Full Text of "A Brief History of South Dakota", pages 22-26

	This file contains part of a full transcription of "A Brief 
	History of South Dakota", by Doane Robinson, Secretary of the 
	State Historical Society of South Dakota. Originally published 
	in 1905, it was republished many times through the 1930's. This 
	transcription is from the 1919 Edition.

	The Table of Contents for this book is at:

	http://www.usgwarchives.net/sd/histories/brief.htm

	Scanning and OCR by Barbara Pierce, barbjp48@3rivers.net  This file 
	may be freely copied by individuals and non-profit organizations 
	for their private use. All other rights reserved.

	Any other use, including publication, storage in a retrieval 
	system, or transmission by electronic, mechanical, or other 
	means requires the written approval of the file's author.

	This file is part of the SDGENWEB Archives. If you arrived here inside
	a frame or from a link from somewhere else, our front door is at

	http://www.usgwarchives.net/sd/sdfiles.htm



                             CHAPTER IV

                           WHITE EXPLORERS

Charles Pierre Le Sueur was one of the most enterprising and energetic of the 
merchant explorers who came out from Canada and roamed all over the western 
country in search of trade in furs, during the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries. Le Sueur was a fur trader and a politician as well. He was a native 
of Montreal, and was a cousin of the famous D'Iberville and Bienville who were 
conspicuous in founding the French settlements in Louisiana and Alabama. He 
visited the upper Mississippi country as early as the year 1683, and from that 
time until 1700 spent most of his time upon that stream and westward.

   It is claimed that when Le Sueur learned that La Salle had explored the 
Mississippi River to its mouth, he promptly saw the opportunity to enrich 
himself by collecting furs in the West and sending them to France and England by 
way of the Mississippi, thus escaping the payment of the heavy tax placed on the 
fur traffic by the Canadian government. Sending his cousin, D'Iberville, to the 
mouth of the Mississippi with a ship, Le Sueur came west of the Mississippi, 
collected a large amount of furs among the Omaha Indians on the Big Sioux River, 
and sent them on a flatboat down the Big Sioux and Missouri to the Mississippi, 
where D'Iberville took them aboard his ship and carried them to Europe, selling 
them at great profit. Le Sueur himself returned to the Mississippi, where he 
gathered a small quantity of furs, and taking them back to Canada, dutifully 
paid the tax upon them. While there are reasons for believing that this story is 
true, it can not be verified from the records.

   In any event, Le Sueur in 1699 came back from France, to the West, by way of 
the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, and built a fort on the Blue Earth River, 
a few miles from the site of Mankato, Minnesota, where for a year or two he 
mined for copper and at the same time carried on a trade with the neighboring 
Indians. He traded with the Omahas, who still resided on the Big Sioux River, 
and very probably visited them. He returned to France in 1701 and soon afterward 
furnished the information from which the geographer De l'Isle made a map of the 
central portion of North America, including the eastern portion of South Dakota.  
It is possible that Le Sueur obtained his knowledge of South Dakota from the 
Indians, but it is most likely that he gained it from personal observation of 
the ground.  The map shows Big Stone Lake and Lake Traverse, the Big Sioux, 
James, and Missouri rivers in their proper relation and very well drawn. It 
locates the Omahas (Maha on the map, p.24) on the Big Sioux, a village of Iowa 
Indians (Aiaouez) on the James, and the Yanktons on the Missouri in western 
Iowa, where they were then residing in the Otto country. There is a road shown 
on the map, extending westward from the mouth of the Wisconsin River, by way of 
Spirit Lake, Iowa, to Sioux Falls, and marked "track of the voyagers." From all 
of these things it is believed

                            [PICTURE]
    DE L'ISLE'S MAP, MADE FROM INFORMATION SUPPLIED BY LE SUEUR

that Le Sueur was the first white man to enter the South Dakota country, but if 
he did not come here himself, it is quite certain that other white men in his 
employ did do so, at or before the beginning of the eighteenth century.

   Bienville tells us that a Frenchman came down the Missouri from the Mandans 
in 1734.  Some years later Francois Verendrye was employed, as had been his 
father before him, by the Canadian government, to explore the American continent 
westward to the Pacific Ocean. In 1738 the father and son had come as far west 
as the Missouri, at the Mandan villages in what is now North Dakota, but 
becoming discouraged had returned to Canada.  In 1742 the younger man, Francois, 
known as the Chevalier, accompanied by his brother Louis and two other 
Frenchmen, came west and, leaving the Missouri River at the mouth of Heart 
River, North Dakota, on July 23, they proceeded slowly in a southwesterly 
direction, camping for long periods, visiting the Indian bands and finally 
accompanying a war party against a strong band of enemies. They probably went no 
farther than the Black Hills.  On February 7, 1743, they turned back, and 
reached the Missouri River at the present location of Fort Pierre, on March 19. 
They remained here with Little Cherry's band of Arickaras until April 2, and 
before leaving, took possession of the country in the name of the king of 
France, and upon a hill near the camp buried a lead plate with an inscription, 
as a testimonial of the act.[1] They then returned to Canada.

   In 1745 De Lusigan, a courier in the employ of the Canadian coureurs de bois, 
or unlicensed traders who were living with the Indians. This fact is evidence 
that several white men were probably at this time in the Dakota country.

   In 1785 Pierre Dorion, afterwards guide to Lewis and Clark, settled with the 
Yanktons on lower James River and married one of their women.  In 1787 Joseph 
Garreau came to Dakota "to take advantage of our liberal exemption laws," and 
never again returned to the land of his creditors.  In 1794 Jean Baptiste 
Trudeau, with ten men, came to the Sioux and built the "Pawnee House," under the 
chalk cliff on the bank of the Missouri, on Section 22, town 95, range 65, 
Charles Mix county.  The same year Jacques d'Eglise pushed his trade as far as 
the Rees on Grand River, and Jean Monier, who had discovered the Poncas on the 
Niobrara in 1789, brought trade to them.  In August, 1794, the Rees abandoned 
their ancient settlements near Pierre and removed to Grand River.  In 1796 
Registre Loisel built a substantial fortified trading post on Cedar Island, just 
above the Big Bend, in Hughes county.

   In 1801 the trader Charles Le Raye was captured in Missouri by a war party of 
Brule Sioux.  They took him to the Sioux River, near Elkpoint; then up the 
Missouri, visiting Spirit Mound, the Teton River, and several Ree towns; then 
across to the Minnesota River; then in 1804 back to the Vermilion, where the 
Brules held a council upon the question whether to resist the progress of Lewis 
and Clark, of whom we shall read later.  That fall Le Raye escaped and returned 
to the white settlements.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] On February 16, 1913, Hattie Foster and George O'Reilly, two school 
children, found this plate on a hill in the village of Fort Pierre.