end.

Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, the choice of the Marquis de la Jonquiere
to take up the search for the Western Sea in succession to the elder
La Verendrye, himself went only as far as Fort La Reine. It was a
subordinate, the Chevalier de Niverville, whom he sent farther west to
find the great mountains and if possible the sea. The winter of 1750-51
had set in before Niverville was ready. He started apparently from Fort
Maurepas, on snowshoes, his party dragging their supplies on toboggans.
Before they reached Paskoya on the Saskatchewan (the modern Le Pas) they
had nearly perished of hunger and were able to save their lives only by
catching a few fish through the ice. Niverville was ill. He sent forward
ten men by canoe up the Saskatchewan. They traveled with such rapidity
that on May 29, 1751, they had reached the Rockies. They built a
good fort, which they named Fort La Jonquiere, and stored it with a
considerable quantity of provisions. If, as seems likely, the brothers
La Verendrye saw only the Black Hills, these ten unknown men were the
discoverers of the Rocky Mountains.

Saint-Pierre braced himself to set out for the distant goal but he was
easily discouraged. Niverville, he said, was ill; the Indians were at
war among themselves; some of them were plotting what Saint-Pierre calls
"treason" to the French and their "perfidy" surpassed anything in his
lifelong experience. The hostile influence of the English he thought
all-pervasive. Obviously these are excuses. He did not like the task
and he turned back. As it was, he tells a dramatic story of how Indians
crowded into Fort La Reine in a threatening manner and how he saved the
fort and himself only by rushing to the magazine with a lighted torch,
knocking open a barrel of powder, and threatening to blow up everything
and everybody if the savages did not withdraw at once. He was eager to
leave the country. In 1752 he handed over the command to St. Luc de la
Come and, in August of that year, having experienced "much wretchedness"
on his journeys, he was safely back in Montreal. The founding of Fort
La Jonquiere was, no doubt, a great feat. Where the fort stood we do not
know. It may have been on the North Saskatchewan, near Edmonton, or
on the south branch of the river near Calgary. In any case it was a
far-flung outpost of France.

The English had always been more prosaic than the French. The traders on
Hudson Bay worked, indeed, under a monopoly not less rigor