Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1713 to 1755, part 1

What with clandestine raids and open wars, it might be thought that the little nation of New France had vent enough for the buoyant energy of its youth.

While the population of the English colonies was nearing the million mark, New France had not 60,000 inhabitants by 1759. Yet what had the little nation, whose mainspring was at Quebec, accomplished?

Look at the map!

Her bushrovers had gone overland to Hudson Bay far north as Nelson.

Before 1700 Duluth had forts at Kaministiquia (near modern Fort Williams) on Lake Superior.

Radisson, Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle had blazed a trail to the Mississippi from what is now Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.

By 1701 La Motte Cadillac had built what is now Detroit in order to stop the progress of the English traders up the lakes to Michilimackinac; and by 1727 the Company of the Sioux had forts far west as Lake Pepin.

With Quebec as the hub of the wheel, draw spokes across the map of North America.

Where do they reach?

From Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, to the Missouri, to the Upper Mississippi, to Lake Superior, to Hudson Bay.

Who blazed the way through these far pathless wilds?

Nameless wanderers dressed in rags and tatters,--outcasts of society, forest rovers lured by the Unknown as by a siren, soldiers of fortune, penniless, in debt, heartbroken, slandered, persecuted, driven by the demon of their own genius to earth's ends,--and to ruin!

Spite of clandestine raids and open wars, New France was now setting herself to stretch the lines of her discoveries farther westward.

It will be remembered it was at Three Rivers that the Indians of the Up Country paused on their way down the St. Lawrence.

{206} From the days of Radisson in 1660 the passion for discovery had been in the very air of Three Rivers.

In this little fort was born in 1686 Pierre Gaultier Varennes de La Vérendrye, son of a French officer.

From childhood the boy's ear must have been accustomed to the uncouth babblings of the half-naked Indians, whose canoes came swarming down the river soon as ice broke up in spring.

One can guess that in his play the boy many a time simulated Indian voyageur, bushrover, coming home clad in furs, the envy of the villagers.

At fourteen young Pierre had decided that he would be a great explorer, but destiny for the time ruled otherwise.

At eighteen he was among the bushraiders of New England.

Nineteen found him fighting the English in Newfoundland.

Then came the honor coveted by all Canadian boys,--an appointment to the King's army in Europe.

Young La Vérendrye was among the 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye'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 Vérendrye came to Duluth's old stamping ground--Kaministiquia.

[Illustration: LA VÉRENDRYE'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 Vérendrye'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, while he himself remained at Kaministiquia with the mutineers to forage for provisions.

{208} Winter found Jemmeraie's men on the Minnesota side of Rainy Lake, where they built Fort Pierre and drove a rich trade in furs with the encamped Crees.

In summer of 1732 came La Vérendrye, his men in gayest apparel marching before the awe-struck Crees with bugle blowing and flags flying.

Then white men and Crees advanced in canoes to the Lake of the Woods, coasting from island to island through the shadowy defiles of the sylvan rocks along the Minnesota shore to the northwest angle.

Here a second winter witnessed the building of a second post, Fort St. Charles, with four rows of fifteen-foot palisades and thatched-roofed log cabins.

The Western Sea seemed far as ever,--like the rainbow of the child, ever fleeing as pursued,--and La Vérendrye's merchant partners were beginning to curse him for a rainbow chaser.

He had been away three years, and there were no profits.

Suspicious that he might be defrauding them by private trade or sacrificing their interests to his own ambitions, they failed to send forward provisions for this year.

La Vérendrye was in debt to his men for three years' wages, in debt to his partners for three years' provisions.

To fail now he dared not.

Go forward he could not, so he hurried down to Montreal, where he prevailed on the merchants to continue supplies by the simple argument that, if they stopped now, there would be total loss.

Young Jean La Vérendrye and Jemmeraie have meanwhile descended Winnipeg River's white fret of waterfalls to Winnipeg Lake, where they build Fort Maurepas, near modern Alexander,--and wait.

Fishing failed.

The hunt failed.

The winter of 1735-1736 proved of such terrible severity that famine stalked through the western woods.

La Vérendrye's three forts were reduced to diet of skins, moccasin soup, and dog meat.

In desperation Jemmeraie set out with a few voyageurs to meet the returning commander, but privation had undermined his strength.

He died on the way and was buried in his hunter's blanket beside an unknown stream between Lake Winnipeg and the Lake of the Woods.

