Fort Winnebago Surgeons' Quarters overlooks the area in southern Wisconsin where French explorers Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette left the Fox River at the east end of Wauona Trail in 1673. Long familiar to the Native American tribes, this point on the north-flowing Fox is only 1.4 miles from the Wisconsin River. Marquette and Joliet explored the Fox and Wisconsin waterways, as well as the Mississippi, thus opening the route that would be used by French, British and American traders and trappers for more than a century.