The Great West
In days before the railway had made possible a bulky commerce by
overland routes, rivers furnished the chief means of access to inland
regions. The fame of the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Danube
shows the part which great rivers have played in history. Of North
America's four greatest river systems, the two in the far north have
become known in times so recent that their place in history is not yet
determined. One of them, the Mackenzie, a mighty stream some two
thousand miles long, flows into the Arctic Ocean through what remains
chiefly a wilderness. The waters of the other, the Saskatchewan,
discharge into Hudson Bay more than a thousand miles from their source,
flowing through rich prairie land which is still but scantily peopled.
On the Saskatchewan, as on the remaining two systems, the St. Lawrence
and the Mississippi, the French were the pioneers. Though today the
regions drained by these four rivers are dominated by the rival race,
the story which we now follow is one of romantic enterprise in which the
honors are with France.
More perhaps by accident than by design had the French been the first to
settle on the St. Lawrence. Fishing vessels had hovered round the
entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence for years before, in 1535, the
French sailor, Jacques Cartier, advanced up the river as far as the foot
of the torrential rapids where now stands the city of Montreal. Cartier
was seeking a route to the Far East. He half believed that this
impressive waterway drained the plains of China and that around the next
bend he might find the busy life of an oriental city. The time came when
it was known that a great sea lay between America and Asia and the
mystery of the pathway to this sea long fascinated the pioneers of the
St. Lawrence. Canada was a colony, a trading-post, a mission, the
favorite field of Jesuit activity, but it was also the land which
offered by way of the St. Lawrence a route leading illimitably westward
to the Far East.
One other route rivaled the St. Lawrence in promise, and that was the
Mississippi. The two rivers are essentially different in their
approaches and in type. The mouth of the St. Lawrence opens directly
towards Europe and of all American rivers lies nearest to the seafaring
peoples of Europe. Since it flows chiefly in a rocky bed, its course
changes little; its waters are clear, and they become icy cold as they
approach the sea and mingle with the tide which flows into the great
Gulf of St. Lawrence from the Arctic regions. The Mississippi, on the
other hand, is a turbid, warm stream, flowing through soft lands. Its
shifting channel is divided at its mouth by deltas created from the vast
quantity of soil which the river carries in its current. On the
low-lying, forest-clad, northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico it was not
easy to find the mouth of the Mississippi by approaching it from the
sea. The voyage there from France was long and difficult; and, moreover,
Spain claimed the lands bordering on the Gulf of Mexico and declared
herself ready to drive out all intruders.
Nature, it is clear, dictated that, if France was to build up her power
in the interior of the New World, it was the valley of the St. Lawrence
which she should first occupy. Time has shown the riches of the lands
drained by the St. Lawrence. On no other river system in the world is
there now such a multitude of great cities. The modern traveler who
advances by this route to the sources of the river beyond the Great
Lakes surveys wonders ever more impressive. Before his view appear in
succession Quebec, Montreal, Toronto, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit,
Chicago, Duluth, and many other cities and towns, with millions in
population and an aggregate of wealth so vast as to stagger the
imagination. Step by step had the French advanced from Quebec to the
interior. Champlain was on Lake Huron in 1615, and there the Jesuits
soon had a flourishing mission to the Huron Indians. They had only to
follow the shore of Lake Huron to come to the St. Mary's River bearing
towards the sea the chilly waters of Lake Superior. On this river, a
much frequented fishing ground of the natives, they founded the mission
of Sainte Marie du Saut. Farther to the south, on the narrow opening
connecting Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, grew up the post known as
Michilimackinac. It was then inevitable that explorers and missionaries
should press on into both Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. By the time
that Frontenac came first to Canada in 1672 the French had a post called
St. Esprit on the south shore of Lake Superior near its western end and
they had also passed westward from Lake Michigan and founded posts on
both the Illinois and the Wisconsin Rivers which flow into the
Mississippi.
France had placed on record her claim to the whole of the Great West. On
a June morning in 1671 there had been a striking scene at Sainte Marie
du Saut. The French had summoned a great throng of Indians to the spot.
There, with impressive ceremony, Saint-Lusson, an officer from Canada,
had set up a cedar post on which was a plate engraved with the royal
arms, and proclaimed Louis XIV lord of all the Indian tribes and of all
the lands, rivers, and lakes, discovered and to be discovered in the
region stretching from the Atlantic to that other mysterious sea beyond
the spreading lands of the West. Henceforth at their peril would the
natives disobey the French King, or other states encroach upon these his
lands. A Jesuit priest followed Saint-Lusson with a description to the
savages of their new lord, the King of France. He was master of all the
other rulers of the world. At his word the earth trembled. He could set
earth and sea on fire by the blaze of his cannon. The priest knew the
temper of his savage audience and told of the King's warriors covered
with the blood of his enemies, of the rivers of blood which flowed from
their wounds, of the King's countless prisoners, of his riches and his
power, so great that all the world obeyed him. The savages gave
delighted shouts at the strange ceremony, but of its real meaning they
knew nothing. What they understood was that the French seemed to be good
friends who brought them muskets, hatchets, cloth, and especially the
loved but destructive firewater which the savage palate ever craved.
The mystery of the Great Lakes once solved, there still remained that of
the Western Sea. The St. Lawrence flowed eastward. Another river must
therefore be found flowing westward. The French were eager listeners
when the savages talked of a mighty river in the west flowing to the
sea. They meant, as we now suppose, the Mississippi. There are vague
stories of Frenchmen on the Mississippi at an earlier date; but, however
this may be, it is certain that in the summer of 1673 Louis Joliet, the
son of a wagon-maker of Quebec, and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest,
reached and descended the great river from the mouth of the Wisconsin to
a point far past the mouth of the Ohio.
France thus planted herself on the Mississippi, though there her
occupation was less complete and thorough than it was on the St.
