Lahontan

Lahontan lies in the Minnesota and upper Mississippi country, where the Minnesota River joins the Mississippi near Bdote, the sacred meeting place of the Dakota. The bluffs and river terraces here were home to Dakota villages that farmed the flats, gathered wild rice in the lakes, and hunted bison on the prairies to the west. French traders came up the rivers in the late seventeenth century, and in 1688 the soldier and writer Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce, baron de Lahontan, described a journey up a 'Long River', an account that later readers doubted. Fort Snelling was built at the confluence in the 1820s, bringing American soldiers and fur traders into the Dakota homeland.

The later city of Saint Paul lies here.