Frontenac was not only in full sympathy with La Salle, but with other enterprising adventurers, and there is but little doubt that he shared the profits of the fur-traders. About the time that La Salle was improving Fort Frontenac as a trading-post, Raudin,[491] the engineer who had laid out the plan of that fort, was sent by Frontenac with presents to the Ojibways and Sioux, at the extremity of Lake Superior.[492] A nephew of Patron, named Daniel Greysolon du Lhut,[493] and who had made two voyages from France before 1674, had then entered the army as squire of Marquis de Lassay, was in the campaign of Franche-Comté and at Seneffe, having now returned to Quebec was permitted to go on a voyage of discovery in the then unknown region where dwelt the Sioux and Assineboines.
On the 1st of September, 1678, with three Indians and three Frenchmen, Du Lhut left Montreal for Lake Superior, and wintered at some point on the shore of, or in the vicinity of, Lake Huron. On the 5th of April, 1679, he was in the woods, three leagues from Sault Ste. Marie, when he wrote in the third person to Governor Frontenac: “He will not stir from the Nadoussioux until further orders; and peace being concluded he will set up the King’s arms, lest the English and other Europeans settled toward California take possession of the country.”[494] On the 2d of July, 1679, Du Lhut planted the arms of France beyond Lake Superior, among the Isanti Sioux,[495] who dwelt at Mille Lacs, in what is now the State of Minnesota, and then visited the Songaskitons (Sissetons) and Houetbatons, bands of the Sioux, whose villages were one hundred and twenty leagues beyond. Entering by way of the St. Louis River, it would be easy, by a slight portage, to reach the Sioux village, which was at that time on the shores of the Sandy Lake of the Upper Mississippi.
Among those who went to the Lake Superior region at the same time as Du Lhut, were Dupuy, Lamonde, and Pierre Moreau, alias La Taupine, who had been with Saint Lusson at the planting of the French arms in 1671 at Sault Ste. Marie, and was trading among the Illinois when Joliet was in that country. In the summer of 1679 La Taupine returned, and it was rumored that he had obtained among the Ottawas in two days nine hundred beavers. Duchesneau, Intendant of Justice, feeling that Moreau had violated the law forbidding _coureurs des bois_ to trade with the Indians, had him, in September, arrested at Quebec; but Moreau produced a license from Governor Frontenac, permitting him, with his two comrades, to go to the Ottawas, to execute his secret orders, and so was liberated. He had not left the prison but a short time when an officer and some soldiers came with an order from Frontenac to force the prison, in case he were still there. In a letter to Seignelay he writes: “It is certain, my Lord, that the said La Taupine carried goods to the Ottawas, that his two comrades remained in the country, apparently near Du Lhut, and that he traded there.”[496]