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 shore 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 shore 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 1713, 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 Vérendrye, was a member of the Canadian noblesse, 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, Massachusetts, and either butchered or carried off as prisoners most of the inhabitants. Shortly afterwards we find him a participant in warfare of a less ignoble 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 Vérendrye took part in the last of the series of great battles, the bloody 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 passage to the Western Sea. The venture certainly offered fascinations. Noyon, a fellow-townsman of La Vérendrye 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 bloody struggles with each other and not unlikely to turn on the white intruder. Memorial after memorial to the French court for assistance 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 Vérendrye 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 shore of Lake Superior. From this point it was not very difficult to reach the shore 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 Vérendrye 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 shores of which lived many people. We may be sure that La Vérendrye 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.