wers the explorer was welcomed
through the gateway of little Fort Maurepas.

[Illustration: Traders' Boats running the Rapids of the Athabasca
River.]

Pierre de la Verendrye had heard of a region to the south much
frequented by the Assiniboine Indians, who had conducted Radisson to
the Sea of the North fifty years before--the Forks where the
Assiniboine River joins the Red, and the city of Winnipeg stands
to-day. It was reported that game was plentiful here. Two hundred
tepees of Assiniboines were awaiting the explorer. His forces were
worn with their marching, but in a few weeks the glaze of ice above the
fathomless drifts of snow would be too rotten for travel, and not until
June would the riverways be clear for canoes. But such a scant supply
of goods had his partners sent up that poor De la Verendrye had nothing
to trade with the waiting Assiniboines. Sending his sons forward to
reconnoitre the Forks of the Assiniboine,--the modern Winnipeg,--he set
out for Montreal as soon as navigation opened, taking with him fourteen
great canoes of precious furs.

The fourteen canoe loads proved his salvation. As long as there were
furs and prospects of furs, his partners would back the enterprise of
finding the Western Sea. The winter of 1738 was spent as the guest of
the governor at Chateau St. Louis. The partners were satisfied, and
plucked up hope of their venture. They would advance provisions in
proportion to earnings. By September he was back at Fort Maurepas on
Lake Winnipeg, pushing for the undiscovered bourne of the Western Sea.
Leaving orders for trade with the chief clerk at Maurepas, De la
Verendrye picked out his most intrepid men; and in September of 1738,
for the first time in history, white men glided up the ochre-colored,
muddy current of the Red for the Forks of the Assiniboine. Ten Cree
wigwams and two war chiefs awaited De la Verendrye on the low flats of
what are now known as South Winnipeg. Not the fabled Western Sea, but
an illimitable ocean of rolling prairie--the long russet grass rising
and falling to the wind like waves to the run of invisible
feet--stretched out before the eager eyes of the explorer. Northward
lay the autumn-tinged brushwood of Red River. South, shimmering in the
purple mists of Indian summer, was Red River Valley. Westward the sun
hung like a red shield, close to the horizon, over vast reaches of
prairie billowing to the sky-line in the tide of a boundless ocean.