Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Verendrye, was the first white man known to have entered what is now North Dakota. Like so many others of his time, Verendrye, a French-Canadian, was in search of the westward route to India. When the liberal Louis XV came to the throne of France he granted Verendrye permission to explore and claim new lands for France, in return for which Verendrye was to receive exclusive fur trading privileges. With a fur monopoly to back him Verendrye succeeded in obtaining financial support for his venture, and in 1731 he and his party left Montreal for the explorations which were to occupy the remainder of his life. It was in 1738 that, having established several forts in what later became Manitoba and Saskatchewan, he decided to visit the Indians called the Mantannes (Mandans), of whom he had heard. Accordingly he journeyed south and west, past the Pembina and Turtle Mountains, and eventually reached a Mandan village located a day's journey from the Missouri. Until 1936 this village was believed by historians to have been near Sanish, but in the light of recent discoveries at a site near Menoken, the latter is now thought by many historians to have been the village visited by the Verendrye party. This theory is substantiated by the journal of Verendrye in which he states that he sent his sons to visit another village on the Missouri, a day's march distant (_see Tour 8_). Of this trip to the Mandans, Verendrye wrote that their village consisted of 130 earth lodges, and added, "Their fortification ... has nothing savage about it." The people he described as "of mixed blood, white and black. The women are rather handsome, particularly the light colored ones; some have an abundance of fair hair." But later he records that he reproved his Assiniboin guides for telling him the Mandans were light-colored, and asserted they had lied to him, whereupon they said the fair people of whom they spoke wore metal (armor) and were a summer's journey down the river. The French party left the Mandan chief a lead tablet claiming the land in the King's name. What became of the tablet is unknown; a similar one, buried by a son of Verendrye on an expedition in 1743, was unearthed in 1913 at Fort Pierre, S. Dak. This visit of Verendrye to North Dakota was his only trip into the region. Two of his sons passed through North Dakota again in 1742, on which expedition they reached either the Black Hills or the Big Horn Mountains. Unable to make any satisfactory progress toward the ocean, they returned to their friends the Mandans and thence to Fort la Reine in Manitoba.