ned the
north-eastern part of Asia--a guess that was not very far wrong. But
he also surmised that there were rivers in the far west which led to
an ocean--the Pacific--across which ships might go to Japan and China
without passing to the southward of the Equator.

[Footnote 12: The real name of the Siou, as far as we can arrive at it
through the records of the French pioneers, was Issati or Naduessiu.]

Whilst moving up and down the northern Mississippi, bison-hunting with
the Indians, the Frenchmen were met near the site of St. Paul by one
of the great French pioneers of the seventeenth century, the Sieur
DANIEL DE GREYSOLON DU L'HUT. This remarkable man, who was an officer
of the French army, had already planted the French arms at the
Amerindian settlement of Mille Lacs in 1679, and had established
himself as a powerful authority at the west end of Lake Superior. He
had also summoned a great council of Amerindian tribes--the Siou from
the Upper Mississippi, the Assiniboins from the Lake of the Woods
(between Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg), and the Kri Indians from
Lake Nipigon. He had further discovered, in 1679, the water route of
the St. Croix River from near Lake Superior to the Mississippi.

Du L'Hut soon persuaded the Siou to let his fellow countrymen return
with him to Lake Superior. Accault remained behind with the Siou,
delighted with their wild, roving life, and no doubt married an Indian
wife and became the father of some of those bold half-breeds who
played such a great part in the subsequent history of innermost
Canada. But Father Hennepin returned to Montreal, and made his way
eventually to France, where he fell into great disgrace and was
unfrocked. He had richly merited this treatment, for after he heard of
the death of La Salle he impudently claimed the discovery of the whole
course of the Mississippi River for himself, and for a long time was
believed. He will certainly go down in history as the man who
discovered and described Niagara Falls (in 1678), and he also assisted
greatly to clear up the geography of the time by the information he
collected from the Amerindians as to the vast extent of the
North-American continent; but he was a boastful, unscrupulous man.

Du L'Hut, who came to the rescue of Accault and Hennepin, was of noble
family, and a member of the king's bodyguard. He decided, however, to
seek his fortune in Canada, and obtained a commission as captain. It
was his cousin, Henri d