Pathfinders of the West Part 11

Alert as a hawk, the bowman stroked for the sh.o.r.e; and his stroke was answered by all paddles. If the water were high enough to carry the canoes above rocks, and the rapids were not too violent, several of the boatmen leaped out to knees in water, and "tracked" the canoes up stream; but this was unusual with loaded craft. The bowman steadied the beached keel. Each man landed with pack on his back, lighted his pipe, and trotted away over portages so dank and slippery that only a moccasined foot could gain hold. On long portages, camp-fires were kindled and the kettles slung on the crotched sticks for the evening meal. At night, the voyageurs slept under the overturned canoes, or lay on the sand with bare faces to the sky. Morning mist had not risen till all the boats were once more breasting the flood of the Ottawa.

For a month the canoe prows met the current when a portage lifted the fleet out of the Ottawa into a shallow stream flowing toward Lake Nip.i.s.sing, and from Lake Nip.i.s.sing to Lake Huron. The change was a welcome relief. The canoes now rode with the current; and when a wind sprang up astern, blanket sails were hoisted that let the boatmen lie back, paddles athwart. Going with the stream, the _voyageurs_ would "run"--"_sauter les rapides_"--the safest of the cataracts. Bowman, not steersman, was the pilot of such "runs." A faint, far swish as of night wind, little forward leaps and swirls of the current, the blur of trees on either bank, were signs to the bowman. He rose in his place. A thrust of the steel-shod pole at a rock in mid-stream--the rock raced past; a throb of the keel to the live waters below--the bowman crouches back, lightening the prow just as a rider "lifts" his horse to the leap; a sudden splash--the thing has happened--the canoe has run the rapids or shot the falls.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Each man landed with pack on his back, and trotted away over portages."]

Pause was made at Lake Huron for favorable weather; and a rear wind would carry the canoes at a bouncing pace clear across to Michilimackinac, at the mouth of Lake Michigan. This was the chief fur post of the lakes at that time. All the boats bound east or west, Sioux and Cree and Iroquois and Fox, traders' and priests' and outlaws'--stopped at Michilimackinac. Vice and brandy and religion were the characteristics of the fort.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Cree Indian of the Minnesota Borderlands.]

This was familiar ground to De la Verendrye. It was at the lonely fur post of Nepigon, north of Michilimackinac, in the midst of a wilderness forest, that he had eaten his heart out with baffled ambition from 1728 to 1730, when he descended to Montreal to lay before M. de Beauharnois, the governor, plans for the discovery of the Western Sea. Born at Three Rivers in 1686, where the pa.s.sion for discovery and Radisson's fame were in the very air and traders from the wilderness of the Upper Country wintered, young Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Verendrye, at the ambitious age of fourteen, determined that he would become a discoverer.[2] At eighteen he was fighting in New England, at nineteen in Newfoundland, at twenty-three in Europe at the battle of Malplaquet, where he was carried off the field with nine wounds. Eager for more distinguished service, he returned to Canada in his twenty-seventh year, only to find himself relegated to an obscure trading post in far Northern wilds. Then the boyhood ambitions reawakened. All France and Canada, too, were ringing with projects for the discovery of the Western Sea. Russia was acting. France knew it. The great priest Charlevoix had been sent to Canada to investigate plans for the venture, and had recommended an advance westward through the country of the Sioux; but the Sioux[3] swarmed round the little fort at Lake Pepin on the Mississippi like angry wasps. That way, exploration was plainly barred. Nothing came of the attempt except a brisk fur trade and a brisker warfare on the part of the Sioux. At the lonely post of Nepigon, vague Indian tales came to De la Verendrye of "a great river flowing west" and "a vast, flat country devoid of timber" with "large herds of cattle." Ochagach, an old Indian, drew maps on birch bark showing rivers that emptied into the Western Sea. De la Verendrye's smouldering ambitions kindled. He hurried to Michilimackinac. There the traders and Indians told the same story. Glory seemed suddenly within De la Verendrye's grasp. Carried away with the pa.s.sion for discovery that ruled his age, he took pa.s.sage in the canoes bound for Quebec. The Marquis Charles de Beauharnois had become governor. His brother Claude had taken part in the exploration of the Mississippi.