Lawrence. Distance was an obstacle; it was a far cry from Quebec by
land, and from France the voyage by sea through the Gulf of Mexico was
hardly less difficult. The explorer La Salle tried both routes. In
1681-1682 he set out from Montreal, reached the Mississippi overland,
and descended to its mouth. Two years later he sailed from France with
four ships bound for the mouth of the river, there to establish a
colony; but before achieving his aim he was murdered in a treacherous
attack led by his own countrymen.
It was Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, who first made good France's
claim to the Mississippi. He reached the river by sea in 1699 and
ascended to a point some eighty miles beyond the present city of New
Orleans. Farther east, on Biloxi Bay, he built Fort Maurepas and planted
his first colony. Spain disliked this intrusion; but Spain--soon to be
herself ruled, as France then was, by a Bourbon king--did not prove
irreconcilable and slowly France built up a colony in the south. It was
in 1718 that Iberville's brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de
Bienville, founded New Orleans, destined to become in time one of the
great cities of North America. Its beginnings were not propitious. The
historian Charlevoix describes it as being in 1721 a low-lying,
malarious place, infested by snakes and alligators, and consisting of a
hundred wretched hovels.
In spite of this dreary outlook, it was still true that France, planted
at the mouth of the Mississippi, controlled the greatest waterway in the
world. Soon she had scattered settlements stretching northward to the
Ohio and the Missouri, the one river reaching eastward almost to the
waters of the St. Lawrence system, the other flowing out of the western
plains from its source in the Rocky Mountains. The old mystery, however,
remained, for the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, into
Atlantic waters already well known. The route to the Western Sea was
still to be found.
It was easy enough for France to record a sweeping claim to the West,
but to make good this claim she needed a chain of posts, which should
also be forts, linking the Mississippi with the St. Lawrence and strong
enough to impress the Indians whose country she had invaded. At first
she had reached the interior by way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron,
and in that northern country her position was secure enough through her
posts on the upper lakes. The route farther south by Lake Ontario and
Lake Erie was more difficult. The Iroquois menaced Niagara and long
refused to let France have a footing there to protect her pathway to
Lake Erie and the Ohio Valley. It was not until 1720, a period
comparatively late, that the French managed to have a fort at the mouth
of the Niagara. On the Detroit River, the next strategic point on the
way westward, they were established earlier. Just after Frontenac died
in 1698, La Mothe Cadillac urged that there should be built on this
river a fort and town which might be made the center of all the trading
interests west of Lake Erie. End the folly, he urged, of going still
farther afield among the Indians and teaching them the French language
and French modes of thought. Leave the Indians to live their own type of
life, to hunt and to fish. They need European trade and they have
valuable furs to exchange. Encourage them to come to the French at
Detroit and see that they go nowhere else by not allowing any other
posts in the western country. Cadillac was himself a keen if secret
participant in the profits of the fur trade and hoped to be placed in
command at Detroit and there to become independent of control from
Quebec. Detroit was founded in 1701; and though for a long time it did
not thrive, the fact that on the site has grown up one of the great
industrial cities of modern times shows that Cadillac had read aright
the meaning of the geography of North America.
When France was secure at Niagara and at Detroit, two problems still
remained unsolved. One was that of occupying the valley of the Ohio, the
waters of which flow westward almost from the south shore of Lake Erie
until they empty into the vaster flood of the Mississippi. Here there
was a lion in the path, for the English claimed this region as naturally
the hinterland of the colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania. What
happened on the Ohio we shall see in a later chapter. The other great
problem, to be followed here, was to explore the regions which lay
beyond the Mississippi. These spread into a remote unknown, unexplored
by the white man, and might ultimately lead to the Western Sea. We might
have supposed that France's farther adventure into the West would have
been from the Mississippi up its great tributary the Missouri, which
flows eastward from the eternal snows of the Rocky Mountains. Always,
however, the uncertain temper of the many Indian tribes in this region
made the advance difficult. The tribes inhabiting the west bank of the
Mississippi were especially restless and savage. The Sioux, in
particular, made life perilous for the French at their posts near the
mouth of the Missouri.
It thus happened that the white man first reached the remoter West by
way of regions farther north. It became easy enough to coast along the
north and the south shore of Lake Superior, easy enough to find rivers
which fed the great system of the St. Lawrence or of the Mississippi.
These, however, would not solve the mystery. A river flowing westward
was still to be sought. Thus, both in pursuit of the fur trade and in
quest of the Western Sea, the French advanced westward from Lake
Superior. Where now stands the city of Fort William there flows into
Lake Superior the little stream called still by its Indian name of
Kaministiquia. There the French had long maintained a trading-post from
which they made adventurous journeys northward and westward.
The rugged regions still farther north had already been explored, at
least in outline. There lay the great inland sea known as Hudson Bay.
French and English had long disputed for its mastery. By 1670 the
English had found trade to Hudson Bay so promising that they then
created the Hudson's Bay Company, which remains one of the great trading
corporations of the world. With the English on Hudson Bay, New France
was between English on the north and English on the south and did not
like it. On Hudson Bay the English showed the same characteristics which
they had shown in New England. They were not stirred by vivid imaginings
of what might be found westward beyond the low-lying coast of the great
inland sea. They came for trade, planted themselves at the mouths of the
chief rivers, unpacked their goods, and waited for the natives to come
to barter with them. For many years the natives came, since they must
have the knives, hatchets, and firearms of Europe. To share this
profitable trade the French, now going overland to the north from
Quebec, now sailing into Hudson Bay by the Straits, attacked the
English; and on those dreary waters, long before the Great West was
known, there had been many a naval battle, many a hand-to-hand fight for
forts and their rich prize of furs.
