Duluth and La Salle by means of Accault’s reports revealed to Count Frontenac the magnificence of the upper Mississippi region, and Father Hennepin’s book, dedicated to the king, seems to have inspired Louis XIV with a desire to occupy and possess that goodly land. In 1686 the able and experienced Nicholas Perrot, who had been appointed commandant of the west with orders to make an establishment there, built a fort on the east bank of Lake Pepin, and called it Fort St. Antoine. The site has been clearly identified about two miles below the “Burlington” railroad station of Stockholm, Pepin County, Wisconsin. Summoned the following year to lead a contingent of voyageurs and savages in the campaign against the Iroquois in the Genesee valley of western New York, he did not return to Fort St. Antoine till late in 1688. To satisfy any lingering doubts about the legitimate sovereignty of those parts, he made formal proclamation of his king’s lordship over all the countries and rivers he had seen and would see. Perrot was too useful a man to be left in the wilderness, and was presently ordered on other service and his fort left empty. Another attempt at settlement on the upper Mississippi was made by a Canadian, Pierre Le Sueur, an associate of Perrot, who in 1694 established a trading post on Prairie Island in the Mississippi, about nine miles below Hastings, the same on which Groseilliers and Radisson are imagined to have camped in 1655. Le Sueur stayed over one winter in the west, and returned to Montreal to discover to Frontenac a new project. He had located a copper mine. He hastened to Paris to obtain the king’s license, then necessary for mining operations. After a struggle of two years he got his permit and started for Canada. The English caught him and held him a prisoner for some months. Returning to France, he found his license canceled, because of a resolution of the government to abandon all trade west of Mackinaw. At length Le Sueur was excepted from the rule and his license renewed. In 1699 he sailed with the expedition of D’Iberville, which was to make and did make the first settlement out of which New Orleans grew.