]
Whilst moving up and down the northern Mississippi, bison-hunting with
the Indians, the Frenchmen were met near the site of St. Paul by one
of the great French pioneers of the seventeenth century, the Sieur
DANIEL DE GREYSOLON DU L'HUT. This remarkable man, who was an officer
of the French army, had already planted the French arms at the
Amerindian settlement of Mille Lacs in 1679, and had established
himself as a powerful authority at the west end of Lake Superior. He
had also summoned a great council of Amerindian tribes--the Siou from
the Upper Mississippi, the Assiniboins from the Lake of the Woods
(between Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg), and the Kri Indians from
Lake Nipigon. He had further discovered, in 1679, the water route of
the St. Croix River from near Lake Superior to the Mississippi.
Du L'Hut soon persuaded the Siou to let his fellow countrymen return
with him to Lake Superior. Accault remained behind with the Siou,
delighted with their wild, roving life, and no doubt married an Indian
wife and became the father of some of those bold half-breeds who
played such a great part in the subsequent history of innermost
Canada. But Father Hennepin returned to Montreal, and made his way
eventually to France, where he fell into great disgrace and was
unfrocked. He had richly merited this treatment, for after he heard of
the death of La Salle he impudently claimed the discovery of the whole
course of the Mississippi River for himself, and for a long time was
believed.
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