Page:History of Goodhue County, Minnesota.djvu/71

 HISTORY OF GOODHUE COUNTY 41 commission from the British. This was talked over. Altogether, if anyone was entitled, Red AYing was, to one of the medals. Of course, Pike's promises were sacredly kept. It is no objection that the date is 1801, as it was the custom to strike the medal the first year of the new administration and the die was preserved until another president took his seat. Big Buffalo's was a Madi- son medal of the year 1809, but which he could not have received until 1816, for he fought with the British in 1812-15, and sur- rendered his old medal, if he had one, to them on receiving their flag. Big Buffalo was originally buried at the corner of Main and Plum streets, and when the town was laid out was removed to College Bluff, and about 1870 his medal was stolen from the grave and fell into the hands of a stranger, to whom it is worth- less, and is lost to us. "The Jefferson medal is now held by Mrs. Frank Sterritt, of Merriam Park, in trust for our Red Wing Library Association. I think the above facts make a good case for it, as having in very deed been worn by Red Wing." The titles Hoo-pa-hoo-doo-ta (Wing of Scarlet), now rendered Red Wing; Wapashaw (Red War Banner), now rendered Wa- basha, and Wa-coo-tay (Leaf Shooter), rendered in French Ocha- gach and now called AVacoota, probably have a common origin, and weye evidently used interchangably by the early writers to describe whatever chief they found at the head of the bands in this vicinity. The particular chief of the Goodhue county band of whom we know the most, with the exception of AVacoota, whom the white settlers of 1848-53 found here, is the Aile Rouge described by Pike and Hennepin. The Dakota Indians who now reside on Prairie Island still speak of Red AVing as Ilupa-hu-sha, meaning wing of red. The question as to the first white man who ever set foot on the soil of this county is no less a matter of conjecture. Traders or soldiers of fortune may have wandered to this locality, but the first white man of whom we have any reliable record as to his presence here is Father Louis Hennepin, an explorer and Fran- ciscan monk, in 1680. This statement is made with a full knowledge of the allega- tions advanced by AVarren Upham, of the State Historical Society, that Radisson and Groseilliers wintered on Prairie Island in 1654-55 and were consequently the first white men in Minnesota. In this contention, Mr. Upham is unsupported by any reliable historian, and his own earlier writings successfully refute his present arguments. Peter (or Pierre) Esprit Radisson and Me- clard Chouart, better known as Sieur de Groseilliers (The Goose- berry), were early explorers around the Great Lakes, and the former, after being discredited by France, wrote an extensive