store of furs. On the shore of the
lake, in a charming meadow surrounded by oak trees, La Verendrye built a
trading-post on waters flowing to the west, naming it Fort St. Pierre.

The voyageurs could now travel westward with the current. It is certain
that other Frenchmen had preceded them in that region, but this is the
first voyage of discovery of which we have any details. Escorted by an
imposing array of fifty canoes of Indians, La Verendrye floated down
Rainy River to the Lake of the Woods, and here, on a beautiful peninsula
jutting out into the lake, he built another post, Fort St. Charles.
It must have seemed imposing to the natives. On walls one hundred feet
square were four bastions and a watchtower; evidence of the perennial
need of alertness and strength in the Indian country. There were a
chapel, houses for the commandant and the priest, a powder-magazine,
a storehouse, and other buildings. La Verendrye cleared some land and
planted wheat, and was thus the pioneer in the mighty wheat production
of the West. Fish and game were abundant and the outlook was smiling. By
this time the second winter of La Verendrye's adventurous journeying
was near, but even the cold of that hard region could not chill his
eagerness. He himself waited at Fort St. Charles but his eldest son,
Jean Baptiste, set out to explore still farther.

We may follow with interest the little group of Frenchmen and Indian
guides as they file on snowshoes along the surface of the frozen river
or over the deep snow of the silent forest on, ever on, to the West.
They are the first white men of whom we have certain knowledge to
press beyond the Lake of the Woods into that great Northwest so full of
meaning for the future. The going was laborious and the distances seemed
long, for on their return they reported that they had gone a hundred and
fifty leagues, though in truth the distance was only a hundred and fifty
miles. Then at last they stood on the shores of a vast body of water,
ice-bound and forbidding as it lay in the grip of winter. It opened out
illimitably westward. But it was not the Western Sea, for its waters
were fresh. The shallow waters of Lake Winnipeg empty not into the
Western Sea but into the Atlantic by way of Hudson Bay. Its shores then
were deserted and desolate, and even to this day they are but scantily
peopled. In that wild land there was no hint of the populous East of
which La Verendrye had dreamed.

At the mouth of the W