[594] Margry (i. 421) gives the papers of La Salle’s financial management from 1678 to 1683; and further (ii. 7) gives various papers relating to La Salle’s movements in 1679.
[595] The exact position of this extemporized ship-yard is in dispute. Parkman puts it at Cayuga Creek, on the east side of the river, and gives his reasons. La Salle, p. 132.
[596] Historical Magazine, viii. 367.
[597] Parkman, La Salle, p. 169. This first vessel of the lakes has been the subject of some study. Hennepin gives a view of her building in his Voyage curieux, 1711 edition, etc., p. 100. Mr. O. H. Marshall has published, as no. 1 of the publications of the Buffalo Historical Society, a tract of thirty-six pages, called The Building and Voyage of the “Griffin,” printed in 1879, giving in it a map of Niagara and its vicinity in 1688. Margry prints (i. 435) a “Relation des découvertes et des voyages du Sieur de la Salle, 1679-1681,” which he calls the Official Report of the transactions of this period made to the minister of the marine, and thinks it drawn up from La Salle’s letter by Bernou, and that Hennepin used it. Shea considers the question an open one, and that the Report may perhaps have been borrowed from Hennepin. A note on Hennepin and his contributions to the historical material of this period is on a later page.
[598] The principal portages by which passage was early made by canoes from the basin of the lakes to that of the Mississippi were five in number:—
1. By Green Bay, Lake Winnebago, and the Fox River to the Wisconsin, thence to the Mississippi,—the route of Joliet.
2. By the Chicago River, at the southwest of Lake Michigan, to the Illinois, thence to the Mississippi. This appears in the earliest maps of Joliet and Marquette, and is displayed in the great 1684 map of Franquelin, of this part of which Parkman gives a drawing in his La Salle, which with various later ones is repeated in Hurlbut’s Chicago Antiquities.
3. By the St. Joseph River, at the southeast corner of Lake Michigan, to the Kankakee, and so to the Illinois. This was La Salle’s route.
4. By the St. Joseph’s River to the Wabash (Ouabache); thence to the Ohio and Mississippi.
5. By the Miami River from the west end of Lake Erie to the Wabash; thence to the Ohio and Mississippi.