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26 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.