Before the year 1700, the course of the upper Mississippi was known. Nicolas Perrot, in or about 1685, is said to have established posts where the river widens out into Lake Pepin; and further north, French coureurs de bois, or voyageurs, as they began to be called, gained information of the Lake of the Woods, and of the Lac des Assiniboines, now Lake Winnipeg. The principal Indian tribes in the regions of the upper Mississippi were Sioux; and, with a view to making them friends to France, and penetrating through their country to the western sea, the Jesuit traveller Charlevoix recommended, in 1723, that a mission should be established among them. A few years later, in 1727, a company was formed for trading in the Sioux country, and built a new fort on Lake Pepin called, after the then Governor of Canada, Fort Beauharnois. The Sioux, however, proved intractable neighbours, and ten years later the fort was abandoned.
| Verendrye. |
In 1728, there was a small French outpost at Nipigon, at the western end of Lake Superior, on its northern side—where the river Nipigon flows from the lake of the same name into Lake Superior. The commander was Pierre de Varennes de la Verendrye, son of a lieutenant of the Carignan Regiment, who had settled at and been Governor of Three Rivers. As a young man, La Verendrye had crossed the sea to fight in the armies of France, and had been badly wounded on the field of Malplaquet. He lived to leave his name high in the list of western explorers. At his distant station on Lake Superior, he heard the stories that Indians brought, mixture of fact and fable, of waters to the west that led to the long-sought-for sea; he offered to follow up the clue, and, with the usual opposition from jealous Canadian merchants, and the usual barren authority from the French Government to explore at his own expense, in return for the grant of a monopoly of the fur trade to the west and north of Lake Superior, he gave the rest of his life to western discovery.
| The water-parting on the west of Lake Superior. |
As the water-parting between the basin of the St. Lawrence and that of the Mississippi is hardly marked by any height of land, so the divide between the chain of lakes which feed the St. Lawrence and the more westerly waters, of which Lake Winnipeg is the centre, is a slight rise of ground which it is difficult to distinguish on the maps. A low range of hills runs round the western end of Lake Superior, at the highest point not more than 1,000 feet above the level of the lake. These uplands separate the tributaries of Lake Superior and the St. Lawrence from the feeders of Lake Winnipeg. There were two routes across the divide, one leaving Lake Superior at Thunder Bay, near the point where Port Arthur now stands, and following for a short distance the present line of the Canadian Pacific Railway; the other a little further south, leaving the lake at or near Pigeon river, and going westward along the present boundary line between Canada and the United States. On this latter route was the Grand Portage, by which the voyageurs crossed the water-parting at about sixty miles distance from Lake Superior, and reached Rainy Lake. Rainy Lake drains into the Lake of the Woods, and the Lake of the Woods drains into Lake Winnipeg. This last great lake, fed by the Saskatchewan, the Assiniboine, the Red River, and many other rivers and lakes, finds its outlet by the Nelson river to Hudson Bay, and a chain of posts carried from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg would tend to divert the western fur trade from Hudson Bay to the St. Lawrence.
| Verendrye's journeys and forts. His sons near the Rocky mountains. |
In the summer of 1731, La Verendrye started west by the Grand Portage; and in the next eight or nine years established posts along the water line, from Rainy Lake to where the Saskatchewan river enters Lake Winnipeg from the north-west. One of these forts or stations was Fort La Reine on the Assiniboine river, which formed the starting-point for an advance over the western plains through what is now the State of Dakota. In 1742, two of his sons made their way from the Assiniboine to the Missouri, crossed the latter river, and, traversing the prairies in a westerly and south-westerly direction, reached the country drained by the tributaries of the Yellowstone river. How far they went is matter of conjecture, and doubt is thrown on their claim to have been the first discoverers of the Rocky mountains. It is stated that, on January 1, 1743, they came in sight of high mountains, which are supposed to have been the Bighorn range in Wyoming and Montana, an eastern buttress of the Rocky mountains, lying in front of the Yellowstone National Park; but no mention is made in the story of snowy peaks, such as would indicate discovery of the great mountain barrier of America. The explorers came back in fifteen months' time. Their father died in 1749, and, like other pioneers, they reaped but little fruit, in honour or in profit, from all their labours. They did not find the western sea, they possibly did not descry the Rocky mountains; but to La Verendrye and his sons it must be credited that a new water area in the far west was fully made known to the world, and that trade routes were opened beyond the basin of the St. Lawrence and the basin of the Mississippi, reaching to the great Saskatchewan river and to the waters which flow into Hudson Bay.
| The Rocky mountains. |
The Rocky mountains, as we know them, were not known in the eighteenth century.10 In 1793 Sir Alexander Mackenzie crossed them far in the North, by the line of the Peace river, and reached the Pacific Ocean on the coast of British Columbia; but the full revelation of the main range dates from the year 1805, when Lewis and Clarke followed the Missouri to its source, and thence made their way over the mountain barrier to the western sea. In short, as long as Canada was New France, and for years afterwards, it was for trading and for colonizing purposes a region of inland waters; it was not also, as it now is, a land of plains, with a background of giant mountains, and behind them the further ocean. Yet it was to reach the further ocean that Europeans first came into Canada, and the earnest expectation of the earliest explorers has in our own time found more than fulfilment in a Dominion from sea to sea.
10 In Jeffreys' American Atlas, 1775, the Assiniboils (sic) or St. Charles river is prolonged to the Pacific by a dotted line, entitled the 'River of the West.' Below it a range of mountains is traced from north to south, with the note, 'Hereabouts are supposed to be the mountains of bright stones mentioned in the map of the Indian Ochagach.' In Carver's Travels through North America in 1766-8, published in 1778, p. 121, the Rocky mountains 'are called the Shining Mountains from an infinite number of chrystal stones of amazing size with which they are covered, and which, when the sun shines full upon them, sparkle so as to be seen at a very great distance.' Morse's American Geography, 1794, shows the Rocky mountains on the map of America. In the text they are called 'Shining Mountains.' In Arrowsmith's Map of North America, dated 1795-6, they are called Stony Mountains. In a later edition of 1811 the name 'Rocky Mountains' appears.