The Conquest of New France; A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars

by George McKinnon Wrong

It was a long march over the prairie. La Vérendrye found that he could not hurry his Indian guides. They insisted on delays during days of glorious autumn weather when it would have been wise to press on and avoid the winter cold on the wind-swept prairie. They went out of their way to visit a village of their own Assiniboine tribe; and, when they resumed their journey, this whole village followed them. The prairie Indians had a more developed sense of order and discipline than the tribes of the forest. La Vérendrye admired the military regularity of the savages on the march. They divided the company of more than six hundred into three columns: in front, scouts to look out for an enemy and also for herds of buffalo; in the center, well protected, the old and the lame, all those incapable of fighting; and, for a rear-guard, strong fighting men. When buffalo were seen, the most active of the fighters rushed to the front to aid in hemming in the game. Women and dogs carried the baggage, the men condescending to bear only their weapons.

Not until cold December had come did the party reach the chief Mandan village. It was in some sense imposing, for the Indian lodges were arranged neatly in streets and squares and the surrounding palisade was strong and well built. Around the fort was a ditch fifteen feet deep and of equal width, which made the village impregnable in Indian warfare. After saluting the village with three volleys of musket fire, La Vérendrye marched in with great ceremony, under the French flag, only to discover that the Mandans were not greatly unlike the Assiniboines and other Indians of the West whom he already knew. The men went about naked and the women nearly so. They were skilled in dressing leather. They were also cunning traders, for they duped La Vérendrye’s friends, the Assiniboines, and cheated them out of their muskets, ammunition, kettles, and knives. Great eaters were the Mandans. They cultivated abundant crops and stored them in cave cellars. Every day they brought their visitors more than twenty dishes cooked in earthen pottery of their own handicraft. There was incredible feasting, which La Vérendrye avoided but which his sons enjoyed. The Mandan language he could not understand and close questioning as to the route to the Western Sea was thus impossible. He learned enough to discredit the vague tales of white men in armor and peopled towns with which his lying guides had regaled him. In the end he decided for the time being to return to Fort La Reine and to leave two of his followers to learn the Mandan language so that in the future they might act as interpreters. When he left the Mandan village on the 13th of December, he was already ill and it is a wonder that he did not perish from the cold on the winter journey across hill and prairie. “In all my life I have never,” he says, “endured such misery from illness and fatigue, as on that journey.” On the 11th of February he was back at Fort La Reine, worn out and broken in health but still undaunted and resolved never to abandon his search.

Abandon it he never did. We find him in Montreal in 1740 involved in what he had always held in horror—a lawsuit brought against him by some impatient creditor. The report had gone abroad that he was amassing great wealth, when, as he said, all that he had accumulated was a debt of forty thousand livres. In the autumn of 1741 he was back at Fort La Reine, where he welcomed his son Pierre from a fruitless journey to the Mandans.

The most famous of all the efforts of the family was now on foot. On April 29, 1742, a new expedition started from Fort La Reine, led by La Vérendrye’s two sons, Pierre and François. They knew the nature of the task before them, its perils as well as its hopes. They took with them no imposing company as their father had done, but only two men. The party of four, too feeble to fight their way, had to trust to the peaceful disposition of the natives. When they started, the prairie was turning from brown to green and the rivers were still swollen from the spring thaw. In three weeks they reached a Mandan village on the upper Missouri and were well received. It was after midsummer when they set out again and pressed on westward with a trend to the south. The country was bare and desolate. For twenty days they saw no human being. They had Mandan guides who promised to take them to the next tribe, the Handsome Men—Beaux Hommes—as the brothers called them, a tribe much feared by the Mandans. The travelers were now mounted; for the horse, brought first to America by the Spaniards, had run wild on the western plains where the European himself had not yet penetrated, and had become an indispensable aid to certain of the native tribes. Deer and buffalo were in abundance and they had no lack of food.

