Note II-4 — Chapter II · ITINERARY, CONTINUED: ST. PAUL TO LEECH LAKE, SEPTEMBER 22D, 1805-JANUARY 31ST, 1806.

Setting camp close to a small stream which falls in on Pike's left, and which has acquired great celebrity for its pretty little water-fall. For this is no other than the Minnehaha. It is a wonder Pike missed Minnehaha falls; or that, if he was informed of them, he did not take the trouble to go less than a mile up the stream to see so pretty a spectacle. About 2½ m. from Fort Snelling, on the road to Minneapolis, the stream spills over the bluff, with as clear a descent as water ordinarily makes from the nozzle of a spout. The picturesque features of this place may be imagined, or easily inspected by ordinary tourist travel; the poetical and sentimental are well developed by Longfellow in Hiawatha; the hydrographic are a creek 5 yards wide, falling 43 feet in an unbroken parabolic curve. This was formerly plain Brown's cr. and Brown's fall; Nicollet named the stream Cascade cr.; but it will doubtless always be best known by the name which Longfellow transferred from its original to a new application, to suit the exigencies of verse. This stream is the discharge of Lake Minnetonka. In its course it receives the outlet of a chain of lakes from the W., called Bass (modern), Calhoun (Nicollet), and Harriet (Nicollet); nearer the falls is a set of smaller lakes, whose modern names are Diamond, Pearl, Duck, Mother, Amelia, and Rice (latter, the Lake Ann of times when Fort Snelling was Fort St. Anthony, an expansion of Brown's cr. itself).