16 THE GEOLOGY OF MINNESOTA. 



[Le Sueur, 1700. 



was the one referred to by La Hontan, while others, with perhaps as good 

 reasons, think he actually entered the Minnesota river. The very general 

 and vague description which he makes of the physical character of the 

 valley of the Riviere Longe will apply with equal correctness to either of 

 these valleys, but the direction of the river he says he explored, as 

 represented on his map, can only apply to the Root river. The Root river 

 is less likely to be frozen in winter than either of the others, owing to the 

 fact that it is derived largely from copious springs and subterranean streams 

 that flow from the rocky bluffs between which it runs (see the geology of 

 Fillmore county), and is a larger stream than the Cannon, and further south.* 



LE SUEUR IN THE MINNESOTA VALLEY. 



Although there is mention made in the treatise of Nicholas Perrot, a 

 trader and interpreter, and later an agent of the government in the upper 

 Mississippi region, on the habits, customs and religions of the savages of North 

 America, of the St. Croix and St. Peter's rivers, there seems to have been 

 no further extension of knowledge of the geography of the region till the 

 time of Le Sueur. 



The first accredited exploration of the Minnesota valley was made by 

 Le Sueur, who first visited the upper Mississippi in 1683, with Perrot, in 

 the interests of trade. He built a trading-post on Isle Pelee, a few miles 

 below Hastings, in 1695, and in 1699 received a commission from D'Iberville 

 to visit and examine a copper mine which he claimed to have discovered 

 in the country of the loways. In April, 1700, with a single shallop and 

 about twenty-five persons, he started from the settlements on the lower 

 Mississippi for the mouth of the Minnesota river, where he arrived on the 

 19th of September ; and on the last day of the same month, being stopped 

 by ice forty -four leagues above its union with the Mississippi, he determined 

 to build his fort. His narrator, Penicaut, who was also his carpenter, states 

 that this place was a league up the Green river (now the Blue Earth) on a 

 point of land a quarter of a league distant from the woods. This river was 

 so called "because it is of that color by reason of a green earth, which, 

 loosening itself from the copper mines, becomes dissolved in it and makes 



* Coxo in French's Hist. Col. of Louisiana, Part II., p. 233, says lake Ppin was abate the "Long" river of 

 La Hontan. 



