Nicolas Perrot

Nicolas Perrot (c.1644–1717), a French explorer, fur trader, and diplomat, was one of the first European men to travel in the Upper Mississippi Valley, in what is now Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Nicolas Perrot was born in France between 1641 and 1644, perhaps at Darcey in Burgundy, where his father was lieutenant of justice.

Perrot traveled to New France around 1660 with the Jesuit missionaries. He journeyed with several to the Western Great Lakes, where they intended to preach to the Native Americans, reaching present-day Wisconsin in 1665. He earned the friendship of the natives by swapping furs for guns, allowing the group to defend themselves on an equal footing against their enemies. He was nicknamed the "trafficker of iron", or "iron legs".

In 1667 he formed a fur trading company with three settlers in Montreal. On August 12, 1667, he returned to the Green Bay region. In 1670, he was enlisted as a translator for Simon-François Daumont de Saint-Lusson, a military officer and deputy of Jean Talon, who had been sent "to lay claim to the land of the Ottawa, Amikwa, Illinois, and of other nations discovered or to be discovered in North America contiguous and adjacent to Lake Superior(French: Lac Supérieur), the great inland sea, including all its length and breadth, and including the resources therein, for Louis XIV" at what was called "The Pageant of the Sault" or the rapids on the .

Afterward, he married Madeleine Raclot. He was given a land grant on the river Saint-Michel in present-day Quebec. By the 1681 census he and Madeleine had six children. They had a total of eleven altogether.

Perrot's relationship with and influence over the tribes of the west was drawn on again during the 1680s. In 1684, he participated in the peacekeeping mission of the Governor Lefebvre de La Barre and succeeded in bringing the warriors of several nations together to sign a peace treaty. In the spring of 1685 he was appointed Commandant-in-Chief of Bais Des Puants (present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin) and the neighboring regions when war broke out between the Fox tribe and the Sioux and Chippewa tribes. He worked hard to bring about peace, and was successful, at least for a time. After this, Perrot traveled to the northern waters of the Mississippi River, in the territory of the Sioux, where he built Fort Saint Antoine, now in Minnesota.

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