Minnesota, the North Star State

by William Watts Folwell

Frontenac at once adopted Talon’s scheme, and gave Joliet leave to go. Accompanied by Marquette he struck the great river at Prairie du Chien, June 17, 1673, and then followed its flow far enough to satisfy himself that it ran to the Mexican gulf. Joliet’s great map has a truly modern aspect. The importance of this discovery of the Mississippi for the present purpose is, that it was by way of the great river that the French, with a notable exception, pushed their way into Minnesota.

A company of Canadian merchants resolved to attempt an opening of trade about and beyond the head of Lake Superior, and selected as their agent Daniel Greyloson, the Sieur Duluth, a man of ability and enterprise. He evidently received some kind of public character from Frontenac, whose enemies insinuated that he was to be a sharer in profits. In the spring of 1679 Duluth penetrated to the shores of Mille Lacs, and in a great Sioux village which he understood to be called “Kathio,” on July 2 he planted the king’s arms and took possession in the royal name. Duluth, therefore, was the first white man in Minnesota not ashamed to report and record the fact. In the same season he retraced his steps to the head of the lake, and passed down the north shore to Pigeon River, which forms part of the Canadian boundary. There, on the left bank of that river, he built a trading post, on the site afterwards occupied by Fort William.

The next dash into the territory of the North Star State was directed by one who has been called the most picturesque figure in American history, Réné Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle. At the age of twenty-three he broke away from the Jesuits with whom he was in training, and set sail for Canada with four hundred francs in his pocket, in the year 1663. When Frontenac came, nine years later, he found in young La Salle a man after his own heart, and sent him to France in 1674 to secure royal support for further explorations. Such support, then withheld, was vouchsafed four years later, when La Salle was again in Paris on the same errand. By a royal patent signed May 12, 1678, La Salle was authorized to extend the scope of Joliet’s exploration to the Gulf of Mexico and to pay his expenses by trade, provided he kept off the preserves of the Montreal traders.

With the king’s patent in hand, it was easy to attract capital and enlist volunteers. Early in the fall of the same year, La Salle was back in Canada with his men and outfit, and soon set out for the west. After battling with a series of delays and discouragements which need not be narrated, the undaunted leader established himself in a fort built on the east bank of the Illinois River, near Peoria, Illinois, in the winter of 1680. There is no record that La Salle had been authorized to explore the upper Mississippi, but he was not the man to lose a good opportunity for lack of technical instructions. To lead an exploring party up that stream he chose Michael Accault, an experienced voyageur, “prudent, brave, and cool,” and gave him two associates: Antoine Auguelle, called the Picard du Gay, was one; the other was the now famous Father Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan friar of the Recollet branch, who came over in the same ship with La Salle in 1678. He had wandered in many lands, knew some Indian dialects, and shared La Salle’s passion for adventure.

In a bark canoe laden with their arms, personal belongings, and some packs of merchandise which served for money between whites and Indians, the little party set out, after priestly benediction, on February 28, 1680. They dropped down the Illinois to its mouth, and took their toilsome way against the current of the Mississippi. On April 11, when near the southern line of Minnesota, they encountered a fleet of thirty-three canoes carrying a war-party intent on mischief to certain Illinois tribes. The savages frightened but did not harm the Frenchmen. Accault was able to inform them that the Illinois Indians had crossed the river to hunt. They therefore turned homewards, taking the explorers with them. At the end of the month the flotilla rounded up, as is believed, at the mouth of Phalen’s Creek, at St. Paul. Here they abandoned their canoes and set out overland by a trail which would naturally follow the divide between the waters of the Mississippi and the St. Croix, for their villages on Mille Lacs. On May 5 they arrived, and the Frenchmen, compelled to sell their effects to their captors, were sent to separate villages. The friar lost his portable altar and brocade vestments; otherwise they were not unkindly treated. Some weeks passed, when Hennepin and Auguelle were allowed to take a canoe and start for the mouth of the Wisconsin, where La Salle promised to send supplies. Accault preferred to join a great hunting party that was about setting out. Hennepin and his comrade left the hunters at the mouth of Rum River, and paddling with the current soon found themselves at the falls called by the Dakotas Mi-ni-i-ha-ha, the rushing water, then first seen by white men, to which he gave the name of his patron saint, Anthony of Padua. His description of the cataract and surroundings is reasonably accurate, although he greatly exaggerated its height. No rival has claimed the credit of their discovery. Passing on down the river, they met an Indian who informed them that the hunting party was not far away, on some tributary. They abandoned their lonesome journey and joined the hunters, who, the hunt over, were about returning to their villages.

