In 1615, Champlain's interpreter, Etienne Brule, was sent southward to seek aid from the Andastes and is lost to sight in the western forests for three years; it is possible that Brule even reached the copper region of Lake Superior at this time, and it is fairly probable that this intrepid wanderer, first of all Frenchmen, followed the Niagara River and gazed upon its mighty cataract. The first knowledge we have, however, of a Frenchman's presence on Niagara River is of Father Joseph de la Roche Dallion, who crossed it near Lewiston eleven years later, 1626. Nicolet was in the Straits of Mackinac and at Sault Ste. Marie in 1634, at the time that Champlain (now in the last year of his eventful life) founded Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence above Quebec for the defence of this endangered capital! Father L'Allemant, in his _Relation_ of 1640-41, refers to the Niagara River as the _Onaguiaahra_, and calls it the "celebrated" river of the Neutral Nation. Montreal was founded in 1642, simultaneously with the memorable capture of Father Jogues, who now, first of Europeans, passed through Lake George en route to the homes of the merciless Iroquois. In fact it was Father Jogues who first named this beautiful sheet of water, when he entered it on the eve of Corpus Christi, "Lake Saint Sacrament"; Sir William Johnson, at a later date rechristened it Lake George. Jogues may have heard the Niagara cataract. Ragueneau, writing to France in 1648, affirmed that "North of the Eries is a great lake, about two hundred leagues in circumference, called Erie, formed by the discharge of the _mer-douce_, or Lake Huron, and which falls into a third lake called Ontario, over a cataract of frightful height." The description by La Salle's Sulpician companion, Galinee, in 1669, is the most accurate of all early accounts. After La Salle's visit to the Senecas the party struck westward toward Niagara. [Illustration: Niagara Falls by Father Hennepin. The first known picture of Niagara, dated 1697.]