The Frenchmen were at first in danger of being killed, as the Sious refused to smoke with them the pipe of peace.  But being much less bloodthirsty than the Iroquois, they soon calmed down and treated their captives with a certain rough friendliness.  All their goods were taken from them, even the vestments worn by Father Hennepin.  But they were well supplied with food such as the country produced—­bison, beef, fish, wild turkeys, and the grain of the wild rice, which made such excellent flour.  They were gradually conveyed by the Siou[12] to a large settlement of that tribe on the shore of Mille Lacs, a sheet of water not far distant from the westernmost extremity of Lake Superior.  Whilst staying at this Siou town Hennepin conversed with Indians from the far north and north-west, and from what they told him came to the conclusion that there was no continuous waterway or “Strait of Anian” across the North-American continent, but that the land extended to the north-west till it finally joined 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.