The most westernly portage from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi was of the greatest importance in the earliest years of white man's exploration. The French were the first explorers, and they were at first barred from Lakes Ontario and Erie--which offered the shortest courses to the Mississippi, via the Ohio--by the ferocious Iroquois; whose hostility Champlain had quickly incurred, toward himself and his people. Driven around, as has been shown,[89] by way of the Ottawa to Georgian Bay, the longest route to the Mississippi became one of the shortest. From Georgian Bay it is a straight course to Green Bay, and so the portage between the Fox and the Wisconsin Rivers became one of the earliest as well as one of the most important in America. By this route the discoverers of the Mississippi were destined to come--for there were many who found and lost this river. First in the line came Radissou and Groseilliers, at the end of that fifth shadowy decade of the seventeenth century. These daring men, possessed of the desire "to travell and see countreys" and "to be knowne w^{th} the remotest people," found the Fox-Wisconsin portage and passed down the Wisconsin to the Mississippi, probably in the spring or early summer of 1659[90]--arriving on that river eleven years before La Salle, and fourteen years before Joliet and Marquette, to whom the discovery of the Mississippi is usually ascribed. But though these men passed over this route to the discovery of the Mississippi, they were not the first white men to traverse it. Jean Nicolet, the first of Europeans, came over this course in 1634, but did not descend the Wisconsin.[91]