The Chronicles of America Series (Volume 8)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 Excerpt: ...Nearly all pioneer work is a record of tragedy and its gloom lies heavy on the career of La Verendrye. A little later came another sorrowladen disaster. La Verendrye sent his eldest son Jean back to Rainy Lake to hurry the canoes from Montreal which were bringing needed food. The party landed on a peninsula at the discharge of Rainy Lake into Rainy River, fell into an ambush of Sioux Indians, and were butchered to a man. This incident reveals the chief cause of the slow progress in discovery in the Great West: the temper of the savages was always uncertain. There is no sign that La Verendrye wavered in his great hope even when he realized that the Winnipeg River was not the river flowing westward which he sought. We know now that the northern regions of the American continent east of the Rocky Mountains are tilted towards the east and the north and that in all its vast spaces there is no great river which flows to the west. La Verendrye, however, ignorant of this dictate of nature, longed to paddle with the stream towards the west. The Red River flows from the south into Lake Winnipeg at a point near the mouth of the Winnipeg River. Up the Red River went La Verendrye and found a tributary, the Assiniboine, flowing into it from the west. At the point of junction, where has grown up the city of Winnipeg, he built a tiny fort, called Fort Rouge, a name still preserved in a suburb of the modern Winnipeg. The explorers went southward on the Red River, and then went westward on the Assiniboine River only to find the waters persistently flowing against them and no definite news of other waters leading to the Western Sea. On the Assiniboine, near the site of the present town of Portage la Prairie in Manitoba, La Verendrye built Fort La Reine. Its name is evidence s...