The governor favored the project of the Western Sea. Perhaps Russia's activity gave edge to the governor's zest; but he promised De la Verendrye the court's patronage and prestige. This was not money.

France would not advance the enthusiast one sou, but granted him a monopoly of the fur trade in the countries which he might discover.

The winter of 1731-1732 was spent by De la Verendrye as the guest of the governor at Chateau St. Louis, arranging with merchants to furnish goods for trade; and on May 19 the agreement was signed. By a lucky coincidence, the same winter that M. de la Verendrye had come down to Quebec, there had arrived from the Mississippi fort, his nephew, Christopher Dufrost, Sieur de la Jemmeraie, who had commanded the Sioux post and been prisoner among the Indians. So M. de la Verendrye chose Jemmeraie for lieutenant.

And now the explorer was back at Michilimackinac, on the way to the accomplishment of the daring ambition of his life. The trip from Montreal had fatigued the _voyageurs_. Brandy flowed at the lake post freely as at a modern mining camp. The explorer kept military discipline over his men. They received no pay which could be squandered away on liquor. Discontent grew rife. Taking Father Messaiger, the Jesuit, as chaplain, M. de la Verendrye ordered his grumbling _voyageurs_ to their canoes, and, pa.s.sing through the Straits of the Sault, headed his fleet once more for the Western Sea. Other explorers had preceded him on this part of the route. The Jesuits had coasted the north sh.o.r.e of Lake Superior. So had Radisson. In 1688 De Noyon of Three Rivers had gone as far west as the Lake of the Woods towards what is now Minnesota and Manitoba; and in 1717 De Lanoue had built a fur post at Kaministiquia, near what is now Fort William on Lake Superior. The sh.o.r.e was always perilous to the boatman of frail craft. The harbors were fathoms deep, and the waves thrashed by a cross wind often proved as dangerous as the high sea. It took M. de la Verendrye's canoemen a month to coast from the Straits of Mackinaw to Kaministiquia, which they reached on the 26th of August, seventy-eight days after they had left Montreal. The same distance is now traversed in two days.

Prospects were not encouraging. The crews were sulky. Kaministiquia was the outermost post in the West. Within a month, the early Northern winter would set in. One hunter can scramble for his winter's food where fifty will certainly starve; and the Indians could not be expected back from the chase with supplies of furs and food till spring. The canoemen had received no pay. Free as woodland denizens, they chafed under military command. Boats were always setting out at this season for the homeland hamlets of the St. Lawrence; and perhaps other hunters told De la Verendrye's men that this Western Sea was a will-o'-the-wisp that would lead for leagues and leagues over strange lands, through hostile tribes, to a lonely death in the wilderness.

When the explorer ordered his men once more in line to launch for the Western Sea, there was outright mutiny. Soldiers and boatmen refused to go on. The Jesuit Messaiger threatened and expostulated with the men. Jemmeraie, who had been among the Sioux, interceded with the _voyageurs_. A compromise was effected. Half the boatmen would go ahead with Jemmeraie if M. de la Verendrye would remain with the other half at Lake Superior as a rear guard for retreat and the supply of provisions. So the explorer suffered his first check in the advance to the Western Sea.

III

1732-1736

Equipping four canoes, Lieutenant de la Jemmeraie and young Jean Ba'tiste de la Verendrye set out with thirty men from Kaministiquia, _portaged_ through dense forests over moss and dank rock past the high cataract of the falls, and launched westward to prepare a fort for the reception of their leader in spring. Before winter had closed navigation, Fort St. Pierre--named in honor of the explorer--had been erected on the left bank or Minnesota side of Rainy Lake, and the two young men not only succeeded in holding their mutinous followers, but drove a thriving trade in furs with the Crees. Perhaps the furs were obtained at too great cost, for ammunition and firearms were the price paid, but the same mistake has been made at a later day for a lesser object than the discovery of the Western Sea. The spring of 1732 saw the young men back at Lake Superior, going post-haste to Michilimackinac to exchange furs for the goods from Montreal.