The chief French hero in this struggle was that son of Charles Le Moyne
of Montreal, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, who ended his days in the task
of founding the French colony of Louisiana. He was perhaps the most
notable of all the adventurous leaders whom New France produced. He was
first on Hudson Bay in the late summer of 1686, in a party of about a
hundred men, led by the Chevalier de Troyes, who had marched overland
from Quebec through the wilderness. The English on the Bay, with a
charter from King Charles II, the friend of the French, and in a time of
profound peace under his successor, thought themselves secure. They now
had, however, a rude awakening. In the dead of night the Frenchmen fell
upon Fort Hayes, captured its dazed garrison, and looted the place. The
same fate befell all the other English posts on the Bay. Iberville
gained a rich store of furs as his share of the plunder and returned
with it to Quebec in 1687, just at the time when La Salle, that other
pioneer of France, was struck down in the distant south by a murderer's
hand.
Iberville was, above all else, a sailor. The easiest route to Hudson Bay
was by way of the sea. More than once after his first experience he led
to the Bay a naval expedition. His exploits are still remembered with
pride in French naval annals. In 1697 he sailed the Pelican through the
ice-floes of Hudson Straits. He was attacked by three English
merchantmen, with one hundred and twenty guns against his forty-four.
One of the English ships escaped, one Iberville sank with all on board,
one he captured. That autumn the hardy corsair was in France with a
great booty from the furs which the English had laboriously gathered.
The triumph of the French on Hudson Bay was short-lived. Their exploits,
though brilliant and daring, were more of the nature of raids than
attempts to settle and explore. They did no more than the English to
ascend the Nelson or other rivers to find what lay beyond; and in 1713,
by the Treaty of Utrecht, as we have already seen, they gave up all
claim to Hudson Bay and yielded that region to the English.
Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Vérendrye, was a member of the
Canadian noblesse, a son of the Governor of Three Rivers on the St.
Lawrence. He was born in 1685 and had taken part in the border warfare
of the days of Queen Anne. He was a member of the raiding party led
against New England by Hertel de Rouville in 1704 and may have been one
of those who burst in on the little town of Deerfield, Massachusetts,
and either butchered or carried off as prisoners most of the
inhabitants. Shortly afterwards we find him a participant in warfare of
a less ignoble type. In 1706 he went to France and became an ensign in a
regiment of grenadiers. Those were the days when Marlborough was
hammering and destroying the armies of Louis XIV. La Vérendrye took part
in the last of the series of great battles, the bloody conflict at
Malplaquet in 1709. He received a bullet wound through the body, was
left for dead on the field, fell into the hands of the enemy, and for
fifteen months was a captive. On his release he was too poor to maintain
himself as an officer in France and soon returned to Canada, where he
served as an officer in a colonial regiment until the peace of 1713.
Then the ambitious young man, recently married, with a growing family
and slight resources, had to work out a career suited to his genius.
His genius was that of an explorer; his task, which fully occupied his
alert mind, was that of finding the long dreamed of passage to the
Western Sea. The venture certainly offered fascinations. Noyon, a
fellow-townsman of La Vérendrye at Three Rivers, had brought back from
the distant Lake of the Woods, in 1716, a glowing account, told to him
by the natives, of walled cities, of ships and cannon, and of
white-bearded men who lived farther west. In 1720 the Jesuit Charlevoix,
already familiar with Canada, came out from France, went to the
Mississippi country, and reported that an attempt to find the path to
the Western Sea might be made either by way of the Missouri or farther
north through the country of the Sioux west of Lake Superior. Both
routes involved going among warlike native tribes engaged in incessant
and bloody struggles with each other and not unlikely to turn on the
white intruder. Memorial after memorial to the French court for
assistance resulted at last in serious effort, but effort handicapped
because the court thought that a monopoly of the fur trade was the only
inducement required to promote the work of discovery.
La Vérendrye was more eager to reach the Western Sea than he was to
trade. To outward seeming, however, he became just a fur trader and a
successful one. We find him, in 1726, at the trading-post of Nipigon,
not far from the lake of that name, near the north shore of Lake
Superior. From this point it was not very difficult to reach the shore
of one great sea, Hudson Bay, but that was not the Western Sea which
fired his imagination. Incessantly he questioned the savages with whom
he traded about what lay in the unknown West. His zeal was kindled anew
by the talk of an Indian named Ochagach. This man said that he himself
had been on a great lake lying west of Lake Superior, that out of it
flowed a river westward, that he had paddled down this river until he
came to water which, as La Vérendrye understood, rose and fell like the
tide. Farther, to the actual mouth of the river, the savage had not
gone, for fear of enemies, but he had been told that it emptied into a
great body of salt water upon the shores of which lived many people. We
may be sure that La Vérendrye read into the words of the savage the
meaning which he himself desired and that in reality the Indian was
describing only the waters which flow into Lake Winnipeg.
La Vérendrye was all eagerness. Soon we find him back at Quebec stirring
by his own enthusiasm the zeal of the Marquis de Beauharnois, the
Governor of Canada, and begging for help to pay and equip a hundred men
for the great enterprise in the West. The Governor did what he could but
was unable to move the French court to give money. The sole help offered
was a monopoly of the fur trade in the region to be explored, a doubtful
gift, since it angered all the traders excluded from the monopoly. La
Vérendrye, however, was able, by promising to hand over most of the
profits, to persuade merchants in Montreal to equip him with the
necessary men and merchandise.
There followed a period of high hopes and of heart-breaking failure. In
1731 La Vérendrye set out for the West with three sons, a nephew, a
Jesuit priest, the Indian Ochagach as guide--a party numbering in all
about fifty. He intended to build trading-posts as he went westward and
to make the last post always a base from which to advance still farther.
His difficulties read like those of Columbus. His men not only disliked
the hard work which was inevitable but were haunted by superstitious
fears of malignant fiends in the unknown land who were ready to punish
the invaders of their secrets. The route lay across the rough country
beyond Lake Superior. There were many long portages over which his men
must carry the provisions and heavy stores for trade. At length the
party reached Rainy Lake, and out of Rainy Lake the waters flow
westward. The country seemed delightful. Fish and game were abundant,
and it was not hard to secure a rich store of furs. On the shore of the
lake, in a charming meadow surrounded by oak trees, La Vérendrye built a
trading-post on waters flowing to the west, naming it Fort St. Pierre.
