Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/41

 some pages of the biography of that lively enemy of the Jesuits; and his keenness of insight might have lighted up the obscure question whether Lahontan ever saw the Minnesota River, on which Thoreau floated for days. Very likely he would have come to the same conclusion with that other French explorer, Nicollet, the Savoyard savant, who, in his report to the United States Government in 1841, of explorations made some years earlier, said:

"Having procured a copy of Lahontan's book, in which is a roughly made map of his Long River, I was struck with the remembrance of its course as laid down with that of the Cannon River, which I had previously sketched. I soon convinced myself that the principal statements of the Baron, and the few details he gives of the physical character of the river, coincide remarkably witnwith [sic] what I had found as belonging to Cannon River. Thus the lakes and swamps corresponded, and traces of Indian villages mentioned by him might be found in the growth of a wild grass that propagates itself around all old Indian settlements. His [xxxiii]