On the 8th of June, exactly a year from the day that he had left Montreal, M. de la Verendrye pushed forward with all his people for Fort St. Pierre. Five weeks later he was welcomed inside the stockades. Uniformed soldiers were a wonder to the awe-struck Crees, who hung round the gateway with hands over their hushed lips. Gifts of ammunition won the loyalty of the chiefs. Not to be lacking in generosity, the Indians collected fifty of their gaudiest canoes and offered to escort the explorer west to the Lake of the Woods. De la Verendrye could not miss such an offer. Though his _voyageurs_ were fatigued, he set out at once. He had reached Fort St. Pierre on July 14. In August his entire fleet glided over the Lake of the Woods. The threescore canoes manned by the Cree boatmen threaded the shadowy defiles and labyrinthine channels of the Lake of the Woods--or Lake of the Isles--coasting island after island along the south or Minnesota sh.o.r.e westward to the opening of the river at the northwest angle.

This was the border of the Sioux territory. Before the boatmen opened the channel of an unknown river. Around them were sheltered harbors, good hunting, and good fishing. The Crees favored this region for winter camping ground because they could hide their families from the Sioux on the sheltered islands of the wooded lake. Night frosts had painted the forests red. The flacker of wild-fowl overhead, the skim of ice forming on the lake, the poignant sting of the north wind--all fore-warned winter's approach. Jean de la Verendrye had not come up with the supplies from Michilimackinac. The explorer did not tempt mutiny by going farther. He ordered a halt and began building a fort that was to be the centre of operations between Montreal and the unfound Western Sea. The fort was named St. Charles in honor of Beauharnois. It was defended by four rows of thick palisades fifteen feet high. In the middle of the enclosure stood the living quarters, log cabins with thatched roofs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Group of Cree Indians.]

By October the Indians had scattered to their hunting-grounds like leaves to the wind. The ice thickened. By November the islands were ice-locked and snow had drifted waist-high through the forests. The _voyageurs_ could still fish through ice holes for food; but where was young Jean who was to bring up provisions from Michilimackinac? The commander did not voice his fears; and his men were too deep in the wilds for desertion. One afternoon, a shout sounded from the silent woods, and out from the white-edged evergreens stepped a figure on snowshoes--Jean de la Verendrye, leading his boatmen, with the provisions packed on their backs, from a point fifty miles away where the ice had caught the canoes. If the supplies had not come, the explorer could neither have advanced nor retreated in spring. It was a risk that De la Verendrye did not intend to have repeated. Suspecting that his merchant partners were dissatisfied, he sent Jemmeraie down to Montreal in 1733 to report and urge the necessity for prompt forwarding of all supplies. With Jemmeraie went the Jesuit Messaiger; but their combined explanations failed to satisfy the merchants of Montreal. De la Verendrye had now been away three years. True, he had constructed two fur posts and sent East two cargoes of furs. His partners were looking for enormous wealth. Disappointed and caring nothing for the Western Sea; perhaps, too, secretly accusing De la Verendrye of making profits privately, as many a gentleman of fortune did,--the merchants decided to advance provisions only in proportion to earnings. What would become of the fifty men in the Northern wilderness the partners neither asked nor cared.

Young Jean had meanwhile pushed on and built Fort Maurepas on Lake Winnipeg; but his father dared not leave Fort St. Charles without supplies. De la Verendrye's position was now desperate. He was hopelessly in debt to his men for wages. That did not help discipline.

His partners were not only withholding supplies, but charging up a high rate of interest on the first equipment. To turn back meant ruin. To go forward he was powerless. Leaving Jemmeraie in command, and permitting his eager son to go ahead with a few picked men to Fort Maurepas on Lake Winnipeg, De la Verendrye took a small canoe and descended with all swiftness to Quebec. The winter of 1634-1635 was spent with the governor; and the partners were convinced that they must either go on with the venture or lose all. They consented to continue supplying goods, but also charging all outlay against the explorer.

