The things we do!

Meanwhile French explorers were traversing this mighty interior valley
with all the spirit of Cartier, Joliet, Champlain, and La Salle. Pierre
Charles le Sueur had ascended the Mississippi far toward its source in
search of copper and lead. Bernard de la Harpe and Louis Juchereau, the
Sieur de St. Denis, explored the Red River and penetrated as far as the
Spanish settlement of St. Jean Baptiste on the Rio Grande. Each might have
a volume. The turbid Missouri even (which Marquette and Joliet first saw
heading great trees down into the Mississippi) was not passed by as
impervious to the hardihood of undaunted, amphibious geographers such as
La Harpe and Du Tisne.
Two brothers, Pierre and Paul Mallet, penetrated to the old Spanish
settlement at Santa Fe and may have been the first of Frenchmen to see the
farther boundary of the valley, the Rocky Mountains. Whether they did or
not, it is certain that far to the northwest two other brothers did reach
that mighty range and "discovered that part of it to which the name Rocky
Mountains properly belongs.


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