The voyageurs could now travel westward with the current. It is certain
that other Frenchmen had preceded them in that region, but this is the
first voyage of discovery of which we have any details. Escorted by an
imposing array of fifty canoes of Indians, La Vérendrye floated down
Rainy River to the Lake of the Woods, and here, on a beautiful peninsula
jutting out into the lake, he built another post, Fort St. Charles. It
must have seemed imposing to the natives. On walls one hundred feet
square were four bastions and a watchtower; evidence of the perennial
need of alertness and strength in the Indian country. There were a
chapel, houses for the commandant and the priest, a powder-magazine, a
storehouse, and other buildings. La Vérendrye cleared some land and
planted wheat, and was thus the pioneer in the mighty wheat production
of the West. Fish and game were abundant and the outlook was smiling. By
this time the second winter of La Vérendrye's adventurous journeying was
near, but even the cold of that hard region could not chill his
eagerness. He himself waited at Fort St. Charles but his eldest son,
Jean Baptiste, set out to explore still farther.
We may follow with interest the little group of Frenchmen and Indian
guides as they file on snowshoes along the surface of the frozen river
or over the deep snow of the silent forest on, ever on, to the West.
They are the first white men of whom we have certain knowledge to press
beyond the Lake of the Woods into that great Northwest so full of
meaning for the future. The going was laborious and the distances seemed
long, for on their return they reported that they had gone a hundred and
fifty leagues, though in truth the distance was only a hundred and fifty
miles. Then at last they stood on the shores of a vast body of water,
ice-bound and forbidding as it lay in the grip of winter. It opened out
illimitably westward. But it was not the Western Sea, for its waters
were fresh. The shallow waters of Lake Winnipeg empty not into the
Western Sea but into the Atlantic by way of Hudson Bay. Its shores then
were deserted and desolate, and even to this day they are but scantily
peopled. In that wild land there was no hint of the populous East of
which La Vérendrye had dreamed.
At the mouth of the Winnipeg River, where it enters Lake Winnipeg, La
Vérendrye built Fort Maurepas, named after the French minister who was
in charge of the colonies and who was influential at court. The name no
doubt expresses some clinging hope which La Vérendrye still cherished of
obtaining help from the King. Already he was hard pressed for resources.
Where were the means to come from for this costly work of building
forts? From time to time he sent eastward canoes laden with furs which,
after a long and difficult journey, reached Montreal. The traders to
whom the furs were consigned sold them and kept the money as their own
on account of their outlay. La Vérendrye in the far interior could not
pay his men and would soon be without goods to trade with the Indians.
After having repeatedly begged for help but in vain, he made a rapid
journey to Montreal and implored the Governor to aid an enterprise which
might change the outlook of the whole world. The Governor was willing
but without the consent of France could not give help. By promising the
traders, who were now partners in his monopoly, profits of one hundred
per cent on their outlay, La Vérendrye at last secured what he needed.
His canoes were laden with goods, and soon brawny arms were driving once
again the graceful craft westward. He had offered a new hostage to
fortune by arranging that his fourth son, a lad of eighteen, should
follow him in the next year.
La Vérendrye pressed on eagerly in advance of the heavy-laden canoes.
Grim news met him soon after he reached Fort St. Charles on the Lake of
the Woods. His nephew La Jemeraye, a born leader of men, who was at the
most advanced station, Fort Maurepas on Lake Winnipeg, had broken down
from exposure, anxiety, and overwork, and had been laid in a lonely
grave in the wilderness. Nearly all pioneer work is a record of tragedy
and its gloom lies heavy on the career of La Vérendrye. A little later
came another sorrow-laden disaster. La Vérendrye sent his eldest son
Jean back to Rainy Lake to hurry the canoes from Montreal which were
bringing needed food. The party landed on a peninsula at the discharge
of Rainy Lake into Rainy River, fell into an ambush of Sioux Indians,
and were butchered to a man. This incident reveals the chief cause of
the slow progress in discovery in the Great West: the temper of the
savages was always uncertain.
There is no sign that La Vérendrye wavered in his great hope even when
he realized that the Winnipeg River was not the river flowing westward
which he sought. We know now that the northern regions of the American
continent east of the Rocky Mountains are tilted towards the east and
the north and that in all its vast spaces there is no great river which
flows to the west. La Vérendrye, however, ignorant of this dictate of
nature, longed to paddle with the stream towards the west. The Red River
flows from the south into Lake Winnipeg at a point near the mouth of the
Winnipeg River. Up the Red River went La Vérendrye and found a
tributary, the Assiniboine, flowing into it from the west. At the point
of junction, where has grown up the city of Winnipeg, he built a tiny
fort, called Fort Rouge, a name still preserved in a suburb of the
modern Winnipeg. The explorers went southward on the Red River, and then
went westward on the Assiniboine River only to find the waters
persistently flowing against them and no definite news of other waters
leading to the Western Sea. On the Assiniboine, near the site of the
present town of Portage la Prairie in Manitoba, La Vérendrye built Fort
La Reine. Its name is evidence still perhaps of hopes for aid through
the Queen if not through the King of France.
In 1737 La Vérendrye made once more the long journey to Montreal. His
fourteen canoes laden with furs were an earnest of the riches of the
wonderful West and so pleased his Montreal partners that again they
fitted him out with adequate supplies. In the summer of 1738 we find him
at Fort La Reine, rich for the moment in goods with which to trade, keen
and competent as a trader, and having great influence with the natives.
All through the West he found Indians who went to trade with the English
on Hudson Bay, and he constantly urged them not to take the long journey
but to depend upon the French who came into their own country. It was a
policy well fitted to cause searching of heart among the English traders
who seemed so secure in their snug quarters on the seashore waiting for
the Indians to come to them.
