The date of Carver's travels over those regions is 1766. Carver, whose travels have been treated with too indiscriminate censure, was descended from an ancient and respectable English family in Connecticut, and had served as a captain in the provincial army, which was disbanded after the treaty of peace of Versailles, of 1763, and united to great personal courage a persevering and observing mind. By his bravery and admirable conduct among the powerful tribes of Sioux and Chippewas, he obtained a high standing among them; and, after being constituted a chief by the former, received from them a large grant of land, which was not, however, ratified by the British government. The fate of this enterprising traveller cannot but excite regret. After having escaped the massacre of Fort William Henry, on the banks of Lake George, in 1757, and the perils of a long journey through the American wilderness, he was spared to endure miseries in the heart of the British metropolis, which he had never encountered in the huts of the American savages, and perished of want in the city of London, the seat of literature and opulence! Between the years 1769 and 1772, Samuel Hearne performed a journey from Prince of Wales's Fort, in Hudson's Bay, to the Coppermine River of the Arctic Ocean. McKenkie's voyages to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans were performed in 1789 and 1793. Pike ascended the Mississippi in 1805 and 1806. Such is a brief outline of the progress of discovery in the north-western regions of the United States, by which our sources of information have been from time to time augmented, and additional light cast upon the interesting history of our Indian tribes--their numbers and condition, and other particulars connected with the regions they inhabit. Still, it cannot be denied that, amidst much sound and useful information, there has been mingled no inconsiderable proportion that is deceptive, hypothetical, or false; and, upon the whole, that the progress of information has not kept pace with the increased importance which that section of the Union has latterly assumed--with the great improvements of society--and with the spirit and the enterprise of the times. A new era has dawned in the moral history of our country, and, no longer satisfied with mere geographical outlines and boundaries, its physical productions, its antiquities, and the numerous other traits which it presents for scientific research, already attract the attention of a great proportion of the reading community; and it is eagerly inquired of various sections of it--whose trade, whose agriculture, and whose population have been long known--what are its indigenous plants, its zoology, its geology, its mineralogy, &c. Of no part of it, however, has the paucity of information upon these, and upon other and more familiar subjects, been so great, as of the extreme north-western regions of the Union, of the great chain of lakes, and of the sources of