Page:A Brief History of South Dakota.djvu/29

Rh 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