Native tribes had occupied the Duluth area…
1679 CE
Native tribes had occupied the Duluth area for thousands of years.
The original inhabitants are believed to have been members of Paleo-Indian cultures, followed by the "Old Copper" people, who hunted with spear points and knives and fished with metal hooks.
Around two thousand years ago, the Woodlands people, known for their burial mounds and pottery, occupied the area.
They also cultivated wild rice, a crop that continues to be harvested today by Ojibwa tribes in the region and is often seen being sold in the area.
At the beginning of this age, the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ojibway and Cree still lived above Lake Superior, north of the Kickapoo, Menominee, Sauk and Fox nations—Algonquian speakers all.
The Siouan Assiniboin and Lakota nations, speakers of Iroquoian language who will later dominate the northeastern Plains, were, like their Winnebago kin, presumably still in Wisconsin and Upper Michigan.
The Sioux had inhabited the region until the middle of the seventeenth century and there had been an Indian village, known as Wi-ah-quah-ke-che-qume-eng at present day Fond du Lac, in about 1630.
The Ojibwa had driven the Sioux out soon after 1654, after being forced from eastern seaboard areas by the Iroquois.
Duluth's name in Ojibwe is Onigamiinsing ("at the little portage") due to the small and easy portage across Minnesota Point between Lake Superior and western St. Louis Bay forming Duluth's harbor.
According to Ojibwa oral history, Spirit Island located near the Spirit Valley neighborhood was the "Sixth Stopping Place" where the northern and southern branches of the Ojibwa Nation came together and then proceeded to their "Seventh Stopping Place" near the present city of La Pointe, Wisconsin.
Pierre Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers had gone searching in 1659 for furs in the Lake Superior region, and had visited the area that became today’s Duluth.
Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, the city's namesake, born in 1639 Saint-Germain-Laval, near Lyon, France, had first visited New France in 1674 after more than seventeen years of military service in Europe.
He had left Montreal in September 1678 for Lake Superior, spending the winter near Sault Sainte Marie and reaching the western end of the lake in the fall of the following year where he concludes peace talks between the Ojibwe and Sioux nations.
His mission being the advancement of fur trading missions in the area, his work allows for this to occur, with the Ojibwa becoming middlemen between the French and the Lakota.
As a result, the area prospers.