probably in the spring or early summer of 1659[1]—arriving on that river eleven years before La Salle, and fourteen years before Joliet and Marquette, to whom the discovery of the Mississippi is usually ascribed.
But though these men passed over this route to the discovery of the Mississippi, they were not the first white men to traverse it. Jean Nicolet, the first of Europeans, came over this course in 1634, but did not descend the Wisconsin.[2]
Two score years later the bold missionaries, Joliet and Marquette, entered the Fox River and came to Maskoutens, "the fire Nation." "Here," wrote Marquette, "is the limit of the discoveries which the french have made, for they have not yet gone any farther." Of Radissou and Groseilliers no memory was left among the savages, and of them Marquette had never heard. "No sooner had we arrived," Marquette wrote in his Journal, "than we, Monsieur Jollyet and I assembled the elders
