Trail Tales

“An overland highway to the Western sea” was the thought variously expressed by many men in both public and private life among the French, English, and Americans from very early times. In 1659 Pierre Radisson and a companion, by way of the Great Lakes, Fox, and “Ouisconsing” Rivers, discovered the “east fork” of the “Great River” and crossed to the “west fork”, up which they went into what is now the Dakotas, only to find it going still “interminably westward”. In 1766 Carver, an Englishman, went by the same route up the “east fork” to Saint Anthony Falls; thence he traveled to Canada, to learn from the Assiniboin Indians the existence of the “Shining Mountains” and that beyond them was the “Oregan”, which went to the salt sea.