La Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye, 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 heart-breaking failure. In 1731 La Vérendrye 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 superstitious 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 shore of the lake, in a charming meadow surrounded by oak trees, La Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye’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 shores 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 shores 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 Vérendrye had dreamed.
At the mouth of the Winnipeg River, where it enters Lake Winnipeg, La Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye. A little later came another sorrow-laden disaster. La Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 spaces there is no great river which flows to the west. La Vérendrye, 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 Vérendrye and found a tributary, the Assiniboine, 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 Assiniboine River only to find the waters persistently flowing against them and no definite news of other waters leading to the Western Sea. On the Assiniboine, near the site of the present town of Portage la Prairie in Manitoba, La Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 seashore waiting for the Indians to come to them.
La Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye reviewed the whole company and from them chose for his expedition twenty soldiers and voyageurs and about twenty Assiniboine Indians. As companions for himself he took François 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye hoped, but the Missouri, a river already frequented by the French in its lower stretches where its waters join those of the Mississippi.