In June, 1754, Anthony Hendry, a young man in the service of the Company, left York factory on Hudson Bay to find out what the French were doing. We have a slight but carefully written diary of Hendry’s journey. He does not fail to note that in the summer weather life was made almost intolerable by the “musketoos.” Traveling by canoe he reached the Saskatchewan River and tells how, on the 22d of July, he came to “a French house.” It was Fort Paskoya. When Hendry paddled up to the river bank two Frenchmen met him and “in a very genteel manner” invited him into their house. With all courtesy they asked him, he says, if he had any letter from his master and where and on what design he was going inland. His answer was that he had been sent “to view the Country” and that he intended to return to Hudson Bay in the spring. The Frenchmen were sorry that their own master, who was apparently the well-known Canadian leader, St. Luc de la Corne, the successor of Saint-Pierre, had gone to Montreal with furs, and added their regrets that they must detain Hendry until this leader’s return. At this Hendry’s Indians grunted and said that the French dared not do so. Next day Hendry took breakfast and dinner at the fort, gave “two feet of tobacco” (at that time it was sold in long coils) to his hosts, and in return received some moose flesh. The confidence of his Indian guides that the French would not dare to detain him was justified. Next day Hendry paddled on up the river and advanced more than twenty miles, camping at night by “the largest Birch trees I have yet seen.”
Hendry wished to see the country thoroughly and to come into touch with the natives. The best way to do this and to obtain food was to leave the river and go boldly overland. He accordingly left his canoes behind and advanced on foot. The party was starving. On a Sunday in July he walked twenty-six miles and says “neither Bird nor Beast to be seen,—so that we have nothing to eat.” The next day he traveled twenty-four miles on an empty stomach and then, to his delight, found a supply of ripe strawberries, “the size of black currants and the finest I ever eat.” The next day his Indians killed two moose. He then met natives who, when he asked them to go to Hudson Bay to trade, replied that they could obtain all they needed from the French posts. The tact and skill of the French were such that, as Hendry admits, reluctantly enough, the Indians were already strongly attached to them. Day after day Hendry journeyed on over the rolling prairie in the warm summer days. He came to the south branch of the Saskatchewan near the point where now stands the city of Saskatoon and crossed the river on the 21st of August. Then on to the West, eager to take part in the hunting of the buffalo.
Hendry is almost certainly the first Englishman to see this region. In the end he reached the mountains. He makes no mention of having seen or heard anything of Fort La Jonquière, built three years earlier. He had aims different from those of La Vérendrye and other French explorers. Not the Western Sea but openings for trade was he seeking. His great aim was to reach the tribe called later the Blackfeet Indians, who were mighty hunters of the buffalo. Hendry was alive to the impressions of nature. The intense heat of August was followed in September by glorious weather, with the nights cool and the mosquitoes no longer troublesome. The climate was bracing. He complains only, from time to time, of swollen feet, and we need not wonder since his daily march occasionally went beyond twenty-five miles. Sometimes for days he saw no living creature. At other times wild life was prolific: there were moose in great abundance, bears, including the dreaded grizzly—one of which killed an Indian of his company and badly mutilated another—beaver, wild horses, and, above all, the buffalo. “Saw many herds of Buffalo grazing like English cattle,” he says, on the 13th of September, and the next day he goes buffalo hunting. Guns and ammunition were costly. His Indians, who used only bows and arrows, on this day killed seven—“fine sport,” says Hendry. Often the Indians took only the tongue, leaving the carcass for the wolves, who naturally abounded in such advantageous conditions. It is not easy now to imagine the part played by the buffalo in the life of the prairie. As Hendry advanced the herds were so dense as sometimes to retard his progress. Other writers tell of the vast numbers of these creatures. Alexander Henry, the younger, writing on April 1, 1801, says that in a river swollen by spring floods, drowned buffalo floated past his camp in one continuous line for two days and two nights. In prairie fires thousands were blinded and would go tumbling down banks into streams or lie down to die. One morning the bellowing of buffaloes awakened Henry and he looked out to see the prairie black. “The ground was covered at every point of the compass, as far as the eye could reach, and every animal was in motion.”
