Joseph N. Nicollet came to America from France in 1832 nearly penniless, a mathematician and astronomer whose career had been wrecked by French politics, with a plan to map the upper Mississippi. With backing from the fur traders of St. Louis and later the army, he led expeditions in 1838 and 1839 across the country between the Mississippi and the Missouri, with the young John C. Fremont as his assistant and the botanist Charles Geyer recording plants. In 1839 the party went up the Missouri, crossed to Devils Lake, and came back south along the Coteau des Prairies past this ridge on the way to Fort Snelling.
His map of the basin of the upper Mississippi, published in 1843 just after his death, was the first accurate map of this region, fixed by astronomical observation. It is also a record of who lived here: Nicollet took care to ask the Dakota and others the names of lakes, rivers and hills and to set them down, and many of the names on the map are theirs.
Harold Torness, a Sisseton banker taken with Nicollet's story, led the effort to build a tower in his memory, working with the Dakota community, and it opened in 1991 on the eastern edge of the Coteau west of town. From the top the view runs into North Dakota and Minnesota, across the ancient glacial valley below and the low divide between the waters that drain to Hudson Bay and those that reach the Gulf. The interpretive center holds a copy of the great map and a mural of Nicollet meeting the Dakota leader Wanata.
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