Father Louis Hennepin was a missionary of the Franciscan order of Catholics, who accompanied La Salle on his first voyage from France; and after the building of Fort Crevecoeur, on the Illinois, was dispatched in company with three French voyageurs to explore the Mississippi River.
They departed from Fort Crevecoeur on the 29th of February, 1680, and dropping down the Illinois to its junction with the Mississippi, followed the latter an indeterminate distance towards the Gulf, not believed to be great, where they left some memorial of their visit, and immediately commenced their return. When they had proceeded up the Mississippi a hundred and fifty leagues above the confluence of the Illinois, they were taken prisoners by some Indian tribes, and carried towards its sources nineteen days' journey into the territories of the Naudowessies and Issati, where they were detained in captivity three or four months, and then suffered to return. The account which Hennepin published of his travels and discoveries, served to throw some new light upon the topography, and the Indian tribes of the Canadas; and modern geography is indebted to him for the names which he bestowed upon the Falls of St. Anthony and the River St. Francis.
In 1703, the Baron La Hontan, an unfrocked monk, published, in London, his voyages to North America, the result of a residence of six years in the Canadas. La Hontan served as an officer in the French army, and first went out to Quebec in 1683. During the succeeding four years he was chiefly stationed at Chambly, Fort Frontenac, Niagara, St. Joseph, at the foot of Lake Huron, and the Sault de St. Marie.
He arrives at Michilimackinac in 1688, and there first hears of the assassination of La Salle. In 1689 he visits Green Bay, and passes through the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers into the Mississippi. So far, his work appears to be the result of actual observation, and is entitled to respect; but what he relates of Long River appears wholly incredible, and can only be regarded as some flight of the imagination, intended to gratify the public taste for travels, during an age when it had been highly excited by the extravagant accounts which had been published respecting the wealth, population, and advantages of Peru, Mexico, the English and Dutch colonies, New France, the Illinois, and various other parts of the New World.