HENNEPIN

 

HENNEPIN, en-pari or hen'e-pin, Louis, French Franciscan missionary and explorer in North America: b. Ath, Belgium, about 1640; d. Utrecht, Holland, about 1706. He entered a convent, and being sent by his superiors to Calais and Dunkirk, the stories he heard from the sailors inspired him with a desire to visit distant countries. At length, he embarked for Canada and arrived in Quebec in 1675.

In 1676 he went to the Indian mission at Fort Frontenac, where he visited the Five Nations and the Dutch settlement at Albany. In 1678 he was attached to La Salle's expedition, and, in company with the Chevalier de Tonty and the Sieur de la Motte, was ordered to sail from Fort Frontenac to Niagara, and there construct a vessel for navigating the Lakes above the falls. This accomplished, La Salle joined the party, and on 7 Aug 1679, the adventurers began their voyage on Lake Erie. They passed through Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan, to the mouth of the Saint Joseph's River, ascended this in canoes to the portage, carried their frail barks several miles by land to the Kankakee and floated down this stream and the Iroquois to the Illinois, on the banks of which they built Fort Crevecceur near the present site of Peoria.

After a delay of two months at this place, La Salle returned to Fort Frontenac for supplies, charging Father Hennepin with a voyage of discovery to the source of the Mississippi, which had never been explored above the mouth of the Wisconsin. Accompanied by Picard du Gav and Michael Ako, he set out in a canoe on 29 Feb. 1680, followed the Illinois to its mouth, and ascended the Mississippi to the Falls of Saint Anthony, which he was the first European to see, which he named in honor of his patron saint.

This was on 30 April. Arriving at the mouth of the Saint Francis' River, in what is now the State of Minnesota, he traveled by land about 180 miles along its banks, naming it in honor of the founder of his order and visited the Sioux Indians, whom he mentions by the names Issati and Nadouessioux, He stayed with them three months, being, according to his own account, held in captivity, and then, meeting a party of Frenchmen who had come into the country by way of Lake Superior, returned with them to Canada, descending the Mississippi to the Wisconsin, and passing up that river and down the Fox, and so through Green Bay to Lake Michigan. From Quebec he sailed for France, where he published in 1683 his 'Description de la Louisiane nouvellement decouverte au Sud-Ouest dc la Nouvelle-France, etc.,' containing the fullest published account of La Salle's first expedition, a history of his second voyage and of Hennepin's own explorations, with a description of the upper Mississippi. Notwithstanding the writer's vanity and fondness for exaggeration, the work is valuable. He put off his clerical dress in Holland about 1697, but to the end of his life seems to have written himself: "Klt. 1- lect missionary and apostolic notary."

In 1697, 10 years after La Salle's death, Hennepin published his extraordinary 'Nouvelle decouverte d'un tres-grand pays situe dans l'Amerique cntre le Nouveau Mexique et la Mer Glaciale, etc.,' reprinted the next year under the title 'Nouveau voyage dans un pays plus grand que l'Europe, etc' In this work, which embodies his 'Description de la Louisiane,' written anew and enlarged, he claims to have descended to the mouth of the Mississippi and to have been the first European who floated on that river. He gives a description of the scenery, Indian tribes, and distances along the route, with a minuteness that easily gained him credit for veracity, and explains his long silence on this important point by saying that he feared the enmity of La Salle, who had ordered him to follow a different course, and who prided himself upon his own claims as the first who descended the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

Notwithstanding the utter impossibility of reconciling the dates given in Hennepin's narrative, the story obtained general credence until its falseness was exposed by Jared Sparks. (See 'Life of La Salle,' by Sparks in the 'Library of American Biography'). Consult Saint-Genois, 'Les Voyageurs Beiges du XIII au XIX Siecle' (1S67); Van Hulet, 'Notice sur le Pere Louis Hennepin' (1845); Shea, 'Discovery of the Mississippi' (1852); Parkman, 'La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West'; and especially Winsor, 'Narrative and Critical History of America'