Father Aulneau went back with De la Verendrye as chaplain. The trip was made at terrible speed, in the hottest season, through stifling forest fires. Behind, at slower pace, came the provisions. De la Verendrye reached the Lake of the Woods in September. Fearing the delay of the goods for trade, and dreading the danger of famine with so many men in one place, De la Verendrye despatched Jemmeraie to winter with part of the forces at Lake Winnipeg, where Jean and Pierre, the second son, had built Fort Maurepas. The worst fears were realized.

Ice had blocked the Northern rivers by the time the supplies had come to Lake Superior. Fishing failed. The hunt was poor. During the winter of 1736 food became scantier at the little forts of St. Pierre, St. Charles, and Maurepas. Rations were reduced from three times to once and twice a day. By spring De la Verendrye was put to all the extremities of famine-stricken traders, his men subsisting on parchment, moccasin leather, roots, and their hunting dogs.

He was compelled to wait at St. Charles for the delayed supplies.

While he waited came blow upon blow: Jean and Pierre arrived from Fort Maurepas with news that Jemmeraie had died three weeks before on his way down to aid De la Verendrye. Wrapped in a hunter's robe, his body was buried in the sand-bank of a little Northern stream, La Fourche des Roseaux. Over the lonely grave the two brothers had erected a cross.

Father and sons took stock of supplies. They had not enough powder to last another month, and already the Indians were coming in with furs and food to be traded for ammunition. If the Crees had known the weakness of the white men, short work might have been made of Fort St.

Charles. It never entered the minds of De la Verendrye and his sons to give up. They decided to rush three canoes of twenty _voyageurs_ to Michilimackinac for food and powder. Father Aulneau, the young priest, accompanied the boatmen to attend a religious retreat at Michilimackinac. It had been a hard year for the youthful missionary.

The ship that brought him from France had been plague-stricken. The trip to Fort St. Charles had been arduous and swift, through stifling heat; and the year pa.s.sed in the North was one of famine.

Accompanied by the priest and led by Jean de la Verendrye, now in his twenty-third year, the _voyageurs_ embarked hurriedly on the 8th of June, 1736, five years to a day from the time that they left Montreal--and a fateful day it was--in the search for the Western Sea.

The Crees had always been friendly; and when the boatmen landed on a sheltered island twenty miles from Fort St. Charles to camp for the night, no sentry was stationed. The lake lay calm as gla.s.s in the hot June night, the camp-fire casting long lines across the water that could be seen for miles. An early start was to be made in the morning and a furious pace to be kept all the way to Lake Superior, and the _voyageurs_ were presently sound asleep on the sand. The keenest ears could scarcely have distinguished the soft lapping of m.u.f.fled paddles; and no one heard the moccasined tread of ambushed Indians reconnoitring. Seventeen Sioux stepped from their canoes, stole from cover to cover, and looked out on the unsuspecting sleepers. Then the Indians as noiselessly slipped back to their canoes to carry word of the discovery to a band of marauders.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The soldiers marched out from Mount Royal."]

Something had occurred at Fort St. Charles without M. de la Verendrye's knowledge. Hilarious with their new possessions of firearms, and perhaps, also, mad with the brandy of which Father Aulneau had complained, a few mischievous Crees had fired from the fort on wandering Sioux of the prairie.

"Who--fire--on--us?" demanded the outraged Sioux.

"The French," laughed the Crees.

The Sioux at once went back to a band of one hundred and thirty warriors. "Tigers of the plains" the Sioux were called, and now the tigers' blood was up. They set out to slay the first white man seen.

By chance, he was one Boura.s.sa, coasting by himself. Taking him captive, they had tied him to burn him, when a slave squaw rushed out, crying: "What would you do? This Frenchman is a friend of the Sioux!

He saved my life! If you desire to be avenged, go farther on! You will find a camp of Frenchmen, among whom is the son of the white chief!"

