Nicollet

Jean, a French explorer. Little is known of him save that he was an agent of Champlain. He was the first recorded white man to set foot on the soil of Wisconsin. In 1834 he ascended the Fox River. He is to be distinguished from the Jean Nicollet who traveled in the West 1832-40. In 1909 a memorial stone to the explorer Nicollet was erected at Menasha, Wisconsin. It marks the site of the ancient fort of the Winnebago Indians. The memorial is a huge boulder of basalt rock, known as Winnebago Manitou stone, or spirit rock. It is mounted on a plain pyramid of sandstone twelve feet high. It is inscribed: "Near this spot landed, 1634, Jean Nicollet, first white man in Wisconsin, met the Winnebago tribe, held earliest white council with 5,000 savages. Erected by the City and Women's Clubs of Menasha, 1906."