Note 655 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

In the same way, when the early French explorers and traders of Canada reached the hydrographic center of the continent about Lakes Superior and Michigan, they quickly crossed the low rim of these basins southward to the Mississippi, and northward to the Rainy Lake and Winnipeg system draining to Hudson Bay.655 While it took them from 1608 to 1659 and 1662 to penetrate upstream from Quebec to this central watershed, only nine years elapsed from the time (1673) Marquette reached the westward flowing Wisconsin River to 1682, when La Salle reached the mouth of the Mississippi.