In the winter of 1742 and 1743 the brothers Francois and Louis-Joseph La Verendrye, sons of a French officer in Canada, crossed the northern plains looking for a river to the western sea, came in sight of mountains, perhaps the Black Hills, and turned back. Passing an Arikara town at the mouth of the Bad River in March 1743, they climbed the high hill above it and buried a lead plate. Its face, stamped in Latin, named the reign of Louis XV and their father; scratched on the back were their own names and the date, March 30, 1743. Over it they piled a pyramid of stones, and the stones were scattered long before anyone thought to look.
On February 16, 1913, three Fort Pierre schoolchildren, Ethel Parish and her friends Hattie and George, were playing on the hill on a mild winter day when they found a corner of dull metal in the ground. It was the plate, the oldest written record of Europeans in what became South Dakota, lying where the brothers' journal said it would be. Some historians argued that it might have been carried there by someone else and dropped, and one historian answered that such a coincidence approached absurdity.
The plate went to the State Historical Society and is on display across the river in the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre. A granite monument went up on the hill in 1933; Ethel, who had moved away, was not invited to its dedication. The marker stands at the top of a short climb, looking down on the mouth of the Bad River, the town, the bridge and the capitol dome across the water.
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