Before the year 1749 had ended La Vérendrye, who had returned to Montreal, was in his grave. His sons, partners in his work, expected to be charged with the task—to which the King, in 1749, had anew appointed their father—of continuing the work of discovery in the West. François, for a time ill, wrote in 1750 from Montreal to La Jonquière, the Governor at Quebec, that he hoped to take up the plans of his father. The Governor’s reply was that he had appointed another officer, Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, to lead in the search for the Western Sea. François hurried to Quebec. The Governor met him with a bland face and seemed friendly. François urged that he and his brothers claimed no preëminence and that they were ready to serve under the orders of Saint-Pierre. The Governor was hesitant; but at last told François frankly that the new leader desired no help either from him or from his brothers. François was dismayed. He and his brothers were in debt. Already he had sent on stores and men to the West and the men were likely to starve if not followed by provisions. His chief property was in the West in the form of goods which would be plundered without his guardianship. To tide over the immediate future he sold the one small piece of land in Montreal which he had inherited from his father and threw this slight sop to his urgent creditors.
Saint-Pierre, strong in his right of monopoly, insisted that the brothers should not even return to the West. François urged that to go was a matter of life and death. In some way he secured leave to set out with one laden canoe. When Saint-Pierre found that François had gone, he claimed damages for the intrusion on his monopoly and secured an order to pursue François and bring him back. He caught him at Michilimackinac. The meeting between the two men at that place involved explanations. Face to face with an injured man, Saint-Pierre admitted that he had been in the wrong, paid to François many compliments, and regretted that he had not joined hands with the brothers.
The mischief done was, however, irreparable. François, crippled by opposition, could not carry on his trade with success and in the end he returned to Montreal a ruined man overwhelmed with debt. He wrote to the French court a noble appeal for relief:
I remain without friends and without patrimony … a simple ensign of the second grade; my elder brother has only the same rank as myself; my younger brother is only a junior cadet. This is the result of all that my father, my brothers and myself have done.… There are in the hands of your Lordship resources of compensation and of consolation. I venture to appeal to you for relief. To find ourselves excluded from the West would mean to be cruelly robbed of our heritage, to realize for ourselves all that is bitter and to see others secure all that is sweet.
The appeal fell on deaf ears. The brothers sank into obscurity. During Montcalm’s campaigns from 1756 to 1759 Pierre and François seem to have been engaged in military service. François was killed in the siege of Quebec in 1759. After the final surrender of Canada the Auguste, a ship laden for the most part with refugees returning to France, was wrecked on the St. Lawrence. Among those on board who perished was Pierre de la Vérendrye. He died amid the howling of the tempest and the cries of drowning men. Tragedy, unrelenting, had pursued him to the end.
Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, the choice of the Marquis de la Jonquière to take up the search for the Western Sea in succession to the elder La Vérendrye, himself went only as far as Fort La Reine. It was a subordinate, the Chevalier de Niverville, whom he sent farther west to find the great mountains and if possible the sea. The winter of 1750-51 had set in before Niverville was ready. He started apparently from Fort Maurepas, on snowshoes, his party dragging their supplies on toboggans. Before they reached Paskoya on the Saskatchewan (the modern Le Pas) they had nearly perished of hunger and were able to save their lives only by catching a few fish through the ice. Niverville was ill. He sent forward ten men by canoe up the Saskatchewan. They traveled with such rapidity that on May 29, 1751, they had reached the Rockies. They built a good fort, which they named Fort La Jonquière, and stored it with a considerable quantity of provisions. If, as seems likely, the brothers La Vérendrye saw only the Black Hills, these ten unknown men were the discoverers of the Rocky Mountains.
Saint-Pierre braced himself to set out for the distant goal but he was easily discouraged. Niverville, he said, was ill; the Indians were at war among themselves; some of them were plotting what Saint-Pierre calls “treason” to the French and their “perfidy” surpassed anything in his lifelong experience. The hostile influence of the English he thought all-pervasive. Obviously these are excuses. He did not like the task and he turned back. As it was, he tells a dramatic story of how Indians crowded into Fort La Reine in a threatening manner and how he saved the fort and himself only by rushing to the magazine with a lighted torch, knocking open a barrel of powder, and threatening to blow up everything and everybody if the savages did not withdraw at once. He was eager to leave the country. In 1752 he handed over the command to St. Luc de la Corne and, in August of that year, having experienced “much wretchedness” on his journeys, he was safely back in Montreal. The founding of Fort La Jonquière was, no doubt, a great feat. Where the fort stood we do not know. It may have been on the North Saskatchewan, near Edmonton, or on the south branch of the river near Calgary. In any case it was a far-flung outpost of France.
The English had always been more prosaic than the French. The traders on Hudson Bay worked, indeed, under a monopoly not less rigorous than that which Canada imposed. Without doubt, many an Englishman on the Bay was haunted by the hope and desire to reach the Western Sea. But the servants of the Company knew that to buy and sell at a profit was their chief aim. They had been on the whole content to wait for trade to come to them. By 1740 the Indians, who made the long journey to the Bay by the intricate waters which carried to the sea the flood of the Saskatchewan and Lake Winnipeg, were showing to the English articles supplied by the French at points far inland. It thus became evident that the French were tapping the traffic in furs near its source and cutting off the stream which had long flowed to Hudson Bay.