[Sidenote: _Fort built in the Sioux country._] Before the year 1700, the course of the upper Mississippi was known. Nicolas Perrot, in or about 1685, is said to have established posts where the river widens out into Lake Pepin; and further north, French _coureurs de bois_, or _voyageurs_, as they began to be called, gained information of the Lake of the Woods, and of the Lac des Assiniboines, now Lake Winnipeg. The principal Indian tribes in the regions of the upper Mississippi were Sioux; and, with a view to making them friends to France, and penetrating through their country to the western sea, the Jesuit traveller Charlevoix recommended, in 1723, that a mission should be established among them. A few years later, in 1727, a company was formed for trading in the Sioux country, and built a new fort on Lake Pepin called, after the then Governor of Canada, Fort Beauharnois. The Sioux, however, {212} proved intractable neighbours, and ten years later the fort was abandoned. [Sidenote: _Verendrye._] In 1728, there was a small French outpost at Nipigon, at the western end of Lake Superior, on its northern side--where the river Nipigon flows from the lake of the same name into Lake Superior. The commander was Pierre de Varennes de la Verendrye, son of a lieutenant of the Carignan Regiment, who had settled at and been Governor of Three Rivers. As a young man, La Verendrye had crossed the sea to fight in the armies of France, and had been badly wounded on the field of Malplaquet. He lived to leave his name high in the list of western explorers. At his distant station on Lake Superior, he heard the stories that Indians brought, mixture of fact and fable, of waters to the west that led to the long-sought-for sea; he offered to follow up the clue, and, with the usual opposition from jealous Canadian merchants, and the usual barren authority from the French Government to explore at his own expense, in return for the grant of a monopoly of the fur trade to the west and north of Lake Superior, he gave the rest of his life to western discovery. [Sidenote: _The water-parting on the west of Lake Superior._]