Accompanied by the priest Aulneau, young Jean de La Vérendrye decided to rush canoes down from the Lake of the Woods to Michilimackinac for food and powder.

A furious pace was {209} to be kept all the way to Lake Superior.

The voyageurs had risen early one morning in June, and after paddling some miles 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye 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 Vérendrye.

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, fenced only by the blue dip of a shimmering horizon.

It was a world, though La Vérendrye knew it not, five times larger than New France, half as big as all Europe.

He had discovered the Canadian Northwest.

One can guess how the tired wanderers at rest beneath the uptilted canoes that night wondered whither their quest would lead them over the fire-dyed horizon where the sun was sinking as over a sea.

The Cree chiefs told them of other lands and other peoples to the south, "who trade with a people who dwelt on the great waters beyond the mountains of the setting sun,"--the Spaniards.

Leaving men to knock up a trading post near the suburb now known as Fort Rouge, La Vérendrye, on September 26, steers his canoes up the shallow Assiniboine far as what is now known as Portage La Prairie, where a trail leads overland to the Saskatchewan and so down to the English traders of Hudson Bay.

But this is not the trail to the Western Sea; La Vérendrye's quest is set towards those people "who live on the great waters to the south."

{211} [Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE SUPPOSED SEA OF THE WEST, WITH APPROACHES TO THE MISSISSIPPI AND GREAT LAKES, PARIS, 1755]

Fort de La Reine is built at the Portage of the Prairie, and October 18, to beat of drum, with flag flying, La Vérendrye marches forth with fifty-two men towards Souris River for the land of the Mandanes on the Missouri.

December 3 he is welcomed to the Mandane villages; but here is no Western Sea, only the broad current of the Missouri rolling turbulent and muddy southward towards the Mississippi; but the Mandanes tell of a people to the far west, "who live on the great waters bitter for drinking, who dress in armor and dwell in stone houses."

These must be the Spaniards.

La Vérendrye's quest has become a receding phantom.

Leaving men to learn the Missouri dialects, La Vérendrye marched in the teeth of mid-winter storms back to the Portage of the Prairie on the Assiniboine.

Of that march, space forbids to tell.

A

blizzard raged, driving the fine snows into eyes and skin like hot salt.

When the marchers camped at night they had to bury themselves in snow to keep from freezing.

Drifts covered all landmarks.

The men lost their bearings, doubled back on their own tracks, were frost-bitten, buffeted by the storm, and short of food.

Christmas {212} was passed in the camps of wandering Assiniboines, and February 10, 1739, the fifty men staggered, weak and starving, back to the Portage of the Prairie.

The wanderings of La Vérendrye and his sons for the next few years led southwestward far as the Rockies in the region of Montana, northwestward far as the Bow River branch of the Saskatchewan.

Meanwhile, all La Vérendrye's property had been seized by his creditors.

Jealous rivals were clamoring for possession of his fur posts.

The King had conferred on him the Order of the Cross of St. Louis, but eighteen years of exposure and worry had broken the explorer's health.

On the eve of setting out again for the west he died suddenly on the 6th of December, 1749, at Montreal.

Look again at the map!

The spokes of the wheel running out from Quebec extend to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, to the Rockies on the west, to Hudson Bay on the north.

And the population of New France does not yet number 60,000 people.

Is it any wonder French Canadians look back on these days as the Golden Age?

And while the bushrovers of Canada are pushing their way through the wilderness westward, there come slashing, tramping, swearing, stamping through the mountainous wilds of West and East Siberia the Cossack soldiers of Peter the Great, led by the Dane, Vitus Bering, bound on discovery to the west coast of America.

La Vérendrye's men have crossed only half a continent.

Bering's Russians cross the width of two continents, seven thousand miles, then launch their crazily planked ships over unknown northern seas for America.

From 1729 to August of 1742 toil the Russian sea voyagers.

Their story is not part of Canada's history.

Suffice to say, December of 1741 finds the Russian crews cast away on two desert islands of Bering Sea west of Alaska, now known as the Commander Islands.

Half the crew of seventy-seven perish of starvation and scurvy.

Bering himself lies dying in a sandpit, with the earth spread over him for warmth.

Outside the sand holes, {213} where the Russians crouch, scream hurricane gales and white billows and myriad sea birds.

The ships have been wrecked.

The Russians are on an unknown island.

Day dawn, December 8, lying half buried in the sand, Bering breathes his last.

