French people in Nebraska

The area was originally claimed by France in 1682 as part of La Louisiane, the extent of which was largely defined by the watershed of the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

Over the following centuries, explorers of French ethnicity, many of them French-Canadian, trapped, hunted, and established settlements and trading posts across much of the northern Great Plains, including the territory that would eventually become Nebraska, even in the period after France formally ceded its North American claims to Spain.

[1] During the 19th century, fur trading gave way to settlements and farming across the state, and French colonists and French-American migrants continued to operate businesses and build towns in Nebraska.

According to historian Addison Erwin Sheldon, the French knew of the Otoe and Missouri tribes in Nebraska as early as 1673.

[3] Brothers and French-Canadian voyageurs Pierre Antoine and Paul Mallet sought to reach Santa Fe, New Mexico by water via what they renamed the Platte River in 1739.

Trappers and traders established relationships with Native American tribes at major points around the Great Lakes and along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

The first Europeans to see the Platte River were French explorers and fur trappers in about 1714; they first called it the Nebraskier (Nebraska), a transliteration of the name given by the Otoe people, meaning "flat water".

In 1824 Jean-Pierre Cabanné established Cabanne's Trading Post for John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company near Fort Lisa, at the confluence of Ponca Creek and the Missouri River.

Early French Canadian trappers named the area south of Omaha Belle Vue because of the beauty of the view from the bluffs overlooking the Missouri River.

In 1840, Joseph Deroin set up a trading post along the Missouri River at the mouth of the Platte, at the main village of the Otoe.

Deroin was the son of a Métis[7] French Canadian trapper Amable De Rouins and his Otoe wife.