Down to Quebec for more supplies with tales of a vast Beyond Land! Back to Lake Winnipeg by September of 1738 with canoes gliding up the muddy current of Red River for the Unknown Land of the Assiniboines; past Nettley Creek, then known as Massacre Creek or Murderers' River, from the Sioux having slain the encamped wives and children of the Cree who had gone to Hudson Bay with their furs; between the wooded banks of what are now East and West Selkirk, flat to left, high to right; tracking up the Rapids of St. Andrews, thick oak woods to east, rippling prairie russet in the autumn rolling to the west,—La Vérendrye and his voyageurs came to the forks of Red River and the Assiniboine, or what is now known as the city of Winnipeg. Where the two rivers met on the flats to the west were the high scaffoldings of an ancient Cree graveyard, bizarre and eerie and ghostlike between the voyageurs and the setting sun. On the high river bank of what is now known as Assiniboine Avenue gleamed the white skin of ten Cree tepees, where two war chiefs waited to meet La Vérendrye. Drawing up their canoes near where the bridge now spans between St. Boniface and Winnipeg, the voyageurs came ashore.
It was a fair scene that greeted them, such a scene as any westerner may witness to-day of a warm September night when the sun hangs low like a blood-red shield, and the evening breeze touches the rustling grasses of the prairie beyond the city to the waves of an ocean. It was not the Western Sea, but it was a Sea of Prairie. It was a New World, unbounded by hill or forest, spacious as the very airs of heaven, fenced only by the blue dip of a shimmering horizon. It was a world, though La Vérendrye knew it not, five times larger than New France, half as big as all Europe. He had discovered the Canadian Northwest.
One can guess how the tired wanderers at rest beneath the uptilted canoes that night wondered whither their quest would lead them over the fire-dyed horizon where the sun was sinking as over a sea. The Cree chiefs told them of other lands and other peoples to the south, "who trade with a people who dwelt on the great waters beyond the mountains of the setting sun,"—the Spaniards.
Leaving men to knock up a trading post near the suburb now known as Fort Rouge, La Vérendrye, on September 26, steers his canoes up the shallow Assiniboine far as what is now known as Portage La Prairie, where a trail leads overland to the Saskatchewan and so down to the English traders of Hudson Bay. But this is not the trail to the Western Sea; La Vérendrye's quest is set towards those people "who live on the great waters to the south."
MAP SHOWING THE SUPPOSED SEA OF THE WEST, WITH APPROACHES TO THE MISSISSIPPI AND GREAT LAKES, PARIS, 1755
Fort de La Reine is built at the Portage of the Prairie, and October 18, to beat of drum, with flag flying, La Vérendrye marches forth with fifty-two men towards Souris River for the land of the Mandanes on the Missouri. December 3 he is welcomed to the Mandane villages; but here is no Western Sea, only the broad current of the Missouri rolling turbulent and muddy southward towards the Mississippi; but the Mandanes tell of a people to the far west, "who live on the great waters bitter for drinking, who dress in armor and dwell in stone houses." These must be the Spaniards. La Vérendrye's quest has become a receding phantom. Leaving men to learn the Missouri dialects, La Vérendrye marched in the teeth of mid-winter storms back to the Portage of the Prairie on the Assiniboine. Of that march, space forbids to tell. A blizzard raged, driving the fine snows into eyes and skin like hot salt. When the marchers camped at night they had to bury themselves in snow to keep from freezing. Drifts covered all landmarks. The men lost their bearings, doubled back on their own tracks, were frost-bitten, buffeted by the storm, and short of food. Christmas was passed in the camps of wandering Assiniboines, and February 10, 1739, the fifty men staggered, weak and starving, back to the Portage of the Prairie.
The wanderings of La Vérendrye and his sons for the next few years led southwestward far as the Rockies in the region of Montana, northwestward far as the Bow River branch of the Saskatchewan. Meanwhile, all La Vérendrye's property had been seized by his creditors. Jealous rivals were clamoring for possession of his fur posts. The King had conferred on him the Order of the Cross of St. Louis, but eighteen years of exposure and worry had broken the explorer's health. On the eve of setting out again for the west he died suddenly on the 6th of December, 1749, at Montreal.