As the eighteenth century opened, the French seemed to be in the lead. They claimed and controlled Canada and the greater part of the Mississippi valley, and by 1710 there were many French colonies and posts on the banks of the Mississippi. Eight years later Bienville founded New Orleans, and two after that Antoine Crozat received from the King a grant of the privilege of exclusive trade in Louisiana, a privilege which he relinquished in 1717, when it was taken by the Compagnie d'Orient, or, as it also was called, Law's Mississippi Company. It was so held for fifteen years, when it was governed as a French province. By 1722 the French had established a fort on the Missouri called Orleans, about two hundred and fifty miles above the mouth, by some authorities said to have been the result of the Spanish expedition under Villazur, which was destroyed, according to some reports, in an attempt to annihilate the Missouris, who were friendly to the French. But the Spaniards claimed that the French instigated the attack upon their 1720 expedition to the Platte; and the French, it appears, claimed that the Spanish were striving to wipe out their allies.
There were now open into the interior two great water highways, one by the St. Lawrence, the other by the Mississippi-Missouri. Transportation was almost exclusively by boat, hence the waterways were seldom departed from for any great distance, and the immense tract lying west of the Missouri and upper Mississippi was still an unknown country. From time to time rumours were repeated of a huge river which flowed towards the Sea of the West, but the traders did not always heed the tales of the natives. As early as 1716 there was a definite statement that "towards the source (of the Mississippi) there is in the highlands a river that leads to the western ocean." Whether some Frenchman had made the journey or not is unknown, but it is not improbable that a daring coureur de bois had slipped along from tribe to tribe and finally arrived at the Pacific.
In 1728 there was a trader at Lake Nipigon—Sieur de la Verendrye, a Frenchman, to whom the natives told such positive tales about this great river flowing to the Sea of the West, that he determined to explore it.[53] He laid his plans before Beauharnois, then Governor of Canada, who was favourably impressed by the story, and also by a map which Verendrye's Amerind guide had drawn for him. An expedition of fifty men was fitted out, which left Montreal in 1731 under the command of Verendrye's sons and nephew. The party seem not to have moved directly for the river they intended to examine, but spent a number of years exploring, trading, and trapping in the North-west country. Finally, in 1738, they built an advance post, Fort La Reine, on the Assiniboine, whence they continued explorations north and south. In the latter direction they ascended the Souris, or Mouse, River, and at length arrived in the country of the Mandans, on the Missouri, at the great bend to the south, in what is now North Dakota, antedating in the region Lewis and Clark by over threescore years. This was in 1738. Again in 1742 the company arrived at the Missouri under the command of the eldest son and his brother, passed the Yellowstone River, and on January 1, 1743, came in sight of the Rocky Mountains, perhaps the Big Horn range, probably the first white men to see them from this direction; that is, north of about the 38th parallel, where the Spaniards had been. They climbed these mountains, and appear to have proceeded westward, perhaps as far as Wind River, where they remained some time in the country of the Snakes, hearing of another river farther south called Karoskiou, probably the head of the Colorado, now named Green River. They were then within about two hundred miles of the point reached, twenty-three years later, by Escalante, and not much farther from the locality on Grand River arrived at in 1765 by Don Juan Maria de Ribera.
Owing to a war between the Snakes and a tribe to the southward named Arcs, they were unable to go on and returned to the upper Missouri in May, 1743, somewhere erecting a stone monument to commemorate their entrance into the region. Having done this they went to the Saskatchewan valley by way of their Fort La Reine. Jealousy of their success and changes in the governorship of Canada resulted in the overthrow of the Verendryes, but Jonquire later, coming to the head of the government, determined to profit by their investigations and planned two expeditions to the Pacific, one over the course Verendrye had pursued, and the other by the waters of the Saskatchewan. These appear to have had little success, yet some of the men reached the Rocky Mountains, and were there in 1753. The war with England then prevented further organised explorations by the French. Several accounts of the existence of a large river beginning at the head of the Missouri and flowing west to the Pacific had been given by the Amerinds, as already noted, Dupratz having heard one from a native of the Yazoo country.[54] This man said he had himself ascended the Missouri to its source and there found this other river, which he followed for some distance, wars preventing him from going through to the ocean into which he was told it entered. Several maps of about 1750 gave a supposed course of this river, which was called the Great River of the West. Jonathan Carver[55] also told of this stream, called the Oregon, in his book describing the travels he made in 1766-68 into the region of the upper Mississippi; but he did not go there.[56] The Dane, Bering, under Russian patronage, in 1741, had marked out a path to the New World from a totally different direction from any taken by the other nations; he came from the West, from Kamtchatka, by the far northern route. The Russians followed and began to explore down the North-west coast.
Great Fountain Geyser—Yellowstone Park.
From Wonderland, 1901—Northern Pacific Railway.
Having triumphed over France, Great Britain in 1763 acquired the whole of Canada, all of Louisiana east of the Mississippi except New Orleans, and the Spanish claims in Florida. They now controlled the entire continent east of the Mississippi, the Dutch having long before surrendered. France published the next year a secret cession two years before of all Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Spain, and Spain obtaining New Orleans also in 1769, France was thrown completely off the continent. In 1764, at the time France announced the cession to Spain, La Clede founded St. Louis on the site where it now stands, a settlement that henceforth became the departing point for the great Wilderness. Great Britain renounced all claim to lands south-west of the Mississippi, and the vast territory of North America was now divided between Great Britain, Spain, and Russia, the latter on the north-west, Spain on the south-west, and Great Britain on the east. Spain was endeavouring to clinch its hold on the Californian coast and the regions to northward, and several vessels were sent out in that direction. One of these, commanded by Bruno Heceta, returning from more northern shores on the evening of August 17, 1775, came to a great bay where a current was discovered setting out from the land with such power that Heceta thought he had found either some great river or some connection with another sea. The Strait of Fuca was then supposed to join the Atlantic, under the old title of the fabled Strait of Anian, and he also thought he might be at the mouth of this, although his reckoning did not agree with that of Fuca. In reality he had discovered thus vaguely the mouth of the River of the West, now the Columbia. He called the place the Bahia de la Asuncion, but later charts mark it the Inlet of Heceta, while the supposed river is put down as Rio de San Roque. Aguilar, who commanded one of Vizcaino's ships in 1603, went north of Cape Mendocino to the mouth of a great river, which he could not enter on account of the current. This was probably the Columbia. Thus from sea and land the existence of a large river in this quarter began to be understood. Owing to the line of fierce white-caps formed by the tides breaking on the great bar, extending across the mouth of this river, even now, as one views the entrance from the deck of his approaching ship, after government execution of a large amount of admirable engineering, it presents a most impracticable looking channel, the white foam appearing to form a continuous line. At low water, with a sea running, the place is still one of difficult passage, and reminds of Gray, the bold sailor who first steered through it. Heceta, however, did not hesitate from timidity, he was a Spaniard, but his officers dissuaded him from making an attempt to enter on account of their unfit condition.
Once across the bar, the broad bay and river-mouth offer easy navigation, and it is a beautiful voyage, though a short one, up to the site of the fine, prosperous American city which now stands at this gateway, where the Far West opens into the Far East.