Page:A Brief History of South Dakota.djvu/28

 CHAPTER IV

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 22