After La Salle had established Fort Crèvecœur among the Illinois, on the 29th of February, 1680, he sent Michel Accault (often spelt Ako) on a trading and exploring expedition to the Upper Mississippi. He took with him Anthony Augelle, called the Picard, and the Franciscan priest Louis Hennepin, in a canoe, with goods valued at about a thousand livres. In ascending the Mississippi the party was hindered by ice near the mouth of the Illinois River until the 12th of March, when they resumed their voyage. Following the windings of the Mississippi, La Salle mentions in a letter written on the 22d of August, 1682, at Fort Frontenac,[499] that they passed a tributary from the east called by the Sioux Meschetz Odéba,[500] now called Wisconsin, and twenty-three or twenty-four leagues above they saw the Black River, called by the Sioux Chabadeba.[501] About the 11th of April, at three o’clock in the afternoon, a war-party of Sioux going south was met, and Accault, as the leader, presented the calumet,[502] and gave them some tobacco and twenty knives. The Sioux gave up their expedition, and conducted Accault and his companions to their villages. On the 22d of April the isles in the Mississippi were reached, where two Sioux had been killed by the Maskoutens, and they stopped to weep over their death, while Accault, to assuage their grief, gave them in trade a box of goods and twenty-four hatchets. Arriving at an enlargement of the river, about three miles below the modern city of St. Paul, the canoes were hidden in the marshes, and the rest of the journey to the villages of Mille Lacs was made by land. Six weeks after they reached the villages, the Sioux determined to descend the Mississippi on a buffalo hunt, and Hennepin and Augelle went with the party.
When Du Lhut reached the Mississippi from Lake Superior, he found eight cabins of Sioux, and learned that some Frenchmen were with the party hunting below the St. Croix River. Surprised by the intelligence, leaving two Frenchmen to guard his goods, he descended in a canoe with his interpreter and his other two men, and on the morning of the third day he found the hunting camp and the Franciscan Hennepin. In a letter to Seignelay, written while on a visit in France, Du Lhut writes:—