om his winter quarters near the Falls, Pike pushed northward
over the snow and ice until, early in 1806, he reached Leech Lake, in
Cass County, Minnesota, which he wrongly took to be the source of the
Father of Waters. It is little wonder that, at a time when the river and
lake surfaces were frozen over and the whole country heavily blanketed
with snow, he should have found it difficult to disentangle the maze of
streams and lakes which fill the low-lying region around the headwaters
of the Mississippi, the Red River, and the Lake of the Woods. In 1820
General Cass, Governor of Michigan, which then had the Mississippi for
its western boundary, led an expedition into the same region as far
as Cass Lake, where the Indians told him that the true source lay
some fifty miles to the northwest. It remained for the traveler and
ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft, twelve years later, to discover Lake
Itasca, in modern Clearwater County, which occupies a depression near
the center of the rock-rimmed basin in which the river takes its rise.

It was not these infrequent explorers, however, who opened paths for
pioneers into the remote Northwest, but traders in search of furs and
pelts--those commercial pathfinders of western civilization. There is
scarcely a town or city in the State of Wisconsin that does not owe its
origin, directly or indirectly, to these men. Cheap and tawdry enough
were the commodities bartered for these wonderful beaver and otter
pelts--ribbons and gewgaws, looking-glasses and combs, blankets and
shawls of gaudy color. But scissors and knives, gunpowder and shot,
tobacco and whiskey, went also in the traders' packs, though traffic in
fire-water was forbidden. These goods, upon arrival at Mackinac, were
sent out by canoes and bateaux to the different posts, where they were
dealt out to the savages directly or were dispatched to the winter camps
along the far-reaching waterways. Returning home in the spring, the
bucks would set their squaws and children at making maple sugar or
planting corn, watermelons, potatoes, and squash, while they themselves
either dawdled their time away or hunted for summer furs. In the autumn,
the wild rice was garnered along the sloughs and the river mouths, and
the straggling field crops were gathered in--some of the product being
hidden in skillfully covered pits, as a reserve, and some dried for
transportation in the winter's campaign. The villagers were now ready to
depart for their hu