When they reached the tribe of Beaux Hommes, the Mandan guides fled homeward. Summer passed into bleak autumn with chill winds and long nights. By the end of October they were among the Horse Indians who, they had been told, could guide them to the sea. These, however, now said that only the Bow Indians, farther on, could do this. Winter was near when they were among these Indians, probably a tribe of the Sioux, whom they found excitedly preparing for a raid on their neighbors farther west, the Snakes. They were going, they said, towards the mountains and there the Frenchmen could look out on the great sea. So the story goes on. The brothers advanced ever westward and the land became more rugged, for they were now climbing upward from the prairie country. At last, on January 1, 1743, they saw what both cheered and discouraged them. In the distance were mountains. About them was the prairie, with game in abundance. It was a great host with which the brothers traveled for there were two thousand warriors with their families who made night vocal with songs and yells. On the 12th of January, nearly two weeks later, with an advance party of warriors, the La Vérendryes reached the foot of the mountains, “well wooded with timber of every kind and very high.”

Was it the Rocky Mountains which they saw? Had they reached that last mighty barrier of snow-capped peaks, rugged valleys, and torrential streams, beyond which lay the sea? That they had done so was long assumed and many conjectures have been offered as to the point in the Rockies near which they made their last camp. Their further progress was checked by an unexpected crisis. One day they came upon an encampment of the dreaded Snake Indians which had been abandoned in great haste. This, the Bow Indians thought, could only mean that the Snakes had hurriedly left their camp in order to slip in behind the advance guard of the Bows and massacre the women and children left in the rear. Panic seized the Bows and they turned homeward in wild confusion. Their chief could not restrain them. “I was very much disappointed,” writes one of the brothers, “that I could not climb the mountains”—those mountains from which he had been told that he might view the Western Sea.

There was nothing for it but to turn back through snowdrifts over the bleak prairie. The progress was slow for the snow was sometimes two feet deep. On the 1st of March the brothers parted with their Bow friends at their village and then headed for home. By the 20th they were encamped with a friendly tribe on the banks of the Missouri. Here, to assert that Louis XV was lord of all that country, they built on an eminence a pyramid of stones and in it they buried a tablet of lead with an inscription which recorded the name of Louis XV, their King, and of the Marquis de Beauharnois, Governor of Canada, and the date of the visit.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. One hundred and seventy years later, on February 16, 1913, a schoolgirl strolling with some companions on a Sunday afternoon near the High School in the town of Pierre, South Dakota, stumbled upon a projecting corner of this tablet, which was in an excellent state of preservation. Thus we know exactly where the brothers La Vérendrye were on April 2, 1743, when they bade farewell to their Indian friends and set out on horseback for Fort La Reine.

Spring had turned to summer before the brothers reached their destination. On July 2, 1743, they relieved the anxiety of their waiting father after an absence of fifteen months. Moving slowly as they did, could they have traveled from the distant Rockies from the time in January when they turned back? It seems doubtful; and in spite of the long-cherished belief that the brothers reached the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, it may be that they had not penetrated beyond the barrier which we know as the Black Hills. The chance discovery of a forgotten plate by school children may in truth prove that, as late as in 1750, the Rocky Mountains had not yet been seen by white men and that the first vision of that mighty range was obtained much farther north in Canada.

After 1743 the French seem to have made no further efforts to reach the Western Sea by way of the Missouri. If in reality the brothers had not gone beyond the Black Hills in South Dakota, then their most important work appears to have been done within what is now Canada, as discoverers of the Saskatchewan, the mighty river which carries to far-distant Hudson Bay the waters melted on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. It was by this route up the Saskatchewan that fifty years later was solved the tough and haunting problem of going over the mountains to the Pacific Ocean. La Vérendrye now ascended the Saskatchewan for some three hundred miles to the forks where it divides into two great branches. He was going deeper into debt but he hoped always for help from the King. It is pathetic to see today, on the map of that part of western Canada which he and his sons explored, a town, a lake, and a county called Dauphin, in honor of the heir to the throne of France. No doubt La Vérendrye had the thought that some day he might plead with the Dauphin when he had become King for help in his great task.