Note I-42 — Chapter I · ITINERARY: ST. LOUIS TO ST. PAUL, AUGUST 9TH-SEPTEMBER 21ST, 1805.

The bluff W. bank of the Miss. r., opp. P. du C., was later called Pike's mountain; which, says Long's MSS. of 1817, No. I, fol. 37, as cited by Keating, 1824, received its name from having been recommended by the late General Pike, in his journal, "as a position well calculated for the construction of a military post to command the Mississippi." But this recommendation is nowhere made in Pike's journal: it is made in a letter which Pike wrote to General Wilkinson from P. du C., this date of Sept. 5th, as the above text says, and which formed in the orig. ed. Doc. No. 2 of the App. to Part I—the same that covered the Dubuque report. The particular hill that Pike picked out does not differ from the general range of bluffs which extend on that side of the river for several miles, all of about the same elevation. But to be particular, it was that hill which stands between McGregor and N. McGregor. The original settlement of McGregor was called in the first instance McGregor's landing. This was 1½ mile below N. McGregor, built at the mouth of the creek that comes down by Pike's mountain. This stream used to be known as Giard or Gayard r. (latter on Pike's map), and these were common spellings of the name of a person otherwise known as Gaillard, of mixed French-Indian blood, said to have been, with Antaya and Dubuque, one of the three first white settlers at Prairie du Chien, and by Long to have died suddenly during the latter's expedition up the Wisconsin r. The present name of the creek is Bloody Run, which may easily have acquired if it did not deserve the designation in some one or more of the uncounted fierce collisions of this blood-brued region. But tradition, if not authentic history, ascribes the origin of the sanguinary title to the Nimrodic exploits of the celebrated Captain Martin Scott, a mighty hunter who used to kill so much game in that vicinity that he was said to have made this stream literally run with blood. But so much used to be told about Captain Scott—on whom was fathered in those parts the story of the coon which promised to come down if he would not shoot, elsewhere connected with the name of Davy Crockett—that the legends concerning him may pass for what they may be worth. The mouth of this creek is 3 m. below that of Yellow r., and the boundary between Clayton and Allamakee cos. strikes the Mississippi between the two, though very near the mouth of the latter.