winter at the mouth of Yellow River, about ten miles above Prairie du Chien, on the opposite bank of the Mississippi, while he with one voyageur and a Mohawk Indian, pushed on in his canoe towards the Falls of St. Anthony.

He passed Mount Tremealeau, which he described, and on the first of November arrived at Lake Pepin, where he says he observed the ruins of a French factory, where Capt. ST. PIERRE resided and carried on a very great trade with the Naudowissies, before the reduction of Canada. It was here the first trading houses north of the Illinois River were erected. (As early as 1687, NICHOLAS PERROT was trading in the neighborhood of the Sioux, and according to CHARLEVOIX, he built a fort near the mouth of the lake.)

The pre-historic tumuli, which are found in so many places near the banks of the Mississippi, did not escape the observation of CARVER, and he was the first to call the attention of the civilized world to their existence.

He first made the acquaintance of the Dakota Indians near the mouth of the St. Croix River, probably near Prescott, and had the good fortune to make a treaty of peace between that nation and the Chippewas, at a time when an engagement was imminent, in return for which kindly act the Indians bestowed upon him every possible attention.

In his further progress he came to a remarkable cave on the bank of the Mississippi, about thirty miles below the Falls of St. Anthony, of which he says:

"The entrance is about ten feet wide, with a beight of five feet, and a breadth of thirty feet. About twenty feet from the entrance begins a lake which extends to an unsearchable distance."

The walls he describes as being a soft stone, upon which were cut many ancient hieroglyphics, and the cave was believed by the Indians to be the dwelling of the "Great Spirit." It has been materially altered by the action of the elements, the roof has fallen in, and the entrance has been choked up by rock and earth; so that in 1820, SCHOOLCRAFT was led into the error of supposing that the cave near St. Paul, now known as the "Fountain Cave," was the one described by CARVER. The track of a railroad runs along the bank of the river directly in front of the cave, in the construction of which the cave is virtually destroyed, and the stream which flowed through it now supplies a watertank, while the subterranean lake has disappeared.

On reaching the mouth of the St. Peters river, ten miles

below the falls of St. Anthony, called by the natives Wadda-paw-men-e-so-tor, the ice became so troublesome that he left his canoe, and walked to the Falls of St. Anthony where he arrived November 17th. He gives a very particular description of them, accompanied by a copper-plate engraving, from which it would seem that a constant recession of the rock has been going on, which has gradually reduced the height of the fall, and that in ages long past, this sublime cataract of the Mississippi, thundering in its solitude, was not far from the mural cliffs, upon which were erected the barracks of the garrison at Fort Snelling.

This persevering explorer continued on foot, until he reached the river St. Francis or Elk river, about sixty miles above the falls, but as the season was far advanced, he returned, and on the 25th of November commenced with his canoe the ascent of the St. Peters river, now called the Minnesota, which he found free from ice, and proceeded some two hundred miles to the country of the Naudowissies, or Sioux of the plains, which was the western limit of his travels. With these Indians he spent five months, and was well treated. He learned their language, and acquired all the geographical information they could impart.

Capt. CARVER left his hibernal abode the latter end of April and descended to the Mississippi, escorted by nearly three hundred Indians, among whom were many chiefs. It was the habit of these bands to go annually at this season to the great cave, to hold a grand council with all the other bands. CARVER, on this occasion, was admitted to the grand council, and made a speech which is published in his travels. This was on the 1st of May, 1767.

At this time, as claimed by his heirs and their assignees, two of the chiefs of the Naudowissies gave to Capt. CARVER a deed of a large tract of land lying in Wisconsin and Minnesota, bounded as follows:

"From the Falls of St. Anthony, running on the east bank of the Mississippi nearly southeast as far as the south end of Lake Pepin, where the Chippewa river joins the Mississippi, and from thence eastward, five days' travel, accounting twenty English miles per day, and from thence north six days' travel at twenty English miles per day, and from thence again to the Falls of St. Anthony, on a direct straight line."

These boundaries extend east to the range line between ranges 3 and 4 east, north to the south line of Douglass county and south to the south line of Clark county, and embrace the whole of the counties of Pepin, Pierce, St. Croix,

Barron, Dunn, Eau Claire, Clark, Chippewa, Washburn, Sawyer, Price, and Taylor, with parts of Buffalo, Trempealeau, Jackson, Wood, Marathon, Lincoln, Burnett, Polk and Ashland, with a part of Minnesota, and contain an area of about fourteen thousand square miles.

Whether such a deed was ever made, and is not a mere fiction, has given rise to many well-founded doubts. It is not spoken of by CARVER in his "Journal" of his travels. However the fact may be, it is well known that the Naudowissies, or Sioux of the plains, had no claim to any territory east of the Great River, and as the two Indians by whom this deed purports to have been signed were chiefs of this tribe, they were granting that to which they had no claim.

