the bluffs, he says, are from one to two hundred feet high, and adds, "The Mississippi above the St. Croix emphatically deserves the name it has acquired, which originally implied 'Clear River.'"
Different explorers give different altitude for the same bluffs. Long thought the bluff at Red Wing about 400 feet, Nicollet made it 322, Owen about 350, but the Red Wing city survey, more exactly "345½ feet above the level of low water." According to Nicollet, the highest hill or bluff is at Richmond in Winona County, which he makes 531 feet high. Long found the site for Fort Snelling, and planned Fort Crawford at Prairie du Chien. He speaks of the precipices of red sandstone(!) at the top of the bluffs in Dubuque.
Pike's Journal for 1805 is in the Minnesota Annals for 1856. He there tells in few words that story of the Lover's Leap, and says that his was the first (white man's?) canoe that crossed the portage at St. Anthony's Falls; for he went to what he thought the sources. Nicollet made a scientific and important exploration in 1835; Catlin, later, disappoints
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