territories to their native land. Moreover, this
project, which their father had had so much at heart, had become now
for them a sacred duty. To their dismay, however, they soon found that
the promise made to their father did not extend to themselves. Another
officer, Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, was appointed by the governor of
Canada to carry on the search for the Western Sea. They had spent
years of toil and discomfort in the wilderness and endured countless
hardships and dangers. They had carefully studied the languages,
manners, and customs of the Indian tribes, and they had found out by
hard experience what would be the best means of completing their
discovery. Yet now they were thrown aside in {97} favour of an officer
who had never been in the Far West and who knew nothing of the
conditions he would there be compelled to meet.

They could at least appeal for justice. In a last attempt to obtain
this for himself and his brothers, Francois de La Verendrye wrote this
letter to the king's minister:

The only resource left to me is to throw myself at the feet of your
Lordship and to trouble you with the story of my misfortunes. My name
is La Verendrye; my late father is known here [in Canada] and in France
by the exploration for the discovery of the Western Sea to which he
devoted the last fifteen years of his life. He travelled and made
myself and my brothers travel with such vigour that we should have
reached our goal, if he had had only a little more help, and if he had
not been so much thwarted, especially by envy. Envy is still here,
more than elsewhere, a prevailing passion against, which one has no
protection. While my father, my brothers, and myself were exhausting
ourselves with toil, and while we were incurring a crushing burden of
expense, his steps and ours were represented as directed only towards
[our own gain by] the finding of {98} beaver; the outlay he was forced
to incur was described as dissipation; and his narratives were spoken
of as a pack of lies. Envy as it exists in this country is no half
envy; its principle is to calumniate furiously in the hope that if even
half of what is said finds favour, it will be enough to injure. In
point of fact, my father, thus opposed, had to his sorrow been obliged
more than once to return and to make us return because of the lack of
help and protection. He has even been reproached by the court [for not
giving adequate reports upon his work]; he