It was a transshipment point for pelts in fur trading days, and the namesake for an important United States treaty that forced the Dakota people to cede part of their homeland and opened up much of southern Minnesota to European-American settlement.

[1] Traverse des Sioux is located on the Minnesota River, once a major transportation route, in Nicollet County just north of the city of St.

The term Traverse des Sioux has been applied both to the crossing of the Minnesota River at this location,[4] and the transit of the prairie from the west.

[8] The settlement at Traverse des Sioux was a destination of Métis carters during the days of the Red River Trails, and was also home of a voyageur community during the same time.

[9] Nineteenth-century explorer John C. Frémont used the term Traverse des Sioux to refer to the crossing of the plain west of the river.

In the later part of that period, some cart trains traveled all the way to Mendota or Saint Paul, Minnesota, whence the furs were taken by Mississippi riverboat to markets downriver.

[13] By 1851 the settlement had two missionaries and their families, a school, several fur trading establishments, a few cabins of French voyageurs, and twenty to thirty Indian lodges.

[6][19] In addition, archaeologists have found Paleo-Indian projectile points in the area estimated to be 9,000 years old, indicating this site was inhabited or visited by Native Americans for many millennia.

[20] Traverse des Sioux, being the French translation of its Dakota name Oiyuwega, (crossing), was then, and from time immemorial had been, the most important point on the Minnesota.

The excellent river crossing there found, together with its position where the great forest of the east and the vast plains of the west naturally met, where the Blue Earth and its tributaries were conveniently accessible, and where the headwaters of the Minnesota and Red rivers could be reached by a short cut over land, made Traverse des Sioux the natural capital of the Sioux country.Hughes (1901), p. 104.

The Traverse des Sioux is a crossing-place about thirty miles long, where the river makes a large rectangular bend, coming down from the northwest and turning abruptly to the northeast .