In the early spring of 1660 the two adventurers returned to Chequamegon Bay, whence they continued to Montreal without notable incident. In his narrative Radisson injects after the return from the nation of the Beefe a story of an excursion to Hudson’s Bay, occupying a year, which is probably fictitious. The time occupied by the whole journey is well known and could not have included a trip to the “Bay of the North.” Still, it is reasonably certain that Groseilliers and Radisson were in Minnesota twenty years before Duluth. The reader will have already inquired whether the two young Frenchmen of 1654-56, unnamed, might not have been the same with these of 1658-60. This inquiry was frequently made before the discovery of Radisson’s narrative. The question was settled by that document. Radisson gives a separate and circumstantial account of a three years’ journey of trade and exploration to the west taken by himself and his brother-in-law in 1654. Leaving Montreal in the summer of that year, Groseilliers and Radisson, as the story runs, taking the usual Ottawa River route, reached the Straits of Mackinaw in the early fall. They passed the winter about Green Bay, Wisconsin. The following summer they coasted Lake Michigan and proceeded southward through a country “incomparable, though mighty hot,” to the shores of a great sea. They found “a barril broken, as they use in Spaine.” They passed the summer on “the shore of the Great sea.” Returning to the north, they spent a winter with the Ottawas on the upper Michigan peninsula. As the excursion to Hudson’s Bay already mentioned was a fiction, so is this to the Gulf of Mexico. The traders could not have been absent from the French settlement more than two years. It is in the early spring of 1655, therefore, that we find them setting out from their winter quarters to countries more remote. The essence of Radisson’s text is as follows: “We ... thwarted a land of allmost fifty leagues.... We arrived, some 150 of us men and women, to a river-side, where we stayed 3 weeks making boats.... We went up ye river 8 days till we came to a nation called ... the Scratchers. There we gott some Indian meale and corne ... which lasted us till we came to the first landing Isle. There we weare well received againe.” Upon this indefinite passage has been put the following interpretation. The land journey of fifty leagues (about one hundred and forty miles) took the traders to the east bank of the Mississippi near the southeast corner of Minnesota, where they built boats; the nation who furnished provisions resided about the site of Winona, and the “first landing Isle” was Prairie Island, between Red Wing and Hastings. If this interpretation shall at length be confirmed, Groseilliers and Radisson were in Minnesota twenty-four years before Duluth. Subsequent passages of the narrative lend it some support.