r, and he dies in Poverty

I

1731-1736

A curious paradox is that the men who have done the most for North
America did not intend to do so. They set out on the far quest of a
crack-brained idealist's dream. They pulled up at a foreshortened
purpose; but the unaccomplished aim did more for humanity than the
idealist's dream.

Columbus set out to find Asia. He discovered America. Jacques Cartier
sought a mythical passage to the Orient. He found a northern empire.
La Salle thought to reach China. He succeeded only in exploring the
valley of the Mississippi, but the new continent so explored has done
more for humanity than Asia from time immemorial. Of all crack-brained
dreams that led to far-reaching results, none was wilder than the
search for the Western Sea. Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle had
followed the trail that Radisson had blazed and explored the valley of
the Mississippi; but like a will-o'-the-wisp beckoning ever westward
was that undiscovered myth, the Western Sea, thought to lie like a
narrow strait between America and Japan.

The search began in earnest one sweltering afternoon on June 8, 1731,
at the little stockaded fort on the banks of the St. Lawrence, where
Montreal stands to-day. Fifty grizzled adventurers--wood runners,
voyageurs, Indian interpreters--bareheaded, except for the colored
handkerchief binding back the lank hair, dressed in fringed buckskin,
and chattering with the exuberant nonchalance of boys out of school,
had finished gumming the splits of their ninety-foot birch canoes, and
now stood in line awaiting the coming of their captain, Sieur Pierre
Gaultier de Varennes de la Verendrye. The French soldier with his
three sons, aged respectively eighteen, seventeen, and sixteen, now
essayed to discover the fabled Western Sea, whose narrow waters were
supposed to be between the valley of the "Great Forked River" and the
Empire of China.

[Illustration: Indians and Hunters spurring to the Fight.]

Certainly, if it were worth while for Peter the Great of Russia to send
Vitus Bering coasting the bleak headlands of ice-blocked, misty shores
to find the Western Sea, it would--as one of the French governors
reported--"be nobler than open war" for the little colony of New France
to discover this "sea of the setting sun." The quest was invested with
all the rainbow tints of "_la gloire_"; but the rainbow hopes were
founded on the practical basis of profits. Leading merchants of