La Vérendrye had now a fresh plan for penetrating farther on his
alluring quest. He had heard of a river to the south to be reached by a
journey overland. It was a new thing for him to abandon canoes and march
on foot but this he now did and with winter approaching. On October 16,
1738, when the autumn winds were already chill, there was a striking
little parade at Fort La Reine. The drummer beat the garrison to arms.
What with soldiers brought from Canada, the voyageurs who had paddled
the great canoes, and the Indians who dogged always the steps of the
French traders, there was a muster at the fort of some scores of men. La
Vérendrye reviewed the whole company and from them chose for his
expedition twenty soldiers and voyageurs and about twenty Assiniboine
Indians. As companions for himself he took François and Pierre, two of
his three surviving sons, and two traders who were at the fort.
We can picture the little company setting out on the 18th of October on
foot, with some semblance of military order, by a well-beaten trail
leading across the high land which separates the Red River country from
the regions to the southwest. La Vérendrye had heard much of a people,
the Mandans, dwelling in well-ordered villages on the banks of a great
river and cultivating the soil instead of living the wandering life of
hunters. Such wonders of Mandan culture had been reported to La
Vérendrye that he half expected to find them white men with a
civilization equal to that of Europe. The river was in reality not an
unknown stream, as La Vérendrye hoped, but the Missouri, a river already
frequented by the French in its lower stretches where its waters join
those of the Mississippi.
It was a long march over the prairie. La Vérendrye found that he could
not hurry his Indian guides. They insisted on delays during days of
glorious autumn weather when it would have been wise to press on and
avoid the winter cold on the wind-swept prairie. They went out of their
way to visit a village of their own Assiniboine tribe; and, when they
resumed their journey, this whole village followed them. The prairie
Indians had a more developed sense of order and discipline than the
tribes of the forest. La Vérendrye admired the military regularity of
the savages on the march. They divided the company of more than six
hundred into three columns: in front, scouts to look out for an enemy
and also for herds of buffalo; in the center, well protected, the old
and the lame, all those incapable of fighting; and, for a rear-guard,
strong fighting men. When buffalo were seen, the most active of the
fighters rushed to the front to aid in hemming in the game. Women and
dogs carried the baggage, the men condescending to bear only their
weapons.
Not until cold December had come did the party reach the chief Mandan
village. It was in some sense imposing, for the Indian lodges were
arranged neatly in streets and squares and the surrounding palisade was
strong and well built. Around the fort was a ditch fifteen feet deep and
of equal width, which made the village impregnable in Indian warfare.
After saluting the village with three volleys of musket fire, La
Vérendrye marched in with great ceremony, under the French flag, only to
discover that the Mandans were not greatly unlike the Assiniboines and
other Indians of the West whom he already knew. The men went about naked
and the women nearly so. They were skilled in dressing leather. They
were also cunning traders, for they duped La Vérendrye's friends, the
Assiniboines, and cheated them out of their muskets, ammunition,
kettles, and knives. Great eaters were the Mandans. They cultivated
abundant crops and stored them in cave cellars. Every day they brought
their visitors more than twenty dishes cooked in earthen pottery of
their own handicraft. There was incredible feasting, which La Vérendrye
avoided but which his sons enjoyed. The Mandan language he could not
understand and close questioning as to the route to the Western Sea was
thus impossible. He learned enough to discredit the vague tales of white
men in armor and peopled towns with which his lying guides had regaled
him. In the end he decided for the time being to return to Fort La Reine
and to leave two of his followers to learn the Mandan language so that
in the future they might act as interpreters. When he left the Mandan
village on the 13th of December, he was already ill and it is a wonder
that he did not perish from the cold on the winter journey across hill
and prairie. "In all my life I have never," he says, "endured such
misery from illness and fatigue, as on that journey." On the 11th of
February he was back at Fort La Reine, worn out and broken in health but
still undaunted and resolved never to abandon his search.
Abandon it he never did. We find him in Montreal in 1740 involved in
what he had always held in horror--a lawsuit brought against him by some
impatient creditor. The report had gone abroad that he was amassing
great wealth, when, as he said, all that he had accumulated was a debt
of forty thousand livres. In the autumn of 1741 he was back at Fort La
Reine, where he welcomed his son Pierre from a fruitless journey to the
Mandans.
The most famous of all the efforts of the family was now on foot. On
April 29, 1742, a new expedition started from Fort La Reine, led by La
Vérendrye's two sons, Pierre and François. They knew the nature of the
task before them, its perils as well as its hopes. They took with them
no imposing company as their father had done, but only two men. The
party of four, too feeble to fight their way, had to trust to the
peaceful disposition of the natives. When they started, the prairie was
turning from brown to green and the rivers were still swollen from the
spring thaw. In three weeks they reached a Mandan village on the upper
Missouri and were well received. It was after midsummer when they set
out again and pressed on westward with a trend to the south. The country
was bare and desolate. For twenty days they saw no human being. They had
Mandan guides who promised to take them to the next tribe, the Handsome
Men--Beaux Hommes--as the brothers called them, a tribe much feared by
the Mandans. The travelers were now mounted; for the horse, brought
first to America by the Spaniards, had run wild on the western plains
where the European himself had not yet penetrated, and had become an
indispensable aid to certain of the native tribes. Deer and buffalo were
in abundance and they had no lack of food.
When they reached the tribe of Beaux Hommes, the Mandan guides fled
homeward. Summer passed into bleak autumn with chill winds and long
nights. By the end of October they were among the Horse Indians who,
they had been told, could guide them to the sea. These, however, now
said that only the Bow Indians, farther on, could do this. Winter was
near when they were among these Indians, probably a tribe of the Sioux,
whom they found excitedly preparing for a raid on their neighbors
farther west, the Snakes. They were going, they said, towards the
mountains and there the Frenchmen could look out on the great sea. So
the story goes on. The brothers advanced ever westward and the land
became more rugged, for they were now climbing upward from the prairie
country. At last, on January 1, 1743, they saw what both cheered and
discouraged them. In the distance were mountains. About them was the
prairie, with game in abundance. It was a great host with which the
brothers traveled for there were two thousand warriors with their
families who made night vocal with songs and yells. On the 12th of
January, nearly two weeks later, with an advance party of warriors, the
La Vérendryes reached the foot of the mountains, "well wooded with
timber of every kind and very high."
