Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/420

410 was built by the Northwest Company. During the year 1679 the Sioux and Ojibways were on friendly terms, and Du Luth with some Ojibways visited the former. La Salle mentions that "the Sauteurs [Ojibways] who are the savages who carry peltries to Montreal, and who dwell on Lake Superior, wishing to obey the repeated words of the Count [Governor Frontenac] made a peace to unite the Sauteurs and French, and to trade with the Nadouesioux situated about sixty leagues west from Lake Superior."

In June, 1680, Du Luth not satisfied with his visit to the Sioux country by land left his stopping place eight leagues above the Nemitsakouat, now Bois Brulé River, with two canoes, and an Ojibway guide, a Sioux, and four Frenchmen. Ascending the Bois Brulé, by breaking down many beaver dams, he reached its sources; and then, by a short portage, reached the lake from which the River Saint Croix flows, and descended this stream to its junction with the Mississippi, and by way of the Wisconsin, in the spring of 1681 reached Quebec, after an absence of two and a half years. In the fall of 1682, he went to France, and wrote there a memoir, early in 1683, which Harrisse was the first to print, and which Shea has translated and appended to his edition of Hennepin's Louisiana, both of whom, in giving 1685 as the date of its composition, have fallen into error.

As soon as Du Luth returned from France, in 1688, he hastened to Mackinaw with a number of canoes, and on the 8th of August left that post with thirty men, with goods for trading with the Sioux, and proceeded towards the Mississippi by the Green Bay route. Father Engelran, in a letter from Mackinaw on the 26th of August, to Governor De la Barre, writes: "The result from such an expe-