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.