Fort Orleans, the first European post in the Missouri Valley, was built in 1723-24 by the French explorer Etienne Véniard De Bourgmond on the nearby Missouri River a few miles above the mouth of the Grand, though its exact location is unknown. Chosen by the Company of the Indies, De Bourgmond, a friend of the Indian and author of the first navigation report on the Missouri River in 1714, led about 40 men to establish the fort as a check against Spanish advance from the southwest and as a base for New Mexican and Indian trade. As commandant on the Missouri, he was also charged with making peace with the Comanche Indians. Across the river stood a village of Missouri Indians, a Siouan people who had called themselves Niutachis and were probably first called Missouris by the Illinois Indians, using an Algonquin term meaning "he of the big canoe"; the last of the Missouris died on the Oto Reservation in Oklahoma in 1907. The westernmost outpost of France in what is now Missouri, Fort Orleans included a chapel, the first Catholic church in the Missouri Valley, and its first resident priest was Abbé Mercier. After the fort was built, De Bourgmond traveled into what is now central Kansas in 1724 and fulfilled his commission to make peace with the Comanches. In 1725 he returned to France with several Indian chiefs and a young Missouri woman, whom the French called the Princess of the Missouri, baptized in Notre Dame, and married to a sergeant. De Bourgmond was made a noble and given a coat of arms showing an Indian against a silver mountain. He remained in France, and the fort closed in 1728. Fort Orleans stood in territory claimed for France in 1682 and named Louisiana after Louis XIV by La Salle; France held most of that claim for 80 years, ceded it to Spain in 1762, regained it in 1800, and sold it to the United States in 1803.