Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/42

 of the mouth of the river is particularly accurate: 'We entered the mouth of Long River, a sort of lake almost covered with bulrushes,—I say almost, for there was exactly in its middle a small channel which we followed till evening.

Upon this account by Nicollet, E. D. Neill added in 1850 (a paper read in 1861 by Thoreau): "The supposition that Lahontan passed through Cannon River is not improbable; its sources are within four or five miles of an eastern branch of the Blue Earth River, and the intervening ground is a perfect level. The communication at the time of the voyage may have been complete, or been made so by a freshet, and he would thus have passed through the Blue Earth into St. Peter's River."

Minnesota, which now has nearly two million people, had at Thoreau's visit less than two hundred thousand, and a property valuation of less than forty million dollars, while now the aggregate exceeds seven hundred million dollars. It was therefore in a relatively primitive condition, and even its history had not been very carefully studied, though its [xxxiv]