blackfoot-valley

Dakota in 1783. Four years later, after their father had returned to France, the Verendrye brothers resumed their explorations and pushed farther into the unknown Great Plains country. Joining a war party of “Bow People” (pos- sibly Crow or Cheyenne), they passed through what is now southeastern Montana, crossing the lower Yellowstone River twice, and on into Wyoming. They became the first Europeans known to see the Rockies, or “Shining Mountains,” as they called them, almost certainly the Bighorns. But the party then skirted around the south end of the Black Hills and followed the course of the Cheyenne River back toward the Missouri. The Verendrye brothers, tantalizing as the sight of high mountains to the west must have been, decid- ed that the only reasonable choice was to stay with their guides. Frenchmen subsequently ascended the Missouri from St. Louis, a French trading post established in 1763. The city quickly became the nerve center of the mid-Mississippi and continued as such, with the French presence there surviving the subsequent transfer of the vast region’s sovereignty to Spain, then back to France again, and finally to the United States. A conspicuous sprinkling of French place-names in Montana and Idaho, such as Dupuyer and Choteau east of the Divide, Pend Oreille and Coeur d’ Alene west of it, including the anglicized name Frenchtown near Missoula, tes- tify to their passage; likewise, many of the names by which Indian tribes, over a great area came to be known because the first white men to describe them were French: Sioux, Cheyenne, Assinboine, Gros Vente, Nez Perce’, Pend d’ Oreille, all these being either French names or French renderings of Indian names. Their main quarry was beaver, the fur then much in demand and fetching high prices in Europe. The fur trapper-traders, for the most part, got along well with the Indians; from the natives’ point of view fur-trading was not only peaceful, but these newcomers had things they wanted and were not numerous enough to be perceived as a threat (although certainly the trade in liquor and firearms was to become a source of heavy problems for them). In the wake of the fur traders, came the French clerics. Although their numbers were few and records they left were scanty, these intrepid Frenchmen were true pioneers, the first known Europeans to explore huge territories in the American Midwest and Northeast. A perceptive comment that has virtually escaped notice from academic historians was recently made by a researcher as meticulous as any of them, the well known novelist Louis L’ Amour in his 1989 memoir, “Education of a Wandering Man”: “ The records we have are those of known explorations, but what of the many that were unknown? In doing research one stumbles on tantalizing 54