The _voyageur_ was at once unbound, and scouts scattered to find the white men. Night had pa.s.sed before the scouts had carried news of Jean de la Verendrye's men to the marauding warriors. The ghostly gray of dawn saw the _voyageurs_ paddling swiftly through the morning mist from island to island of the Lake of the Woods. Cleaving the mist behind, following solely by the double foam wreaths rippling from the canoe prows, came the silent boats of the Sioux. When sunrise lifted the fog, the pursuers paused like stealthy cats. At sunrise Jean de la Verendrye landed his crews for breakfast. Camp-fires told the Indians where to follow.

A few days later bands of Sautaux came to the camping ground of the French. The heads of the white men lay on a beaver skin. All had been scalped. The missionary, Aulneau, was on his knees, as if in morning prayers. An arrow projected from his head. His left hand was on the earth, fallen forward, his right hand uplifted, invoking Divine aid.

Young Verendrye lay face down, his back hacked to pieces, a spear sunk in his waist, the headless body mockingly decorated with porcupine quills. So died one of the bravest of the young n.o.bility in New France.

The Sautaux erected a cairn of stones over the bodies of the dead. All that was known of the ma.s.sacre was vague Indian gossip. The Sioux reported that they had not intended to murder the priest, but a crazy-brained fanatic had shot the fatal arrow and broken from restraint, weapon in hand. Rain-storms had washed out all marks of the fray.

In September the bodies of the victims were carried to Fort St.

Charles, and interred in the chapel. Eight hundred Crees besought M.

de la Verendrye to let them avenge the murder; but the veteran of Malplaquet exhorted them not to war. Meanwhile, Fort St. Charles awaited the coming of supplies from Lake Superior.

IV

1736-1740

A week pa.s.sed, and on the 17th of June the canoe loads of ammunition and supplies for which the murdered _voyageurs_ had been sent arrived at Fort St. Charles. In June the Indian hunters came in with the winter's hunt; and on the 20th thirty Sautaux hurried to Fort St.

Charles, to report that they had found the mangled bodies of the ma.s.sacred Frenchmen on an island seven leagues from the fort. Again La Verendrye had to choose whether to abandon his cherished dreams, or follow them at the risk of ruin and death. As before, when his men had mutinied, he determined to advance.

Jean, the eldest son, was dead. Pierre and Francois were with their father. Louis, the youngest, now seventeen years of age, had come up with the supplies. Pierre at once went to Lake Winnipeg, to prepare Fort Maurepas for the reception of all the forces. Winter set in.

Snow lay twelve feet deep in the forests now known as the Minnesota Borderlands. On February 8, 1737, in the face of a biting north wind, with the thermometer at forty degrees below zero, M. de la Verendrye left Fort St. Charles, Francois carrying the French flag, with ten soldiers, wearing snow-shoes, in line behind, and two or three hundred Crees swathed in furs bringing up a ragged rear. The bright uniforms of the soldiers were patches of red among the snowy everglades.

Bivouac was made on beds of pine boughs,--feet to the camp-fire, the night frost snapping like a whiplash, the stars flashing with a steely clearness known only in northern climes. The march was at a swift pace, for three weeks by canoe is short enough time to traverse the Minnesota and Manitoba Borderlands northwest to Lake Winnipeg; and in seventeen days M. de la Verendrye was at Fort Maurepas.

Fort Maurepas (in the region of the modern Alexander) lay on a tongue of sand extending into the lake a few miles beyond the entrance of Red River. Tamarack and poplar fringe the sh.o.r.e; and in windy weather the lake is lashed into a roughness that resembles the flux of ocean tides.

I remember once going on a steamer towards the site of Maurepas. The ship drew lightest of draft. While we were anch.o.r.ed the breeze fell, and the ship was stranded as if by ebb tide for twenty-four hours. The action of the wind explained the Indian tales of an ocean tide, which had misled La Verendrye into expecting to find the Western Sea at this point. He found a magnificent body of fresh water, but not the ocean.

The fort was the usual pioneer fur post--a barracks of unbarked logs, c.h.i.n.ked up with frozen clay and moss, roofed with branches and snow, occupying the centre of a courtyard, palisaded by slabs of pine logs.