Daily as Hendry advanced he saw smoke in the distance and his Indians told him that it came from the camp of the Blackfeet. He reached them on Monday the 14th of October. When four miles away he was stopped by mounted scouts who asked whether he came as a friend or as an enemy. He was taken to the camp of two hundred tents pitched in two rows, and was led through the long passage between the tents to the big tent of the chief of whom he had heard much. Not a word was spoken. The chief sat on a white buffalo skin. Pipes were passed round and each person was presented with boiled buffalo flesh. When talk began, Hendry told the chief that his great leader had sent him to invite them to come to trade at Hudson Bay where his people would get powder, shot, guns, cloth, beads, and other things. The chief said it was far away, and his people knew nothing of paddling. Such strangers to great waters were they that they would not even eat fish. They despised Hendry’s tobacco. What they smoked was dried horse dung. In the end Hendry was dismissed and ordered to make his camp a quarter of a mile away from that of the Blackfeet.
It was close by the present site of Calgary and apparently in full view, on clear days, of the white peaks of the Rocky Mountains that Hendry visited the Blackfeet. He lingered in the far western country through the greater part of the winter. On a portion of his return journey he used a horse. When the spring thaw came, once more he took to the water in canoes. He complains of the idleness of his Indian companions who would remain in their huts all day and never stir to lay up a store of food even when game was abundant. Conjuring, dancing to the hideous pounding of drums, feasting and smoking, were their amusements. On his way back Hendry revisited the French post on the Saskatchewan. The leader, no doubt St. Luc de la Corne, had returned from Montreal and now had with him nine men. “The master,” says Hendry, “invited me in to sup with him, and was very kind. He is dressed very Genteel.” He showed Hendry his stock of furs; “a brave parcel,” the admiring rival thought. Hendry admits the superiority of the French as traders. They “talk Several Languages to perfection; they have the advantage of us in every shape.” In the West, as in the East, France was recognized as a formidable rival of England for the mastery of North America.
When Hendry was making his peaceful visit to the French fort in 1755, the crisis of the struggle had just been reached. In that year the battle line from Acadia to the Ohio and the Mississippi was already forming, and the fate of France’s eager efforts to hold the West was soon to be decided in the East. If Britain should conquer on the St. Lawrence, she would conquer also on the Saskatchewan and on the Mississippi.
Conquer she did, and thus it happened that it was Britain’s sons who took up the later burdens of the discoverer. In the summer of 1789, just at the time when the great Revolution was beginning in France, Alexander Mackenzie, a Scotch trader from Montreal, starting from Lake Athabasca, north of the farthest point reached by Hendry, was pressing still onward into an unknown region to find a river which might lead to the sea. This river he found; we know it now as the Mackenzie. For two weeks he and his Indians and voyageurs paddled with the current down this mighty stream, and on July 14, 1789, the day of the fall of the Bastille, he saw whales sporting in Arctic waters.
The real goal which Mackenzie sought was that of La Vérendrye, a western and not a northern ocean. Three years later, after months of preparation, he attempted the great feat of crossing the Rocky Mountains to the sea. After nine months of rugged travel, across mountain streams and gorges, in peril daily from hostile savages, on July 22, 1793, he reached the shore of the Pacific Ocean, the first white man to go by land over the width of the continent from sea to sea. It was thus a Scotchman who achieved that of which La Vérendrye had so long dreamed; and with no aid from the state but with only the resources of a trading company.
Ten years later, when France sold to the United States her last remaining territory of Louisiana, the American Government equipped an expedition under Lewis and Clark to cross the Rocky Mountains by way of the Missouri, the route from which the La Vérendrye brothers had been obliged to turn back. The party began the ascent of the Missouri on May 14, 1804, and arrived in the Mandan country in the late autumn. Here they spent the winter of 1804-05. Not until November 15, 1805, had they completed the hard journey across the Rocky Mountains and reached the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Ocean. Little did La Vérendrye, in his eager search for the Western Sea, imagine the difficulties to be encountered and the hardships to be endured by those who were destined, in later days, to realize his dream.