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WHITE EXPLORERS

Table of Contents

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, as a good citizen should do. While there are reasons for believing that this story is true, it can not be verified from the records. If true, Le Sueur was the first white man to visit South Dakota.

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

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.

​The first white man that we know certainly to have visited South Dakota was a young man named Verendrye, in the year 1743. 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. The father died, and in 1742 the son set out on a new enterprise, reaching the Missouri and following it westward until stopped by the barrier of the Rocky Mountains, at or very near the site of Helena, Montana. There he turned back and, traveling in a southeasterly direction, reached the Missouri River somewhere in central South Dakota, where he spent some weeks with a band of Indians which he calls the band of the Little Cherry. He came to these Indians on the 15th of March, 1743, and remained with them until the 2d of April. Before leaving them he claimed the land for the king of France and upon a hill near the camp planted a lead plate engraved with the arms of France, and marked the spot with a heap of stones. He then set out for the Mandan villages, which he reached on the 18th. To unearth that plate would be a rich find for some enterprising young South Dakotan. Taking into account the directions traveled and the time spent in making the trip, it is most likely that this plate rests within fifty miles of the state capital.

In 1745 De Lusigan, a courier in the employ of the Canadian government, visited Big Stone Lake and other points in western Minnesota to call in 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, but they left no record of their doings or of the localities they visited.

It is rather strange that no record has been kept of the time when the French traders at St. Louis began to trade up the Missouri among the Dakota tribes. We only know that as early as 1796 a post known as Loisel's house, a substantial fortified trading post, was built on Cedar Island in the Missouri River a few miles below the site of Pierre, and that the next year Trudeau's post, generally known as the Pawnee House, was built on the east side of the Missouri River, opposite the site of Fort Randall. Pierre Dorion, afterward guide to Lewis and Clark, traded with the Yanktons and married a Yankton woman before 1785, and Pierre Garreau lived continuously with the Rees after 1790. From these facts it may be fairly assumed that French trade along the Missouri was quite general from about 1785.

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