The Lead Plate: France Claims the Plains

On March thirtieth, seventeen forty-three, two French Canadian brothers climbed a high bluff overlooking the mouth of the Bad River, just across the Missouri from where you are now, and buried a small sheet of lead in the frozen ground. Francois and Louis-Joseph La Verendrye had traveled south from the Canadian prairies with a small party, and they had spent months moving through the northern plains, the first Europeans to reach this deep interior. The lead plate they buried was a formal act of sovereignty, inscribed in French to claim the entire region for King Louis the Fifteenth.

The ceremony almost certainly meant nothing to the Arikara people who watched it. The Arikara had guided the Verendrye brothers and hosted them through the winter. The brothers noted the meeting in their journals, then turned north toward home, leaving behind a buried scrap of metal that no one would see again for a hundred and seventy years.

In nineteen thirteen, a group of schoolchildren playing on the hill above Fort Pierre noticed a corner of metal poking out of the eroding slope. They dug it out, passed it around, and eventually brought it to the attention of South Dakota's state historian, Doane Robinson, who recognized it immediately. The inscriptions matched the Verendrye journals precisely. The plate, roughly nine inches by six, had survived in perfect condition.

Today the original plate lives at the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre, just a few blocks from the Missouri. A four-foot granite monument marks the bluff in Fort Pierre where it was found. It is a significant find in the story of the northern plains, a physical document of a moment when European empires were still drawing lines on maps of land they had never seen.