For thousands of years, the Fox River has served as a highway for the movement of people and goods. Archaeologists working along the Fox River in De Pere uncovered two-thousand-year-old pottery that demonstrates trade with communities in Illinois, and another site near Kaukauna yielded stone tools and pottery from as far away as New York state. European influence spread along the Fox-Wisconsin River system from Jean Nicolet's 1634 landing near Green Bay to Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette's 1672 discovery of the "Great River," already known to Natives as "Messipi," but their guides were following transportation routes that were already old when Nicolet traveled them. In an attempt to exert stronger control over Native American groups, the United States government set up a series of forts along the Fox-Wisconsin River system, including Fort Howard at the mouth of the Fox River. The river also provided a home for different communities around present-day Green Bay, and archaeology along it reveals Native American settlements extending back thousands of years, a seventeenth-century village where Native Americans and Europeans traded goods, and descendants of those traders living there into the nineteenth century. Native American dugout and birchbark canoes were efficient and well suited for travel and gathering food along Wisconsin's lakes and rivers, and European fur traders adapted birchbark canoes to carry more cargo, making portages such as the one connecting the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers require many more men.