Although the French explorer Jacques Cartier first entered the St. Lawrence River in the 16th century, France did not attempt to implant colonies inland until Samuel Champlain and the Company of New France founded Quebec in 1608. They had two principal aims: first, to exploit the fur trade for commercial advantage, and second, to locate a route across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. Led by Native guides, Champlain and other French adventurers set out from the St. Lawrence River Valley to find out all they could about the region around the Great Lakes in order to create trade relationships with the Native people living there and to look for a water route west to the Pacific.
Contact Phase
Prior to the arrival of Europeans on the North American continent, trade among Native peoples had been going on for centuries. In fact, the waterways of Minnesota and the rest of the Upper Midwest—called the “pays d’en haut” or Upper Country by the French—had long served as trade and travel routes. Because of these Indigenous trade networks, by the time the French arrived in what is now Minnesota in the second half of the 1600s, the Native people there were well acquainted with the trade goods that the French offered in exchange for beaver, mink, bear, fox, deer, and other furs and skins: they received them from Indigenous trade partners who were in direct contact with the French. And when the French did travel to the Pays d’en haut they were able to carry out exploration and trade because the Native peoples showed them where and how to travel most easily and efficiently.
Initially, the French established their presence in the form of religious missions and small forts in the Great Lakes region east of Minnesota, at sites like Sault Ste. Marie on Lake Superior and St. Ignace at the Strait of Mackinac. It was from these sites that men set out west and south, seeking to develop and maintain alliances with the Native people, and also seeking a route to the “Western Sea” which would facilitate travel to Asia.
In order to trade effectively, the French understood that speaking and comprehending Native languages and being familiar with Native cultures was crucial. Thus, they sent out young men to stay for prolonged periods with Native groups in order to learn their hosts’ language or languages and become acquainted with their culture. One such “truchement” or interpreter was Jean Nicolet. After gaining linguistic and cultural experience near the St. Lawrence River Valley, Nicolet was sent to investigate whether a large body of water which lay not too far to the west, described by Native people, might be the Pacific Ocean. In 1634 Nicolet and his party arrived at what is now Green Bay, Wisconsin, having “discovered” not the Pacific Ocean but Lake Michigan. He did not continue west into what is today Minnesota, but from the Winnebago people he met at Green Bay he learned of a great river flowing south—likely the Mississippi River—and the stage was set for further ventures by the French into the Pays d’en haut, most specifically the voyage of Father Marquette and Louis Jolliet in 1673.
Some twenty years after Nicolet’s 1634 trip to Green Bay, a pair of French traders traveled through the Lake Superior country. Médard Chouart, Sieur des Groseillers, and his younger brother-in-law Pierre-Esprit Radisson set out to trade in an area where they suspected there would be abundant furs. At this time, France was attempting to strictly control the number of men allowed to participate in the fur trade, but Groseillers and Radisson did not bother to get a license, known in French as a congé. Men who traded without government permission were known as “coureurs de bois” or “runners of the woods” and were sanctioned in various ways by the French government when they were caught.
The two men’s 1658-59 expedition into the area around Lake Superior turned out to be highly lucrative. With their companions they traveled along the southern shore of Lake Superior and spent the winter inland with the Odawa on Lac Courte Oreilles (near today’s Hayward, Wisconsin). There, they learned of the Dakota people to the west, and, hoping to meet them and continue their trade with this people known for hunting bison, they traveled west. They may well have come into what is today Minnesota at that time. In 1660, they returned to Montreal with many furs and with reports of what were, to the French, new territory and new Native peoples. However, as illegal traders, they were not rewarded for bringing this information. Instead, their furs were confiscated and they were fined–and Groseillers was briefly imprisoned–for having left the colony without permission. Later, Groseillers and Radisson would offer their services to the British and help to found the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Dulhut
Around 1670, the new royal governor, Louis Buade, Comte de Frontenac, began to actively encourage expansion of France’s territorial claims and trading activity to the west and around Lake Superior in particular. In this context, a Frenchman who was a relative newcomer to France’s North American colony, Daniel Greysolon de Dulhut, was sent to negotiate with the Native people living around Lake Superior—and particularly the Dakota—to create a French-Native alliance that would allow the fur trade to develop and prevent the Dakota and the Ojibwe from selling their furs to the English.
Dulhut spent the winter of 1679 traveling in what is now Minnesota, visiting Dakota villages. He went as far as the lake today known as Lake Mille Lacs and perhaps as far as St. Anthony’s Falls, near present-day Minneapolis. At that time, the Dakota and Ojibwe were in conflict. In September 1679, on the site of present-day Duluth, Dakota and Ojibwe leaders agreed to work with Dulhut to create an alliance that brought together the French, the Dakota, and the Ojibwe.
Another French speaker and early traveler in what is now Minnesota was the Belgian Recollect priest Father Louis Hennepin. (The Recollects were associated with the Franciscan order and, like the Jesuits, did extensive missionary work in French North America.) Working with an expedition sent by Cavelier de La Salle and led by Michel Accault, Hennepin traveled up the Mississippi in 1680, calling the falls near current Minneapolis St. Anthony’s Falls in honor of his patron saint. Hennepin wrote of his adventures in 1683 and, despite considerable exaggeration in his accounts, he nonetheless made a large European audience aware of this region of the Upper Mississippi.
Perrot and Le Sueur
In the 1680s another Frenchman, Nicolas Perrot, who had established himself as a trader in the Lake Michigan (Green Bay) area, headed west. On the east side of Lake Pepin on the Mississippi River (in what is today Wisconsin), he and his men founded Fort St. Antoine, in an effort to solidify the French presence here to ensure continued trading with the Native people of the region. When the English, shortly thereafter, asserted their claim to this territory, French officials ordered Perrot to claim the area for France again, which he did in a ceremony at Fort St. Antoine in May 1689.
Accompanying Perrot was Lieutenant Pierre Charles Le Sueur. From a group of Lakota, he learned of the existence of a source of blue earth near the Minnesota River. In addition to their wish to export furs from North America, the French were alert to possible sources of minerals such as lead, copper, silver, or even gold, and Le Sueur suspected that this blue earth might indicate the presence of copper. However, at this time, a glut of furs exported meant that the French were not granting licenses for men to travel into the Pays d’en haut.
Le Sueur found a workaround: if it wasn’t possible to get a license to trade out of Montreal and come to Minnesota via the Great Lakes, he could take an alternate route up the Mississippi, starting from the new French fort implanted near today’s Biloxi on the Gulf Coast. In 1700 Le Sueur’s party reached the mouth of the Blue Earth River and built the small Fort L’Huillier. He and his men extracted blue earth from the mine, but it turned out later that there was no copper there.
Le Sueur also traded with the Dakota people in the region, eventually leaving the region with a large supply of beaver pelts and buffalo hides. Some suspected that the furs and hides were the real export that Le Sueur was after, but his travels did spread information about the Lake Superior and Blue Earth regions of Minnesota, and his findings can be seen on the 1703 map made by Guillaume De L’Isle.
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