe navigation brought him to one of the islands at the mouth of the Mississippi. There in the month of April, under his royal patent, he set up a cross and proclaimed the sovereignty of Louis le Grand over the whole valley of the great river and all its tributaries. On the “procès-verbal” of that transaction rests every land title in Minnesota.