On rafts made of wreckage the remnant of his crew find way back to Asia, but they have discovered a trail across the sea to a new land.

Fur hunters are moving from the east, westward.

Fur hunters are moving from the west, eastward.

These two tides will meet and clash at a later era.

The Treaty of Utrecht had stopped open war, but that did not prevent the bushrovers from raiding the border lands of Maine, of Massachusetts, of New York.

The story of one raid is the story of all, and several have already been related.

Now comes a half century of petty war that raged on the border lands from Saratoga and Northfield to Maine and New Brunswick.

The story of these "little wars," as the French called them, belongs more to the history of the United States than Canada.

Nor did the Peace of Utrecht stop the double dealing and intrigue by which European rulers sought to use bigoted missionaries and ignorant Indians as pawns in the game of statecraft.

"Sentiments of opposition to the English in Acadia must be secretly fostered," commanded the King of France in 1715, two years after Acadia had been deeded over to England.

"The King is pleased with the efforts of Père Rasle to induce the Indians not to allow the English to settle on their lands," runs the royal dispatch of 1721 regarding the border massacres of Maine.

"Advise the missionaries in Acadia to do nothing that may serve as a pretext for sending them out of the country, but have them induce the Indians to organize enterprises against the English," command the royal instructions of 1744. "The Indians," writes the Canadian Governor, "can be depended on to bring in the scalps of the English as long as we furnish ammunition.

This is the opinion of the missionary, M. Le Loutre."

Again, from the Governor of New France: "If the settlers of {214} Acadia hesitate to rise against their English masters, we can employ threats of the Indians and force.

It is inconceivable that the English would try to remove these people.

Letters from M. Le Loutre report that his Indians have intercepted dispatches of the English officers.

M.

Le Loutre will keep us informed of everything in Acadia.

We have furnished him with secret signals to our ships, which will tell us of every movement on the part of the enemy."

Of all the hotbeds of intrigue, Acadia, from its position, had become the worst.

Here was a population of French farmers, which in half a century had increased to 12,000, held in subjection by an English garrison at Annapolis of less than two hundred soldiers so destitute they had neither shoes nor stockings, coats nor bedding.

The French were guaranteed in the Treaty of Utrecht the freedom and privileges of their religion by the English; but in matters temporal as well as spiritual they were absolutely subject to priests, acting as spies for the Quebec plotters.

France, as has been told, retained Cape Breton (Isle Royal) and Prince Edward Island (Isle St. Jean), and the Treaty of Utrecht had hardly been signed before plans were drawn on a magnificent scale for a French fort on Cape Breton to effect a threefold purpose,--to command the sea towards Boston, to regain Acadia, to protect the approach to the River St. Lawrence.

The Island of Cape Breton is like a hand with its fingers stuck out in the sea.

The very tip of a long promontory commanding one of the southern arms of the sea was chosen for the fort that was to be the strongest in all America.

On three sides were the sea, with outlying islands suitable for powerful batteries and a harbor entrance that was both narrow and deep.

To the rear was impassable muskeg--quaking moss above water-soaked bog.

Two weaknesses only had the fort.

There were hills to right and left from which an enemy might pour destruction inside the walls, but the royal engineers of France depended on the outlying island batteries preventing any enemy gaining possession of these hills.

By 1720 walls thirty-six feet thick had encircled {215} an area of over one hundred acres.

Outside the rear wall had been excavated a ditch forty feet deep and eighty wide.

Bristling from the six bastions of the walls were more than one hundred and eighty heavy cannon.

Besides the two batteries commanding the entrance to the harbor was an outer Royal Battery of forty cannon directly across the water from the fort, on the next finger of the island.

Twenty years was the fort in building, costing what in those days was regarded as an enormous sum of money,--equal to ,000,000. Such was Louisburg, impregnable as far as human foresight could judge,--the refuge of corsairs that preyed on Boston commerce; the haven of the schemers who intrigued to wean away the Acadians from English rule, the guardian sentinel of all approach to the St. Lawrence.

"It would be well," wrote the King the very next year after the treaty was signed, "to attract the Acadians to Cape Breton, but act with caution."

And now twenty years had passed.

Some Acadians had gone to Cape Breton and others to Prince Edward Island; but statecraft judged the simple Acadian farmer would be more useful where he was,--on the spot in Acadia, ready to rebel when open war would give the French of Louisburg a chance to invade.