The Conquest of New France Part 2

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 partic.i.p.ant 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e 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 1718, 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 Verendrye, was a member of the Canadian n.o.blesse, 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, Ma.s.sachusetts, and either butchered or carried off as prisoners most of the inhabitants. Shortly afterwards we find him a partic.i.p.ant in warfare of a less ign.o.ble 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 Verendrye, took part in the last of the series of great battles, the b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pa.s.sage to the Western Sea. The venture certainly offered fascinations. Noyon, a fellow-townsman of La Verendrye 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 b.l.o.o.d.y struggles with each other and not unlikely to turn on the white intruder. Memorial after memorial to the French court for a.s.sistance 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 Verendrye 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 sh.o.r.e of Lake Superior. From this point it was not very difficult to reach the sh.o.r.e 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 Verendrye 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 sh.o.r.es of which lived many people. We may be sure that La Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye, 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 heartbreaking failure. In 1731 La Verendrye 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 superst.i.tious 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 sh.o.r.e of the lake, in a charming meadow surrounded by oak trees, La Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye'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 sh.o.r.es 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 sh.o.r.es 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 Verendrye had dreamed.

At the mouth of the Winnipeg River, where it enters Lake Winnipeg, La Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye. A little later came another sorrow-laden disaster. La Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 s.p.a.ces there is no great river which flows to the west. La Verendrye, 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 Verendrye and found a tributary, the a.s.siniboine, 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 a.s.siniboine River only to find the waters persistently flowing against them and no definite news of other waters leading to the Western Sea. On the a.s.siniboine, near the site of the present town of Portage la Prairie in Manitoba, La Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 seash.o.r.e waiting for the Indians to come to them.

La Verendrye 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 Verendrye reviewed the whole company and from them chose for his expedition twenty soldiers and voyageurs and about twenty a.s.siniboine Indians. As companions for himself he took Francois 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 a.s.siniboine 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye marched in with great ceremony, under the French flag, only to discover that the Mandans were not greatly unlike the a.s.siniboines 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 Verendrye's friends, the a.s.siniboines, 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 Verendrye 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 ama.s.sing great wealth, when, as he said, all that he had acc.u.mulated 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 Verendrye's two sons, Pierre and Francois. 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 pa.s.sed 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 Verendryes 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 a.s.sumed 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 ma.s.sacre 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 a.s.sert 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye 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 Verendrye, 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. Francois, for a time ill, wrote in 1750 from Montreal to La Jonquiere, 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. Francois hurried to Quebec. The Governor met him with a bland face and seemed friendly. Francois, urged that he and his brothers claimed no preeminence and that they were ready to serve under the orders of Saint-Pierre. The Governor was hesitant; but at last told Francois, frankly that the new leader desired no help either from him or from his brothers. Francois, 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. Francois, 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 Francois had gone, he claimed damages for the intrusion on his monopoly and secured an order to pursue Francois 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 Francois many compliments, and regretted that he had not joined hands with the brothers.

The mischief done was, however, irreparable. Francois, 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 n.o.ble 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 Francois seem to have been engaged in military service. Francois 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 Verendrye. 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 Jonquiere to take up the search for the Western Sea in succession to the elder La Verendrye, 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 Jonquiere, and stored it with a considerable quant.i.ty of provisions. If, as seems likely, the brothers La Verendrye 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" surpa.s.sed 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 Come and, in August of that year, having experienced "much wretchedness" on his journeys, he was safely back in Montreal. The founding of Fort La Jonquiere 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 Jonquiere, built three years earlier. He had aims different from those of La Verendrye 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 carca.s.s 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 r.e.t.a.r.d 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 compa.s.s, 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sed 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 faraway, 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 amus.e.m.e.nts. 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.