On May 25, 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition camped at the mouth of La Charrette Creek near La Charrette, a small French village near present-day Marthasville that William Clark called the "Last Settlement of Whites." After making an easy 10 miles that day, the corps reached the westernmost Euro-American community, a place of seven houses and seven families whose impoverished but friendly inhabitants sent them milk and eggs. The settlement apparently existed before 1800 and was sometimes linked to a possibly short-lived or perhaps never-built Spanish fort called San Juan del Misuri, also reflected in nearby place names such as St. John and St. Johns Creek. Soon after arriving, the expedition met a boat from upriver carrying fur trader Regis Loisel, who had wintered near the Teton Sioux. Because President Thomas Jefferson considered contact with the Sioux a crucial part of the mission, this meeting was especially important, and Meriwether Lewis and Clark gathered valuable information and letters from Loisel that evening, possibly introductions to his trading partners Pierre-Antoine Tabeau and Hugh Heney farther upriver. French traders had been traveling the Missouri for at least a decade before the Corps of Discovery, reaching as far as the Mandan villages 1,600 miles from the river's mouth in search of furs, and the expedition relied heavily on such traders' maps and knowledge in 1804. Loisel, a Montreal-born trader returning from his third upriver voyage, likely provided intelligence about tribes beyond the Platte River and warned that they would see no Indians on the river below the Ponca nation. He had established a trading post around 1800 on Cedar Island, 1,200 miles up the Missouri, and had endured a harrowing winter as the Teton Sioux harassed him, seized his goods, and threatened his life. For the previous 10 years, the Teton Sioux had blockaded river trade to the Arikara and Mandan above them, and although Jefferson hoped to win them over and open commerce, the captains were prepared to use force to keep proceeding, a concern that may have influenced their decision to enlarge their party to more than 40 men and mount guns on the keelboat and two pirogues.