he French forces defeated by the
great Marlborough; but the Peace of Utrecht sent him back to Canada,
aged twenty-seven, to serve in the far northern fur post of Nepigon,
eating his heart out with ambition.

It was here the dreams of his childhood emerged like a commanding
destiny. Old Indian chief Ochagach drew maps on birch bark of a trail
to the Western Sea. La Verendrye took canoe for Quebec, and, with
heart beating to the passion of a secret ambition, laid the drawings
before Governor Beauharnois. He came just in the nick of time.
English traders were pressing westward. New France lent ready ear for
schemes of wider empire. The court could grant no money for
discoveries, but it gave La Verendrye permission for a voyage and
monopoly in furs over the lands he might discover; but the lands must
be found before there would be furs, and here began the mundane worries
of La Verendrye's glory.

Montreal merchants outfitted him, but that meant debt; and his little
party of fifty grizzled woodrovers set out with their ninety-foot birch
canoes from Montreal on June 8, 1731. Three sons were in his party and
a nephew, Jemmeraie, from the Sioux country of the west. Every foot
westward had been consecrated by heroism to set the pulse of
red-blooded men jumping. There {207} was the seigniory of La Chine,
named in derision of La Salle's project to find a path to China. There
was the Long Sault, where Dollard had fought the Iroquois. There were
the pink granite islands of Georgian Bay, where the Jesuits had led
their harried Hurons. There was Michilimackinac, with the brawl of its
vice and brandy and lawless traders from the woods, where La Motte
Cadillac ruled before going to found Detroit. Seventy-eight days from
Montreal, there were the pictured rocks of Lake Superior, purple and
silent and deep as ocean, which Radisson had coasted on his way to the
Mississippi. Then La Verendrye came to Duluth's old stamping
ground--Kaministiquia.

[Illustration: LA VERENDRYE'S FORTS AND THE RIVER OF THE WEST (After
Jeffery's map, 1762)]

The home-bound boats were just leaving the fur posts for the St.
Lawrence. Frosts had already stripped the trees of foliage, and winter
would presently lock all avenues of retreat in six months' ice. La
Verendrye's men began to doubt the wisdom of chasing a will-o'-the-wisp
to an unknown Western Sea. The explorer sent half the party forward
with his nephew Jemmeraie and his son Jean, wh