s through the mist had landed to breakfast when
a band of marauding Sioux fell on them with a shout. The priest
Aulneau fell pierced in the head by a stone-pointed arrow. Young Jean
La Verendrye was literally hacked to pieces. Not a man of the
seventeen French escaped, and Massacre Island became a place of ill
omen to the French from that day. At last came the belated supplies,
and by February of 1737 La Verendrye had moved his main forces west to
Lake Winnipeg. This was no Western Sea, though the wind whipped the
lake like a tide,--which explained the Indian legend of an inland
ocean. Though it was no Western Sea, it was a new empire for France.
The bourne of the Unknown still fled like the rainbow, and La Verendrye
still pursued.

[Illustration: MAP PUBLISHED IN PARIS IN 1752 SHOWING THE SUPPOSED SEA
OF THE WEST]

Down to Quebec for more supplies with tales of a vast Beyond Land!
Back to Lake Winnipeg by September of 1738 with canoes gliding up the
muddy current of Red River for the Unknown Land of the Assiniboines;
past Nettley Creek, then known as Massacre Creek or Murderers' River,
from the Sioux having slain the encamped wives and children of the Cree
who had gone to Hudson Bay with their furs; between the wooded banks of
what are now East and West Selkirk, flat to left, high to right;
tracking up the Rapids of St. Andrews, thick oak woods to east, {210}
rippling prairie russet in the autumn rolling to the west,--La
Verendrye and his voyageurs came to the forks of Red River and the
Assiniboine, or what is now known as the city of Winnipeg. Where the
two rivers met on the flats to the west were the high scaffoldings of
an ancient Cree graveyard, bizarre and eerie and ghostlike between the
voyageurs and the setting sun. On the high river bank of what is now
known as Assiniboine Avenue gleamed the white skin of ten Cree tepees,
where two war chiefs waited to meet La Verendrye. Drawing up their
canoes near where the bridge now spans between St. Boniface and
Winnipeg, the voyageurs came ashore.

It was a fair scene that greeted them, such a scene as any westerner
may witness to-day of a warm September night when the sun hangs low
like a blood-red shield, and the evening breeze touches the rustling
grasses of the prairie beyond the city to the waves of an ocean. It
was not the Western Sea, but it was a Sea of Prairie. It was a New
World, unbounded by hill or forest, spacious as the very airs of
heaven, fe