Was it the Rocky Mountains which they saw? Had they reached that last
mighty barrier of snow-capped peaks, rugged valleys, and torrential
streams, beyond which lay the sea? That they had done so was long
assumed and many conjectures have been offered as to the point in the
Rockies near which they made their last camp. Their further progress was
checked by an unexpected crisis. One day they came upon an encampment of
the dreaded Snake Indians which had been abandoned in great haste. This,
the Bow Indians thought, could only mean that the Snakes had hurriedly
left their camp in order to slip in behind the advance guard of the Bows
and massacre the women and children left in the rear. Panic seized the
Bows and they turned homeward in wild confusion. Their chief could not
restrain them. "I was very much disappointed," writes one of the
brothers, "that I could not climb the mountains"--those mountains from
which he had been told that he might view the Western Sea.
There was nothing for it but to turn back through snowdrifts over the
bleak prairie. The progress was slow for the snow was sometimes two feet
deep. On the 1st of March the brothers parted with their Bow friends at
their village and then headed for home. By the 20th they were encamped
with a friendly tribe on the banks of the Missouri. Here, to assert that
Louis XV was lord of all that country, they built on an eminence a
pyramid of stones and in it they buried a tablet of lead with an
inscription which recorded the name of Louis XV, their King, and of the
Marquis de Beauharnois, Governor of Canada, and the date of the visit.
Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. One hundred and seventy years
later, on February 16, 1913, a schoolgirl strolling with some companions
on a Sunday afternoon near the High School in the town of Pierre, South
Dakota, stumbled upon a projecting corner of this tablet, which was in
an excellent state of preservation. Thus we know exactly where the
brothers La Vérendrye were on April 2, 1743, when they bade farewell to
their Indian friends and set out on horseback for Fort La Reine.
Spring had turned to summer before the brothers reached their
destination. On July 2, 1743, they relieved the anxiety of their waiting
father after an absence of fifteen months. Moving slowly as they did,
could they have traveled from the distant Rockies from the time in
January when they turned back? It seems doubtful; and in spite of the
long-cherished belief that the brothers reached the foothills of the
Rocky Mountains, it may be that they had not penetrated beyond the
barrier which we know as the Black Hills. The chance discovery of a
forgotten plate by school children may in truth prove that, as late as
in 1750, the Rocky Mountains had not yet been seen by white men and that
the first vision of that mighty range was obtained much farther north in
Canada.
After 1743 the French seem to have made no further efforts to reach the
Western Sea by way of the Missouri. If in reality the brothers had not
gone beyond the Black Hills in South Dakota, then their most important
work appears to have been done within what is now Canada, as discoverers
of the Saskatchewan, the mighty river which carries to far-distant
Hudson Bay the waters melted on the eastern slopes of the Rocky
Mountains. It was by this route up the Saskatchewan that fifty years
later was solved the tough and haunting problem of going over the
mountains to the Pacific Ocean. La Vérendrye now ascended the
Saskatchewan for some three hundred miles to the forks where it divides
into two great branches. He was going deeper into debt but he hoped
always for help from the King. It is pathetic to see today, on the map
of that part of western Canada which he and his sons explored, a town, a
lake, and a county called Dauphin, in honor of the heir to the throne of
France. No doubt La Vérendrye had the thought that some day he might
plead with the Dauphin when he had become King for help in his great
task.
Before the year 1749 had ended La Vérendrye, who had returned to
Montreal, was in his grave. His sons, partners in his work, expected to
be charged with the task--to which the King, in 1749, had anew appointed
their father--of continuing the work of discovery in the West. François,
for a time ill, wrote in 1750 from Montreal to La Jonquière, the
Governor at Quebec, that he hoped to take up the plans of his father.
The Governor's reply was that he had appointed another officer,
Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, to lead in the search for the Western Sea.
François hurried to Quebec. The Governor met him with a bland face and
seemed friendly. François urged that he and his brothers claimed no
preëminence and that they were ready to serve under the orders of
Saint-Pierre. The Governor was hesitant; but at last told François
frankly that the new leader desired no help either from him or from his
brothers. François was dismayed. He and his brothers were in debt.
Already he had sent on stores and men to the West and the men were
likely to starve if not followed by provisions. His chief property was
in the West in the form of goods which would be plundered without his
guardianship. To tide over the immediate future he sold the one small
piece of land in Montreal which he had inherited from his father and
threw this slight sop to his urgent creditors.
Saint-Pierre, strong in his right of monopoly, insisted that the
brothers should not even return to the West. François urged that to go
was a matter of life and death. In some way he secured leave to set out
with one laden canoe. When Saint-Pierre found that François had gone, he
claimed damages for the intrusion on his monopoly and secured an order
to pursue François and bring him back. He caught him at Michilimackinac.
The meeting between the two men at that place involved explanations.
Face to face with an injured man, Saint-Pierre admitted that he had been
in the wrong, paid to François many compliments, and regretted that he
had not joined hands with the brothers.
The mischief done was, however, irreparable. François, crippled by
opposition, could not carry on his trade with success and in the end he
returned to Montreal a ruined man overwhelmed with debt. He wrote to the
French court a noble appeal for relief:
I remain without friends and without patrimony ... a simple ensign of
the second grade; my elder brother has only the same rank as myself; my
younger brother is only a junior cadet. This is the result of all that
my father, my brothers and myself have done.... There are in the hands
of your Lordship resources of compensation and of consolation. I venture
to appeal to you for relief. To find ourselves excluded from the West
would mean to be cruelly robbed of our heritage, to realize for
ourselves all that is bitter and to see others secure all that is sweet.
