Montreal had advanced goods for trade with the Indians on the way to
the Western Sea. Their expectations of profits were probably the same
as the man's who buys a mining share for ten cents and looks for
dividends of several thousand per cent. And the fur trade at that time
was capable of yielding such profits. Traders had gone West with less
than $2000 worth of goods in modern money, and returned three years
later with a sheer profit of a quarter of a million. Hope of such
returns added zest to De la Verendrye's venture for the discovery of
the Western Sea.

Goods done up in packets of a hundred pounds lay at the feet of the
_voyageurs_ awaiting De la Verendrye's command. A dozen soldiers in
the plumed hats, slashed buskins, the brightly colored doublets of the
period, joined the motley company. Priests came out to bless the
departing _voyageurs_. Chapel bells rang out their God-speed. To the
booming of cannon, and at a word from De la Verendrye, the gates
opened. Falling in line with measured tread, the soldiers marched out
from Mount Royal. Behind, in the ambling gait of the moccasined
woodsman, came the _voyageurs_ and _coureurs_ and interpreters,
pack-straps across their foreheads, packets on the bent backs, the long
birch canoes hoisted to the shoulders of four men, two abreast at each
end, heads hidden in the inverted keel.

The path led between the white fret of Lachine Rapids and the dense
forests that shrouded the base of Mount Royal. Checkerboard squares of
farm patches had been cleared in the woods. La Salle's old
thatch-roofed seigniory lay not far back from the water. St. Anne's
was the launching place for fleets of canoes that were to ascend the
Ottawa. Here, a last look was taken of splits and seams in the birch
keels. With invocations of St. Anne in one breath, and invocations of
a personage not mentioned in the cure's "petee cat-ee-cheesm" in the
next breath, and imprecations that their "souls might be smashed on the
end of a picket fence,"--the _voyageur's_ common oath even to this
day,--the boatmen stored goods fore, aft, and athwart till each long
canoe sank to the gunwale as it was gently pushed out on the water. A
last sign of the cross, and the lithe figures leap light as a mountain
cat to their place in the canoes. There are four benches of paddlers,
two abreast, with bowman and steersman, to each canoe. One can guess
that the explorer and his sons and his nephew, Sieur de l