Springtime (1655) came at last, and the two traders proceeded merrily up the Fox River, still in the wake of Nicolet, past the sites of the present cities of Green Bay, De Pere, Kaukauna, Appleton, Neenah, and Menasha. They frequently had to carry their boats around the rapids and waterfalls, but after passing Doty's Island they had a smooth highway. Paddling through Lake Winnebago, and past the site of Oshkosh, then an Indian village, they pushed on through the winding reaches of the Upper Fox, and at last came to a broad prairie near Berlin, whereon was stationed the village of the Mascoutins, or Fire Nation. The Mascoutins treated the strangers, as they had Nicolet, with great kindness. With this village as headquarters, the explorers made frequent expeditions, "anxious to be knowne with the remotest people." Radisson quaintly writes, "We ware 4 moneths in our voyage without doeing any thing but goe from river to river." The explorers cared little, we may suppose, except to have a good time and make a profitable trade with the Indians; they do not appear to have made any map. Writing about their travels, many years after, Radisson says, in one place, that they went into a "great river" which flowed southward, and journeyed to a land of continual warmth, finer than Italy, where he heard the Indians describe certain white men living to the south, who might be Spaniards. It is supposed by many historians that Radisson meant that he was on the Mississippi; if this supposition be true, then the two explorers undoubtedly found the great river by going up the Fox from the Mascoutin village, carrying their canoe over the mile and a half of intervening marsh at Portage, and gliding down the Wisconsin to its junction with the Mississippi at Prairie du Chien. This is important, for the credit of discovering the Upper Mississippi is usually given to Louis Joliet and Father Marquette, who took this very course in 1673, eighteen years later. But the whole question of what "great river" Radisson meant to describe is so involved in doubt, that very likely we shall never know the truth about it. Leaving their Mascoutin friends at last, apparently in the autumn of 1655, the two adventurers returned down the Fox River to Green Bay; thence on to the large villages of Indians which clustered around the Sault Ste. Marie. Received there, as elsewhere, with much feasting and good will, Radisson and Groseilliers conducted trade with their hosts, and explored a long stretch of the southern coast of Lake Superior, but do not appear to have ventured so far as the Pictured Rocks. They also made long expeditions into the country, on snowshoes, to visit and trade with other tribes in the Michigan Peninsula and northern Wisconsin, and even as far off as Hudson Bay, at one time being accompanied by a hundred and fifty Indian hunters.