shallow stream flowing toward Lake
Nipissing, and from Lake Nipissing to Lake Huron. The change was a
welcome relief. The canoes now rode with the current; and when a wind
sprang up astern, blanket sails were hoisted that let the boatmen lie
back, paddles athwart. Going with the stream, the _voyageurs_ would
"run"--"_sauter les rapides_"--the safest of the cataracts. Bowman,
not steersman, was the pilot of such "runs." A faint, far swish as of
night wind, little forward leaps and swirls of the current, the blur of
trees on either bank, were signs to the bowman. He rose in his
place. A thrust of the steel-shod pole at a rock in mid-stream--the
rock raced past; a throb of the keel to the live waters below--the
bowman crouches back, lightening the prow just as a rider "lifts" his
horse to the leap; a sudden splash--the thing has happened--the canoe
has run the rapids or shot the falls.

[Illustration: "Each man landed with pack on his back, and trotted
away over portages."]

Pause was made at Lake Huron for favorable weather; and a rear wind
would carry the canoes at a bouncing pace clear across to
Michilimackinac, at the mouth of Lake Michigan. This was the chief fur
post of the lakes at that time. All the boats bound east or west,
Sioux and Cree and Iroquois and Fox, traders' and priests' and
outlaws'--stopped at Michilimackinac. Vice and brandy and religion
were the characteristics of the fort.

[Illustration: A Cree Indian of the Minnesota Borderlands.]

This was familiar ground to De la Verendrye. It was at the lonely fur
post of Nepigon, north of Michilimackinac, in the midst of a wilderness
forest, that he had eaten his heart out with baffled ambition from 1728
to 1730, when he descended to Montreal to lay before M. de Beauharnois,
the governor, plans for the discovery of the Western Sea. Born at
Three Rivers in 1686, where the passion for discovery and Radisson's
fame were in the very air and traders from the wilderness of the Upper
Country wintered, young Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Verendrye, at
the ambitious age of fourteen, determined that he would become a
discoverer.[2] At eighteen he was fighting in New England, at nineteen
in Newfoundland, at twenty-three in Europe at the battle of Malplaquet,
where he was carried off the field with nine wounds. Eager for more
distinguished service, he returned to Canada in his twenty-seventh
year, only to find himself relegated to an obscure trad