M. de la Verendrye was now in the true realm of the explorer--in territory where no other white man had trod. With a shout his motley forces emerged from the snowy tamaracks, and with a shout from Pierre de la Verendrye and his tawny followers the explorer was welcomed through the gateway of little Fort Maurepas.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Traders' Boats running the Rapids of the Athabasca River.]

Pierre de la Verendrye had heard of a region to the south much frequented by the a.s.siniboine Indians, who had conducted Radisson to the Sea of the North fifty years before--the Forks where the a.s.siniboine River joins the Red, and the city of Winnipeg stands to-day. It was reported that game was plentiful here. Two hundred tepees of a.s.siniboines were awaiting the explorer. His forces were worn with their marching, but in a few weeks the glaze of ice above the fathomless drifts of snow would be too rotten for travel, and not until June would the riverways be clear for canoes. But such a scant supply of goods had his partners sent up that poor De la Verendrye had nothing to trade with the waiting a.s.siniboines. Sending his sons forward to reconnoitre the Forks of the a.s.siniboine,--the modern Winnipeg,--he set out for Montreal as soon as navigation opened, taking with him fourteen great canoes of precious furs.

The fourteen canoe loads proved his salvation. As long as there were furs and prospects of furs, his partners would back the enterprise of finding the Western Sea. The winter of 1738 was spent as the guest of the governor at Chateau St. Louis. The partners were satisfied, and plucked up hope of their venture. They would advance provisions in proportion to earnings. By September he was back at Fort Maurepas on Lake Winnipeg, pushing for the undiscovered bourne of the Western Sea.

Leaving orders for trade with the chief clerk at Maurepas, De la Verendrye picked out his most intrepid men; and in September of 1738, for the first time in history, white men glided up the ochre-colored, muddy current of the Red for the Forks of the a.s.siniboine. Ten Cree wigwams and two war chiefs awaited De la Verendrye on the low flats of what are now known as South Winnipeg. Not the fabled Western Sea, but an illimitable ocean of rolling prairie--the long russet gra.s.s rising and falling to the wind like waves to the run of invisible feet--stretched out before the eager eyes of the explorer. Northward lay the autumn-tinged brushwood of Red River. South, shimmering in the purple mists of Indian summer, was Red River Valley. Westward the sun hung like a red shield, close to the horizon, over vast reaches of prairie billowing to the sky-line in the tide of a boundless ocean.

Such was the discovery of the Canadian Northwest.

Doubtless the weary gaze of the tired _voyageurs_ turned longingly westward. Where was the Western Sea? Did it lie just beyond the horizon where skyline and prairie met, or did the trail of their quest run on--on--on--endlessly? The a.s.siniboine flows into the Red, the Red into Lake Winnipeg, the Lake into Hudson Bay. Plainly, a.s.siniboine Valley was not the way to the Western Sea. But what lay just beyond this a.s.siniboine Valley? An old Cree chief warned the boatmen that the a.s.siniboine River was very low and would wreck the canoes; but he also told vague yarns of "great waters beyond the mountains of the setting sun," where white men dwelt, and the waves came in a tide, and the waters were salt. The Western Sea where the Spaniards dwelt had long been known. It was a Western Sea to the north, that would connect Louisiana and Canada, that De la Verendrye sought. The Indian fables, without doubt, referred to a sea beyond the a.s.siniboine River, and thither would De la Verendrye go at any cost. Some sort of barracks or shelter was knocked up on the south side of the a.s.siniboine opposite the flats. It was subsequently known as Fort Rouge, after the color of the adjacent river, and was the foundation of Winnipeg. Leaving men to trade at Fort Rouge, De la Verendrye set out on September 26, 1738, for the height of land that must lie beyond the sources of the a.s.siniboine.

De la Verendrye was now like a man hounded by his own Frankenstein. A thousand leagues--every one marked by disaster and failure and sinking hopes--lay behind him. A thousand leagues of wilderness lay before him. He had only a handful of men. The a.s.siniboine Indians were of dubious friendliness. The white men were scarce of food. In a few weeks they would be exposed to the terrible rigors of Northern winter.

Yet they set their faces toward the west, types of the pioneers who have carved empire out of wilderness.