It was here the dreams of his childhood emerged like a commanding destiny. Old Indian chief Ochagach drew maps on birch bark of a trail to the Western Sea. La Vérendrye took canoe for Quebec, and, with heart beating to the passion of a secret ambition, laid the drawings before Governor Beauharnois. He came just in the nick of time. English traders were pressing westward. New France lent ready ear for schemes of wider empire. The court could grant no money for discoveries, but it gave La Vérendrye permission for a voyage and monopoly in furs over the lands he might discover; but the lands must be found before there would be furs, and here began the mundane worries of La Vérendrye's glory.
Montreal merchants outfitted him, but that meant debt; and his little party of fifty grizzled woodrovers set out with their ninety-foot birch canoes from Montreal on June 8, 1731. Three sons were in his party and a nephew, Jemmeraie, from the Sioux country of the west. Every foot westward had been consecrated by heroism to set the pulse of red-blooded men jumping. There was the seigniory of La Chine, named in derision of La Salle's project to find a path to China. There was the Long Sault, where Dollard had fought the Iroquois. There were the pink granite islands of Georgian Bay, where the Jesuits had led their harried Hurons. There was Michilimackinac, with the brawl of its vice and brandy and lawless traders from the woods, where La Motte Cadillac ruled before going to found Detroit. Seventy-eight days from Montreal, there were the pictured rocks of Lake Superior, purple and silent and deep as ocean, which Radisson had coasted on his way to the Mississippi. Then La Vérendrye came to Duluth's old stamping ground—Kaministiquia.
LA VÉRENDRYE'S FORTS AND THE RIVER OF THE WEST (After Jeffery's map, 1762)
The home-bound boats were just leaving the fur posts for the St. Lawrence. Frosts had already stripped the trees of foliage, and winter would presently lock all avenues of retreat in six months' ice. La Vérendrye's men began to doubt the wisdom of chasing a will-o'-the-wisp to an unknown Western Sea. The explorer sent half the party forward with his nephew Jemmeraie and his son Jean, while he himself remained at Kaministiquia with the mutineers to forage for provisions. Winter found Jemmeraie's men on the Minnesota side of Rainy Lake, where they built Fort Pierre and drove a rich trade in furs with the encamped Crees. In summer of 1732 came La Vérendrye, his men in gayest apparel marching before the awe-struck Crees with bugle blowing and flags flying. Then white men and Crees advanced in canoes to the Lake of the Woods, coasting from island to island through the shadowy defiles of the sylvan rocks along the Minnesota shore to the northwest angle. Here a second winter witnessed the building of a second post, Fort St. Charles, with four rows of fifteen-foot palisades and thatched-roofed log cabins. The Western Sea seemed far as ever,—like the rainbow of the child, ever fleeing as pursued,—and La Vérendrye's merchant partners were beginning to curse him for a rainbow chaser. He had been away three years, and there were no profits. Suspicious that he might be defrauding them by private trade or sacrificing their interests to his own ambitions, they failed to send forward provisions for this year. La Vérendrye was in debt to his men for three years' wages, in debt to his partners for three years' provisions. To fail now he dared not. Go forward he could not, so he hurried down to Montreal, where he prevailed on the merchants to continue supplies by the simple argument that, if they stopped now, there would be total loss.
Young Jean La Vérendrye and Jemmeraie have meanwhile descended Winnipeg River's white fret of waterfalls to Winnipeg Lake, where they build Fort Maurepas, near modern Alexander,—and wait. Fishing failed. The hunt failed. The winter of 1735-1736 proved of such terrible severity that famine stalked through the western woods. La Vérendrye's three forts were reduced to diet of skins, moccasin soup, and dog meat. In desperation Jemmeraie set out with a few voyageurs to meet the returning commander, but privation had undermined his strength. He died on the way and was buried in his hunter's blanket beside an unknown stream between Lake Winnipeg and the Lake of the Woods. Accompanied by the priest Aulneau, young Jean de La Vérendrye decided to rush canoes down from the Lake of the Woods to Michilimackinac for food and powder. A furious pace was to be kept all the way to Lake Superior. The voyageurs had risen early one morning in June, and after paddling some miles through the mist had landed to breakfast when a band of marauding Sioux fell on them with a shout. The priest Aulneau fell pierced in the head by a stone-pointed arrow. Young Jean La Vérendrye was literally hacked to pieces. Not a man of the seventeen French escaped, and Massacre Island became a place of ill omen to the French from that day. At last came the belated supplies, and by February of 1737 La Vérendrye had moved his main forces west to Lake Winnipeg. This was no Western Sea, though the wind whipped the lake like a tide,—which explained the Indian legend of an inland ocean. Though it was no Western Sea, it was a new empire for France. The bourne of the Unknown still fled like the rainbow, and La Vérendrye still pursued.
