Mississippi" by saying, "Beyond
reasonable doubt our party is the only one that ever pushed its way by
boat up the entire course of the farthermost Mississippi. Beyond any
question ours were the first wooden boats that ever traversed these
waters." Then, after a slap at poor Schoolcraft, he declares that
although I claimed the entire trip in my canoe five years ago, my guide
and others told him that my Dolly Varden never was above Brainerd, and
_that my portages above were frequent_. Except that, by implication, he
questions my veracity, I would not have taken any notice of the feat on
which he prides himself. To the general reader the word "Brainerd"
conveys no idea further than the one which the author adroitly tries to
convey (without saying so), that I did not travel the entire Upper
Mississippi: his use of the word "High" is another trick to cover a very
small job, as I shall hereafter show. But the fact is, that Mr.
Siegfried has discovered a mare's nest. By stating one fact which has
never been disguised, and repeating an allegation which is absolutely
false, he would dispose utterly of the very trip that made his journey
so easy of accomplishment.

I laid out for myself just one task and no more: I started in May, 1872,
for the sources of the Mississippi, thence to descend the entire river.
After days of inquiry and two trips over the Northern Pacific Railroad,
I decided upon a route to Itasca Lake which no white man had ever
traversed. I made an entirely successful journey, marking out the White
Earth route so clearly that any child could follow it thereafter. What
feat is there to go over ground which I described so explicitly as
follows?--First stage, to White Earth; second stage, to the Twin Lakes;
third stage, across the prairie to the Wild Rice River; fourth stage, up
that stream to the Lake of the Spirit Isle; and fifth stage, of half a
day, by the Ah-she-wa-wa-see-ta-gen portage, to the Mississippi, at a
point twenty-six miles north of Itasca. The same afternoon and the
following day, energetically employed, will suffice to put anybody at
the sources of "the Father of Rivers." Anybody could take a tissue-paper
boat to Itasca after 1872. Had I had a predecessor over this route to
Itasca, as Mr. Siegfried had, and could I have travelled as he did with
a roll of newspaper letters telling me where to stop and when, how to go
and where, I should have been the first to acknowledge my indebtedness
to the man w