the hideous
pounding of drums, feasting and smoking, were their amusements. On
his way back Hendry revisited the French post on the Saskatchewan. The
leader, no doubt St. Luc de la Corne, had returned from Montreal and now
had with him nine men. "The master," says Hendry, "invited me in to
sup with him, and was very kind. He is dressed very Genteel." He showed
Hendry his stock of furs; "a brave parcel," the admiring rival thought.
Hendry admits the superiority of the French as traders. They "talk
Several Languages to perfection; they have the advantage of us in
every shape." In the West, as in the East, France was recognized as a
formidable rival of England for the mastery of North America.

When Hendry was making his peaceful visit to the French fort in 1755,
the crisis of the struggle had just been reached. In that year the
battle line from Acadia to the Ohio and the Mississippi was already
forming, and the fate of France's eager efforts to hold the West was
soon to be decided in the East. If Britain should conquer on the
St. Lawrence, she would conquer also on the Saskatchewan and on the
Mississippi.

Conquer she did, and thus it happened that it was Britain's sons who
took up the later burdens of the discoverer. In the summer of 1789, just
at the time when the great Revolution was beginning in France, Alexander
Mackenzie, a Scotch trader from Montreal, starting from Lake Athabasca,
north of the farthest point reached by Hendry, was pressing still onward
into an unknown region to find a river which might lead to the sea. This
river he found; we know it now as the Mackenzie. For two weeks he and
his Indians and voyageurs paddled with the current down this mighty
stream, and on July 14, 1789, the day of the fall of the Bastille, he
saw whales sporting in Arctic waters.

The real goal which Mackenzie sought was that of La Verendrye, a
western and not a northern ocean. Three years later, after months of
preparation, he attempted the great feat of crossing the Rocky Mountains
to the sea. After nine months of rugged travel, across mountain streams
and gorges, in peril daily from hostile savages, on July 22, 1793, he
reached the shore of the Pacific Ocean, the first white man to go by
land over the width of the continent from sea to sea. It was thus a
Scotchman who achieved that of which La Verendrye had so long dreamed;
and with no aid from the state but with only the resources of a trading
company.

Ten years later,