neatly in streets and squares and the surrounding palisade was
strong and well built. Around the fort was a ditch fifteen feet deep and
of equal width, which made the village impregnable in Indian warfare.
After saluting the village with three volleys of musket fire, La
Verendrye marched in with great ceremony, under the French flag, only to
discover that the Mandans were not greatly unlike the Assiniboines and
other Indians of the West whom he already knew. The men went about naked
and the women nearly so. They were skilled in dressing leather. They
were also cunning traders, for they duped La Verendrye's friends,
the Assiniboines, and cheated them out of their muskets, ammunition,
kettles, and knives. Great eaters were the Mandans. They cultivated
abundant crops and stored them in cave cellars. Every day they brought
their visitors more than twenty dishes cooked in earthen pottery of
their own handicraft. There was incredible feasting, which La Verendrye
avoided but which his sons enjoyed. The Mandan language he could not
understand and close questioning as to the route to the Western Sea was
thus impossible. He learned enough to discredit the vague tales of white
men in armor and peopled towns with which his lying guides had regaled
him. In the end he decided for the time being to return to Fort La Reine
and to leave two of his followers to learn the Mandan language so that
in the future they might act as interpreters. When he left the Mandan
village on the 13th of December, he was already ill and it is a wonder
that he did not perish from the cold on the winter journey across hill
and prairie. "In all my life I have never," he says, "endured such
misery from illness and fatigue, as on that journey." On the 11th of
February he was back at Fort La Reine, worn out and broken in health but
still undaunted and resolved never to abandon his search.

Abandon it he never did. We find him in Montreal in 1740 involved in
what he had always held in horror--a lawsuit brought against him by
some impatient creditor. The report had gone abroad that he was amassing
great wealth, when, as he said, all that he had accumulated was a debt
of forty thousand livres. In the autumn of 1741 he was back at Fort La
Reine, where he welcomed his son Pierre from a fruitless journey to the
Mandans.

The most famous of all the efforts of the family was now on foot. On
April 29, 1742, a new expedition started from Fort La Reine, led by La
Verendry