enturers. Plans continued to be formed for
reaching the Western or Pacific ocean even in the middle of the
eighteenth century. The Jesuit Charlevoix, the historian of New France,
was sent out to Canada by the French government to enquire into the
feasibility of a route which Frenchmen always hoped for. Nothing
definite came out of this mission, but the Jesuit was soon followed by
an enterprising native of Three Rivers, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes,
generally called the Sieur de la Verendrye, who with his sons ventured
into the region now known as the province of Manitoba and the north-west
territory of Canada. He built several forts, including one on the site
of the city of Winnipeg. Two of his sons are believed to have reached
the Big Horn Range, an "outlying buttress" of the Rocky Mountains, in
1743, and to have taken possession of what is now territory of the
United States. The youngest son, Chevalier de la Verendrye, who was the
first to see the Rocky Mountains, subsequently discovered the
Saskatchewan (Poskoiac) and even ascended it as far as the forks--the
furthest western limits so far touched by a white man in America. A few
years later, in 1751, M. de Niverville, under the orders of M. de St.
Pierre, then acting in the interest of the infamous Intendant Bigot, who
coveted the western fur-trade, reached the foot-hills of the Rocky
Mountains and built a fort on the Saskatchewan not far from the present
town of Calgary.

We have now followed the paths of French adventurers for nearly a
century and a half, from the day Champlain landed on the rocks of Quebec
until the Verendryes traversed the prairies and plains of the
North-west. French explorers had discovered the three great waterways of
this continent--the Mississippi, which pours its enormous volume of
water, drawn from hundreds of tributaries, into a southern gulf; the St.
Lawrence, which bears the tribute of the great lakes to the Atlantic
Ocean; the Winnipeg, with its connecting rivers and lakes which stretch
from the Rocky Mountains to the dreary Arctic sea. La Verendrye was the
first Frenchman who stood on the height of land or elevated plateau of
the continent, almost within sight of the sources of those great rivers
which flow, after devious courses, north, south and east. It has been
well said that if three men should ascend these three waterways to their
farthest sources, they would find themselves in the heart of North
America; and, so to speak, withi