On September 17, 1727, at noon, La Perrière beached his canoes on a low point of land on the west shore of Lake Pepin, near the steamboat landing at Frontenac. Putting his men to work with axes, he had them all comfortably housed by the end of October. There were three log buildings, each 16 feet wide; one 30, a second 38, and the third 25 feet long. Surrounding them was a stockade of tree-trunks 12 feet out of ground, 100 feet square, “with two good bastions.” The fort was named “Beauharnois” after the governor-general of Canada. To the first mission on Minnesota soil the priests gave the title, “Mission of St. Michael the Archangel.” On November 4 the company celebrated the birthday of the governor, but were obliged by the state of the weather to postpone to the night of the 14th the crowning event of their programme. They then set off “some very fine rockets.” When the visiting Indians saw the stars falling from heaven, the women and children took to the woods, while the men begged for an end of such marvelous medicine. The Sioux were not disposed to be hospitable, and the good behavior of the Sacs and Foxes could not be counted on. In the following season La Perrière departed with the Jesuits and eight other Frenchmen for Montreal. The post was held, and occupied off and on for twenty years or more. No settlement was made about it, no permanent mission work was established, and no expedition towards the Pacific was undertaken. The Indians were unreliable, the French had other interests to attend to, and, contrary to expectation, game was scarce in the region. One of the successors of La Perrière in command of Fort Beauharnois was Captain Legardeur Saint Pierre, the same officer who in 1753 at his post on French Creek, not far from Pittsburg, was waited on by young Mr. Washington, bearing Governor Dinwiddie’s invitation to the French to get out of Virginian territory. Another French adventure, although of slight import to Minnesota, deserves mention. The Sieur de la Verendrye, commanding the French post on Lake Nipigon, fell in with the Jesuit Guinas, who went out with La Perrière in 1727, and was inflamed by him with a desire to find the western ocean. At his own post he had found an Indian, Ochaga by name, who sketched for him an almost continuous water route thither; another offered to be his guide. He hastened to Montreal, secured the assent of the governor-general, Beauharnois, and in 1731 dispatched his advance party. It reached the foot of Rainy Lake that year, and there built a fort on the Canadian side. The next year the expedition made its way to the southwest margin of the Lake of the Woods and there built Fort Charles, giving it the Christian name of the governor-general. Whether this fort was on Minnesota soil is undecided.