sachusetts,
and either butchered or carried off as prisoners most of the
inhabitants. Shortly afterwards we find him a participant in warfare of
a less ignoble type. In 1706 he went to France and became an ensign in
a regiment of grenadiers. Those were the days when Marlborough was
hammering and destroying the armies of Louis XIV. La Verendrye, took
part in the last of the series of great battles, the bloody conflict
at Malplaquet in 1709. He received a bullet wound through the body, was
left for dead on the field, fell into the hands of the enemy, and for
fifteen months was a captive. On his release he was too poor to maintain
himself as an officer in France and soon returned to Canada, where he
served as an officer in a colonial regiment until the peace of 1713.
Then the ambitious young man, recently married, with a growing family
and slight resources, had to work out a career suited to his genius.

His genius was that of an explorer; his task, which fully occupied
his alert mind, was that of finding the long dreamed of passage to
the Western Sea. The venture certainly offered fascinations. Noyon, a
fellow-townsman of La Verendrye at Three Rivers, had brought back from
the distant Lake of the Woods, in 1716, a glowing account, told to
him by the natives, of walled cities, of ships and cannon, and of
white-bearded men who lived farther west. In 1720 the Jesuit Charlevoix,
already familiar with Canada, came out from France, went to the
Mississippi country, and reported that an attempt to find the path to
the Western Sea might be made either by way of the Missouri or farther
north through the country of the Sioux west of Lake Superior. Both
routes involved going among warlike native tribes engaged in incessant
and bloody struggles with each other and not unlikely to turn on
the white intruder. Memorial after memorial to the French court for
assistance resulted at last in serious effort, but effort handicapped
because the court thought that a monopoly of the fur trade was the only
inducement required to promote the work of discovery.

La Verendrye was more eager to reach the Western Sea than he was to
trade. To outward seeming, however, he became just a fur trader and a
successful one. We find him, in 1726, at the trading-post of Nipigon,
not far from the lake of that name, near the north shore of Lake
Superior. From this point it was not very difficult to reach the shore
of one great sea, Hudson Bay, but that was not th