when France sold to the United States her last
remaining territory of Louisiana, the American Government equipped an
expedition under Lewis and Clark to cross the Rocky Mountains by way of
the Missouri, the route from which the La Verendrye brothers had been
obliged to turn back. The party began the ascent of the Missouri on May
14, 1804, and arrived in the Mandan country in the late autumn. Here
they spent the winter of 1804-05. Not until November 15, 1805, had they
completed the hard journey across the Rocky Mountains and reached
the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Ocean. Little did
La Verendrye, in his eager search for the Western Sea, imagine the
difficulties to be encountered and the hardships to be endured by those
who were destined, in later days, to realize his dream.

CHAPTER VI. The Valley Of The Ohio

Almost at the moment in 1749 when British ships were lying at anchor in
Halifax harbor and sending to shore hundreds of boatloads of dazed and
expectant settlers for the new colony, there had set out from Montreal,
in the interests of France, an expedition with designs so far-reaching
that we wonder still at the stupendous issues involved in efforts which
seem so petty. The purpose of France was now to make good her claim
to the whole vast West. It was a picturesque company which pushed its
canoes from the shore at Lachine on the 15th of June, six days before
the British squadron reached Halifax. There was a procession of
twenty-three great birchbark canoes well filled, for in them were more
than two hundred men, at least ten in each canoe, together with the
necessary impedimenta for a long journey. There were twenty soldiers
in uniform, a hundred and eighty Canadians skilled in paddling and in
carrying canoes and freight over the portages, a band of Indians, and
fourteen officers with Celoron de Blainville at their head.

The acting Governor of Canada at this time was a dwarf in physique, but
a giant in intellect, the brilliant naval officer, the Marquis de
la Galissoniere, destined later to inflict upon the English in the
Mediterranean the naval defeat which caused the execution of Admiral
Byng as a coward. This remarkable man--planning, like his predecessor
Frontenac, on a scale suited to world politics--saw that the peace of
1748 settled nothing, that in the balance now was the whole future of
North America, and that victory would be to the alert and the strong.
He chose Celoron, the most ca