Hennepin
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Louis, the discoverer of St. Anthony Falls. He was of French ancestry, but was born in Belgium about 1640. He was educated as a Franciscan monk. He served in the French army as a chaplain. He accompanied La Salle in 1675 to Canada. He acquainted himself with the language of the Indians, and engaged in preaching to them. He took trips through the Mohawk country, and in 1679 he joined La Salle's expedition of discovery. The company sailed through Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan to the mouth of St. Joseph River. Here they left the ship, the Griffin, and went up the St. Joseph in canoes. These they carried over a portage to the Kankakee, down which they floated to the Illinois. They built a fort where Peoria now stands. Hennepin and two companions set out on a vogage toward the northwest, under orders to rejoin La Salle at the mouth of the Wisconsin River. They followed the Illinois River to its mouth, then went northward up the Mississippi, until they were captured by a band of Sioux and conducted to the villages of the latter on Mille Lacs, Minnesota. During this captivity Father Hennepin saw and named the Falls of St. Anthony in the Mississippi. This occurred April 30, 1680. He was rescued by a French voyageur, and, on his return to France, published a Description of Louisiana. Hennepin's name was given to the county of Minnesota which surrounds the Falls of St. Anthony; also to a main avenue of Minneapolis leading from the Falls westward. See Joliet ; Duluth ; Carver
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 sketch puts Hennepin's birth "about 1640"; parish records at Ath, in Belgium, establish that he was baptized on 12 May 1626, so he was in his fifties on the Mississippi, not his thirties. The entry also passes over the reason his name is treated warily by historians: in a later book of 1697 he claimed to have travelled down the Mississippi to its mouth before La Salle did, a boast now generally rejected as fabrication, though his 1683 account of the upper river is still read as a source. The Falls of St. Anthony he named on 30 April 1680 no longer look like a waterfall; they are held in place by a concrete apron and spillway, and the lock above them was closed to navigation in 2015 to block invasive carp. Hennepin Avenue and Hennepin County keep the name, but the falls are increasingly called by their Dakota name, Owamniyomni.
Written for this edition, 2026.