Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts 2.djvu/59

 He relates various improbable things about the country and its inhabitants; so that this letter has been regarded as pure fiction, or, more properly speaking, a lie. But I am somewhat inclined now to reconsider the matter.

The recent republication at Chicago by that diligent and accurate editor, Mr. Thwaites of the Wisconsin Historical Society, of La Hontan's book (mostly written between 1684 and 1695, though not published in Holland and England till 1703 and later) allows us to see what this precursor of St. John de Crèvecœur and Henry Thoreau really meant by his fiction. Having an idle winter at Mackinaw, he may have journeyed in part through Green Bay and the Wisconsin River, as he said; and then made up from the accounts of others, voyageurs and Indians, his notice of the Long River, which does seem to agree with what is now known of the situation of the Minnesota River, though not of its depth, direction, or inhabitants. These particulars he invented or exaggerated from the reports of his informants. He was an