The appeal fell on deaf ears. The brothers sank into obscurity. During
Montcalm's campaigns from 1756 to 1759 Pierre and François seem to have
been engaged in military service. François was killed in the siege of
Quebec in 1759. After the final surrender of Canada the Auguste, a ship
laden for the most part with refugees returning to France, was wrecked
on the St. Lawrence. Among those on board who perished was Pierre de la
Vérendrye. He died amid the howling of the tempest and the cries of
drowning men. Tragedy, unrelenting, had pursued him to the end.
Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, the choice of the Marquis de la Jonquière to
take up the search for the Western Sea in succession to the elder La
Vérendrye, himself went only as far as Fort La Reine. It was a
subordinate, the Chevalier de Niverville, whom he sent farther west to
find the great mountains and if possible the sea. The winter of 1750-51
had set in before Niverville was ready. He started apparently from Fort
Maurepas, on snowshoes, his party dragging their supplies on toboggans.
Before they reached Paskoya on the Saskatchewan (the modern Le Pas) they
had nearly perished of hunger and were able to save their lives only by
catching a few fish through the ice. Niverville was ill. He sent forward
ten men by canoe up the Saskatchewan. They traveled with such rapidity
that on May 29, 1751, they had reached the Rockies. They built a good
fort, which they named Fort La Jonquière, and stored it with a
considerable quantity of provisions. If, as seems likely, the brothers
La Vérendrye saw only the Black Hills, these ten unknown men were the
discoverers of the Rocky Mountains.
Saint-Pierre braced himself to set out for the distant goal but he was
easily discouraged. Niverville, he said, was ill; the Indians were at
war among themselves; some of them were plotting what Saint-Pierre calls
"treason" to the French and their "perfidy" surpassed anything in his
lifelong experience. The hostile influence of the English he thought
all-pervasive. Obviously these are excuses. He did not like the task and
he turned back. As it was, he tells a dramatic story of how Indians
crowded into Fort La Reine in a threatening manner and how he saved the
fort and himself only by rushing to the magazine with a lighted torch,
knocking open a barrel of powder, and threatening to blow up everything
and everybody if the savages did not withdraw at once. He was eager to
leave the country. In 1752 he handed over the command to St. Luc de la
Corne and, in August of that year, having experienced "much
wretchedness" on his journeys, he was safely back in Montreal. The
founding of Fort La Jonquière was, no doubt, a great feat. Where the
fort stood we do not know. It may have been on the North Saskatchewan,
near Edmonton, or on the south branch of the river near Calgary. In any
case it was a far-flung outpost of France.
The English had always been more prosaic than the French. The traders on
Hudson Bay worked, indeed, under a monopoly not less rigorous than that
which Canada imposed. Without doubt, many an Englishman on the Bay was
haunted by the hope and desire to reach the Western Sea. But the
servants of the Company knew that to buy and sell at a profit was their
chief aim. They had been on the whole content to wait for trade to come
to them. By 1740 the Indians, who made the long journey to the Bay by
the intricate waters which carried to the sea the flood of the
Saskatchewan and Lake Winnipeg, were showing to the English articles
supplied by the French at points far inland. It thus became evident that
the French were tapping the traffic in furs near its source and cutting
off the stream which had long flowed to Hudson Bay.
In June, 1754, Anthony Hendry, a young man in the service of the
Company, left York factory on Hudson Bay to find out what the French
were doing. We have a slight but carefully written diary of Hendry's
journey. He does not fail to note that in the summer weather life was
made almost intolerable by the "musketoos." Traveling by canoe he
reached the Saskatchewan River and tells how, on the 22d of July, he
came to "a French house." It was Fort Paskoya. When Hendry paddled up to
the river bank two Frenchmen met him and "in a very genteel manner"
invited him into their house. With all courtesy they asked him, he says,
if he had any letter from his master and where and on what design he was
going inland. His answer was that he had been sent "to view the Country"
and that he intended to return to Hudson Bay in the spring. The
Frenchmen were sorry that their own master, who was apparently the
well-known Canadian leader, St. Luc de la Corne, the successor of
Saint-Pierre, had gone to Montreal with furs, and added their regrets
that they must detain Hendry until this leader's return. At this
Hendry's Indians grunted and said that the French dared not do so. Next
day Hendry took breakfast and dinner at the fort, gave "two feet of
tobacco" (at that time it was sold in long coils) to his hosts, and in
return received some moose flesh. The confidence of his Indian guides
that the French would not dare to detain him was justified. Next day
Hendry paddled on up the river and advanced more than twenty miles,
camping at night by "the largest Birch trees I have yet seen."
Hendry wished to see the country thoroughly and to come into touch with
the natives. The best way to do this and to obtain food was to leave the
river and go boldly overland. He accordingly left his canoes behind and
advanced on foot. The party was starving. On a Sunday in July he walked
twenty-six miles and says "neither Bird nor Beast to be seen,--so that
we have nothing to eat." The next day he traveled twenty-four miles on
an empty stomach and then, to his delight, found a supply of ripe
strawberries, "the size of black currants and the finest I ever eat."
The next day his Indians killed two moose. He then met natives who, when
he asked them to go to Hudson Bay to trade, replied that they could
obtain all they needed from the French posts. The tact and skill of the
French were such that, as Hendry admits, reluctantly enough, the Indians
were already strongly attached to them. Day after day Hendry journeyed
on over the rolling prairie in the warm summer days. He came to the
south branch of the Saskatchewan near the point where now stands the
city of Saskatoon and crossed the river on the 21st of August. Then on
to the West, eager to take part in the hunting of the buffalo.
Hendry is almost certainly the first Englishman to see this region. In
the end he reached the mountains. He makes no mention of having seen or
heard anything of Fort La Jonquière, built three years earlier. He had
aims different from those of La Vérendrye and other French explorers.
