In consequence of this intimation, I have been casting about to find some authors who treat of the region of country which embraces the St. Peter’s, but with little success.  Hennipin’s “Discovery of a large Country in the Northern America, extending above Four Thousand Miles,” I have read with care.  But care indeed it requires to separate truth from error, both in his descriptions and opinions.  He thinks “Japan a part of the American Continent;” and describes the Wisconsin as “navigable for large vessels above one hundred leagues.”  Yet, notwithstanding this gross hyberbole, he describes the portage between the Fox and Wisconsin at “half a league,” which is within the actual distance.  It may be admitted that he was within the Sioux country, and went up the Mississippi as high as the St. Francis.

La Hontan, whose travels were published in London only a few years after the translation of Hennipin’s, is entitled, it is believed, to no credit whatever, for all he relates of personal discoveries on the Mississippi.  His fiction of observations on “River La Long,” is quite preposterous.  I once thought he had been as far as Prairie du Chien; but think it more probable he never went beyond Green Bay.

Carver, who went from Boston to the Mississippi in the latter part of the 18th century, is not an author to glean much from.  I, however, re-perused his volume carefully, and extracted notes.  Some of the stories inserted in his work have thrown an air of discredit over it, and caused the whole work to be regarded in rather an apocryphal light.  I think there is internal evidence enough in his narrative to prove that he visited the chief portions of country described.  But he probably neglected to keep diurnal notes.  When in London, starvation stared him in the face.  Those in office to whom he represented his plans probably listened to him awhile, and afterwards lost sight of, or neglected him.  He naturally fell into the hands of the booksellers, who deemed him a good subject to get a book from.  But his original journal did not probably afford matter enough, in point of bulk.  In this exigency, the old French and English authors appear to have been drawn upon; and probably their works contributed by far the larger part of the volume after the 114th page (Philadelphia ed. 1796), which concludes the “Journal.”  I think it questionable whether some literary hack was not employed, by the booksellers, to draw up the part of the work “On the origin, manners, customs, religion, and language of the Indians.”  Considerable portions of the matter are nearly verbatim in the language of Charlevoix, La Hontan, and other authors of previous date.  The “vocabulary of Chippewa,” so far as it is Chippewa at all, has the French or a mixed orthography, which it is not probable that an Englishman or an American would, de novo, employ.  CHAPTER XVIII.