SOURCE OP ST Peter's river. 323 



>tanding the great importance which seems to have been 

 attached in France to le Sueur's discoveries, so little 

 should have been said by other authors, concerning this 

 explorer and the regions which he discovered. 



Carver is the only traveller who states that he visited this 

 river, merely from motives of curiosity ; but a close perusal 

 of his book, has satisfied us that he professes too much. He 

 asserts that he " proceeded upon the river about two hun- 

 dred miles, to the country of the Naudowessies of the plains, 

 which lies a little above the forks formed by the Verd and 

 Red Marble rivers." He states that he resided five months 

 among the Naudowessies, and that he acquired their lan- 

 guage perfectly. We are inclined to doubt this ; we believe 

 that he ascended the Mississippi to the Falls of St. An- 

 thony, that he saw the St. Peter, and that he may even 

 perhaps have entered it ; but had he resided five months 

 in the country, and become acquainted with their lan- 

 guage, it is not probable that he would have uniformly 

 applied to them the term of Naudowessies, and omitted 

 calling them the Dacota Indians, as they style themselves. 

 It is probable that Carver derived his name from the source 

 from which the other travellers received that of Nadiou- 

 sioux, from which Sioux has been derived by abbrevia- 

 tion. This is the term given to strangers by some of 

 the North American Indians, (the Iroquois, as we believe,) 

 and with them is synonymous with that of enemy. The 

 term Dacota, by which the Sioux call themselves, signi- 

 fies in their language the united or allied, because the 

 whole nation consists of several allied tribes. In his ac- 

 count of the river St. Peter, Carver attributes to it a 

 breadth of nearly one hundred yards for two hundred 

 miles, whereas at the distance of one hundred and thirty 

 miles it was but seventy yards wide, and was found to be 