If the authenticity of the deed be conceded, as well as the validity of the title of the grantors, the transaction was in direct violation of the proclamation of his king, made less than three years before, of which Capt. CARVER was no doubt aware, which strictly enjoined and required that no private person should presume to make any purchase of any land from any Indian.

A petition of the heirs of CARVER and their assignees, for the recognition of the validity of their title under this grant, appears to have been presented to congress as early as 1806, and referred to a committee of the senate, but no report seems to have been made. Subsequently, January 23, 1823, Mr. VAN DYKE, from the committee on public lands, submitted to the senate a report upon a like petition, concluding with a resolution, that the prayer of the petitioners ought not to be granted.

A similar petition was presented to the next congress, and on the 28th of January, 1825, a report was made by Mr. CAMPBELL of Ohio, from the committee on private land claims, which contains a most exhaustive discussion of all the questions involved, and demonstrates most conclusively that there was no foundation for the pretended claim, and that it was utterly worthless.

In a letter from Lord PALMERSTON, dated February 8, 1834, to Hon. AARON VAIL, then charge d'affaires of the United States to Great Britain, is the statement in reference to this claim that

"No trace has been found of any ratification of the grant in question by His Majesty's government."

A claim of somewhat the same kind was made by the

"Illinois and Wabash Land Company," for a large territory in Illinois, under a grant claimed to have been made to WILLIAM MURRAY in 1773, and met a like fate at the hands of congress as the CARVER claim.

The validity of claims founded on actual settlement and improvement, without other pretended title, has been recognized by the United States government. Of this character were all the claims to lands at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien, which, on examination, have been confirmed by the general government.

In continuing the account of the travels of Capt. CARVER, it appears that having first ascertained that the goods which Gov. ROGERS had promised to send to the Falls of St. Anthony for him, had not arrived, he decided to return to Prairie du Chien, abandoning for the present his original plan of proceeding further to the Northwest. Here he obtained from the traders what goods they could spare, but as they were not sufficient, he determined to make his way across the country of the Chippewas to Lake Superior, where he hoped to meet the traders that annually went from Mackinaw to the Northwest, from whom he thought he should be able to obtain what goods he required.

In the month of June CARVER left Prairie du Chien, and leaving the Mississippi River, he ascended the Chippewa, near the head waters of which he found a Chippewa village, composed of forty houses adjacent to a small lake. He left this village in July, and having crossed a number of small lakes and portages that intervened, came to a head branch of the St. Croix River-probably the Namekagon. This branch he descended to a fork, and then ascended another-probably one of the Totogatics to its source. On both these branches he discovered, as he says, several mines of virgin copper, very pure. That many of the outcrops of rock upon these branches are cupriferous has been shown by the explorations of the late geological survey of the state, but "mines of virgin copper" will be developed only as the result of more labor than has yet been bestowed upon them. From this last branch he made a portage to a stream which flowed into Lake Superior. Descending this he coasted around the western extremity of the lake, and finally arrived at the Grand Portage on the north shore. Here, although he obtained much information about the lakes and rivers lying to the northwest, he could not pro

cure the goods he wanted, and was compelled to give up the one great object of his travels, and return to Mackinaw, where he arrived the beginning of November. He spent the winter at Mackinaw, and returned to Boston the following year, having been absent two years and five months, and traversed seven thousand miles.

CHAPTER V.

PROGRESS OF SETTLEMENTS IN THE NORTHWEST, AND TRANSFER TO BRITISH JURISDICTION.

The history of the war with the Outagamies on Fox River after their failure to destroy Detroit in 1712, naturally led to an account of the DE LANGLADES and of events intimately connected with them, causing a digression from the chronological narrative which had been attempted and which will now be resumed.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, the progress of settlement and industry in the Wabash country was very considerable. As early as 1705 fifteen thousand skins and hides had been sent to Mobile for the European market. In 1716 the French population of that fertile region kept up a lucrative trade with Mobile, by means of traders and voyageurs. Agriculture soon began to flourish, and in 1746, six hundred barrels of flour were manufactured and shipped to New Orleans, besides large quantities of hides, peltry, tallow and beeswax.

In 1730 the Illinois country, not including the Wabash valley, contained one hundred and forty French families, besides about six hundred converted Indians, many traders, voyageurs and couriers du bois. About twenty years later (1751) it contained six distinct settlements, with their respective villages. These were Cahokia, St. Philip, Fort Chartres, Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rochier, and St. Genevieve. Kaskaskia in its best days, under the French regime, contained two or three thousand inhabitants, but under British dominion the population in 1773 had decreased to four hundred and fifty souls.

The ambition of the French was to preserve the possession