Note 187 — Chapter IV · —The Movements Of Peoples In Their Geographical Significance

Every staple place and trading station is a center of geographical information; it therefore gives an impulse to expansion by widening the geographical horizon. The Lewis and Clark Expedition found the Mandan villages at the northern bend of the Missouri River the center of a trade which extended west to the Pacific, through the agency of the Crow and Paunch Indians of the upper Yellowstone, and far north to the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Rivers. Here in conversation with British and French fur-traders of the Northwest Company's posts, they secured information about the western country they were to explore.187 Similarly the trade of the early Jesuit missions at La Pointe near the west end of Lake Superior annually drew the Indians from a wide circle sweeping from Green Bay and the Fox River in the south, across the Mississippi around to the Lake of the Woods and far north of Lake Superior.188 Here Marquette first heard of the great river destined to carry French dominion to the Gulf of Mexico.