Not the Western Sea but openings for trade was he seeking. His great aim
was to reach the tribe called later the Blackfeet Indians, who were
mighty hunters of the buffalo. Hendry was alive to the impressions of
nature. The intense heat of August was followed in September by glorious
weather, with the nights cool and the mosquitoes no longer troublesome.
The climate was bracing. He complains only, from time to time, of
swollen feet, and we need not wonder since his daily march occasionally
went beyond twenty-five miles. Sometimes for days he saw no living
creature. At other times wild life was prolific: there were moose in
great abundance, bears, including the dreaded grizzly--one of which
killed an Indian of his company and badly mutilated another--beaver,
wild horses, and, above all, the buffalo. "Saw many herds of Buffalo
grazing like English cattle," he says, on the 13th of September, and the
next day he goes buffalo hunting. Guns and ammunition were costly. His
Indians, who used only bows and arrows, on this day killed seven--"fine
sport," says Hendry. Often the Indians took only the tongue, leaving the
carcass for the wolves, who naturally abounded in such advantageous
conditions. It is not easy now to imagine the part played by the buffalo
in the life of the prairie. As Hendry advanced the herds were so dense
as sometimes to retard his progress. Other writers tell of the vast
numbers of these creatures. Alexander Henry, the younger, writing on
April 1, 1801, says that in a river swollen by spring floods, drowned
buffalo floated past his camp in one continuous line for two days and
two nights. In prairie fires thousands were blinded and would go
tumbling down banks into streams or lie down to die. One morning the
bellowing of buffaloes awakened Henry and he looked out to see the
prairie black. "The ground was covered at every point of the compass, as
far as the eye could reach, and every animal was in motion."
Daily as Hendry advanced he saw smoke in the distance and his Indians
told him that it came from the camp of the Blackfeet. He reached them on
Monday the 14th of October. When four miles away he was stopped by
mounted scouts who asked whether he came as a friend or as an enemy. He
was taken to the camp of two hundred tents pitched in two rows, and was
led through the long passage between the tents to the big tent of the
chief of whom he had heard much. Not a word was spoken. The chief sat on
a white buffalo skin. Pipes were passed round and each person was
presented with boiled buffalo flesh. When talk began, Hendry told the
chief that his great leader had sent him to invite them to come to trade
at Hudson Bay where his people would get powder, shot, guns, cloth,
beads, and other things. The chief said it was far away, and his people
knew nothing of paddling. Such strangers to great waters were they that
they would not even eat fish. They despised Hendry's tobacco. What they
smoked was dried horse dung. In the end Hendry was dismissed and ordered
to make his camp a quarter of a mile away from that of the Blackfeet.
It was close by the present site of Calgary and apparently in full view,
on clear days, of the white peaks of the Rocky Mountains that Hendry
visited the Blackfeet. He lingered in the far western country through
the greater part of the winter. On a portion of his return journey he
used a horse. When the spring thaw came, once more he took to the water
in canoes. He complains of the idleness of his Indian companions who
would remain in their huts all day and never stir to lay up a store of
food even when game was abundant. Conjuring, dancing to the hideous
pounding of drums, feasting and smoking, were their amusements. On his
way back Hendry revisited the French post on the Saskatchewan. The
leader, no doubt St. Luc de la Corne, had returned from Montreal and now
had with him nine men. "The master," says Hendry, "invited me in to sup
with him, and was very kind. He is dressed very Genteel." He showed
Hendry his stock of furs; "a brave parcel," the admiring rival thought.
Hendry admits the superiority of the French as traders. They "talk
Several Languages to perfection; they have the advantage of us in every
shape." In the West, as in the East, France was recognized as a
formidable rival of England for the mastery of North America.
When Hendry was making his peaceful visit to the French fort in 1755,
the crisis of the struggle had just been reached. In that year the
battle line from Acadia to the Ohio and the Mississippi was already
forming, and the fate of France's eager efforts to hold the West was
soon to be decided in the East. If Britain should conquer on the St.
Lawrence, she would conquer also on the Saskatchewan and on the
Mississippi.
Conquer she did, and thus it happened that it was Britain's sons who
took up the later burdens of the discoverer. In the summer of 1789, just
at the time when the great Revolution was beginning in France, Alexander
Mackenzie, a Scotch trader from Montreal, starting from Lake Athabasca,
north of the farthest point reached by Hendry, was pressing still onward
into an unknown region to find a river which might lead to the sea. This
river he found; we know it now as the Mackenzie. For two weeks he and
his Indians and voyageurs paddled with the current down this mighty
stream, and on July 14, 1789, the day of the fall of the Bastille, he
saw whales sporting in Arctic waters.
The real goal which Mackenzie sought was that of La Vérendrye, a western
and not a northern ocean. Three years later, after months of
preparation, he attempted the great feat of crossing the Rocky Mountains
to the sea. After nine months of rugged travel, across mountain streams
and gorges, in peril daily from hostile savages, on July 22, 1793, he
reached the shore of the Pacific Ocean, the first white man to go by
land over the width of the continent from sea to sea. It was thus a
Scotchman who achieved that of which La Vérendrye had so long dreamed;
and with no aid from the state but with only the resources of a trading
company.
Ten years later, when France sold to the United States her last
remaining territory of Louisiana, the American Government equipped an
expedition under Lewis and Clark to cross the Rocky Mountains by way of
the Missouri, the route from which the La Vérendrye brothers had been
obliged to turn back. The party began the ascent of the Missouri on May
14, 1804, and arrived in the Mandan country in the late autumn. Here
they spent the winter of 1804-05. Not until November 15, 1805, had they
completed the hard journey across the Rocky Mountains and reached the
mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Ocean. Little did La
Vérendrye, in his eager search for the Western Sea, imagine the
difficulties to be encountered and the hardships to be endured by those
who were destined, in later days, to realize his dream.