We left Duluth in his fort at the mouth of Pigeon River in the fall of 1679. He wintered there, and, as he relates, dissatisfied with his discoveries of the previous summer, resolved on a new adventure. When the season of 1680 opened he set out with four Frenchmen and two Indian guides, ascended the Bois Brulé River, portaged over to the head of the St. Croix, and followed that down to Point Douglass, where he doubtless recognized the great river. Here he learned that but a short time before two Frenchmen had passed down in a canoe. He instantly followed, and after forty-eight hours of lively paddling met the Sioux hunters and with them Accault, Auguelle, and Hennepin. All the French now traveled with the Indians to their villages on Mille Lacs, this time up the Mississippi and Rum rivers. The season was now far advanced and Duluth was obliged to give up his project of a journey to “the ocean of the west,” which he believed to be not more than twenty days’ march distant. Furnished with a rude but truthful map sketched by one of the Sioux chiefs, and promising the Indians to return to trade, the eight white men took their departure for home by Prairie du Chien and Green Bay. Hennepin returned to France and in 1682 published his “Description of Louisiana.” He knew how to tell an interesting story, and stuck as close to the truth as most annalists of his day. He assumed to have been the leader of the exploring party. Fifteen years later there was published in Holland a book under the title of “A New Discovery of a Great Country.” It contained all the matter of Hennepin’s “Description,” and some one hundred and fifty pages more. These interpolated into the original story a journey of more than three thousand miles in thirty days, from the mouth of the Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico and back, before ascending the Mississippi. If Hennepin himself wrote the injected pages, he was the shameless liar which he has been frequently declared to be. There is room, however, for the suggestion that the added pages were the work of some literary hack employed by dishonest publishers to give the book the appearance of a new one; but a good degree of charity is necessary to entertain this theory, as there is no record of any disavowal by Hennepin. Granting Hennepin to have been the leader, it must be remembered he was an agent of La Salle. La Salle’s foresight and enterprise sent him to the land of the Dakotas and to the Falls of St. Anthony.

It was not till the winter of 1682 that La Salle was able to embark from his fort at Peoria. Sixty days of easy canoe navigation brought him to one of the islands at the mouth of the Mississippi. There in the month of April, under his royal patent, he set up a cross and proclaimed the sovereignty of Louis le Grand over the whole valley of the great river and all its tributaries. On the “procès-verbal” of that transaction rests every land title in Minnesota.

Duluth and La Salle by means of Accault’s reports revealed to Count Frontenac the magnificence of the upper Mississippi region, and Father Hennepin’s book, dedicated to the king, seems to have inspired Louis XIV with a desire to occupy and possess that goodly land. In 1686 the able and experienced Nicholas Perrot, who had been appointed commandant of the west with orders to make an establishment there, built a fort on the east bank of Lake Pepin, and called it Fort St. Antoine. The site has been clearly identified about two miles below the “Burlington” railroad station of Stockholm, Pepin County, Wisconsin. Summoned the following year to lead a contingent of voyageurs and savages in the campaign against the Iroquois in the Genesee valley of western New York, he did not return to Fort St. Antoine till late in 1688. To satisfy any lingering doubts about the legitimate sovereignty of those parts, he made formal proclamation of his king’s lordship over all the countries and rivers he had seen and would see. Perrot was too useful a man to be left in the wilderness, and was presently ordered on other service and his fort left empty.

Another attempt at settlement on the upper Mississippi was made by a Canadian, Pierre Le Sueur, an associate of Perrot, who in 1694 established a trading post on Prairie Island in the Mississippi, about nine miles below Hastings, the same on which Groseilliers and Radisson are imagined to have camped in 1655. Le Sueur stayed over one winter in the west, and returned to Montreal to discover to Frontenac a new project. He had located a copper mine. He hastened to Paris to obtain the king’s license, then necessary for mining operations. After a struggle of two years he got his permit and started for Canada. The English caught him and held him a prisoner for some months. Returning to France, he found his license canceled, because of a resolution of the government to abandon all trade west of Mackinaw. At length Le Sueur was excepted from the rule and his license renewed. In 1699 he sailed with the expedition of D’Iberville, which was to make and did make the first settlement out of which New Orleans grew.

In the midsummer following he made his way with a sailboat and two canoes up the Mississippi, reaching Fort Snelling September 19. He doubtless knew where he was going, for without delay he turned into the Minnesota River, which he followed to the mouth of the Mah-ka-to or Blue Earth. A short distance above, the latter stream receives the Le Sueur. At their junction he built a fort to which he gave the name of a treasury official of Paris who had supported him, “Fort L’Huillier.” The spot has been identified by a local archæologist. He was obliged to pacify with presents the Sioux who were displeased because he did not build at the mouth of the Minnesota. His company passed a comfortable winter, but before it was over they had to come down to buffalo beef without salt. Some of them could put away six pounds along with four bowls of broth daily. In the spring Le Sueur departed for Biloxi, with his shallop loaded with bluish green earth taken from a bluff near his fort. He never saw Minnesota again, and no later explorer has rediscovered his mine. The state geologist has not found the least trace of copper in the region.