There was incredible feasting, which La Verendrye avoided but which his sons enjoyed.The Mandan language he could not understand and close questioning as to the route to the Western Sea was thus impossible.He learned enough to discredit the vague tales of white men in armor and peopled towns with which his lying guides had regaled him.In the end he decided for the time being to return to Fort La Reine and to leave two of his followers to learn the Mandan language so that in the future they might act as interpreters.When he left the Mandan village on the 13th of December, he was already ill and it is a wonder that he did not perish from the cold on the winter journey across hill and prairie."In all my life I have never," he says, "endured such misery from illness and fatigue, as on that journey." On the 11th of February he was back at Fort La Reine, worn out and broken in health but still undaunted and resolved never to abandon his search.
Abandon it he never did.We find him in Montreal in 1740 involved in what he had always held in horror--a lawsuit brought against him by some impatient creditor.The report had gone abroad that he was amassing great wealth, when, as he said, all that he had accumulated was a debt of forty thousand livres.In the autumn of 1741 he was back at Fort La Reine, where he welcomed his son Pierre from a fruitless journey to the Mandans.
The most famous of all the efforts of the family was now on foot.
On April 29, 1742, a new expedition started from Fort La Reine, led by La Verendrye's two sons, Pierre and Francois.They knew the nature of the task before them, its perils as well as its hopes.They took with them no imposing company as their father had done, but only two men.The party of four, too feeble to fight their way, had to trust to the peaceful disposition of the natives.When they started, the prairie was turning from brown to green and the rivers were still swollen from the spring thaw.In three weeks they reached a Mandan village on the upper Missouri and were well received.It was after midsummer when they set out again and pressed on westward with a trend to the south.The country was bare and desolate.For twenty days they saw no human being.They had Mandan guides who promised to take them to the next tribe, the Handsome Men--Beaux Hommes--as the brothers called them, a tribe much feared by the Mandans.The travelers were now mounted; for the horse, brought first to America by the Spaniards, had run wild on the western plains where the European himself had not yet penetrated, and had become an indispensable aid to certain of the native tribes.Deer and buffalo were in abundance and they had no lack of food.
When they reached the tribe of Beaux Hommes, the Mandan guides fled homeward.Summer passed into bleak autumn with chill winds and long nights.By the end of October they were among the Horse Indians who, they had been told, could guide them to the sea.
These, however, now said that only the Bow Indians, farther on, could do this.Winter was near when they were among these Indians, probably a tribe of the Sioux, whom they found excitedly preparing for a raid on their neighbors farther west, the Snakes.
They were going, they said, towards the mountains and there the Frenchmen could look out on the great sea.So the story goes on.
The brothers advanced ever westward and the land became more rugged, for they were now climbing upward from the prairie country.At last, on January 1, 1743, they saw what both cheered and discouraged them.In the distance were mountains.About them was the prairie, with game in abundance.It was a great host with which the brothers traveled for there were two thousand warriors with their families who made night vocal with songs and yells.On the 12th of January, nearly two weeks later, with an advance party of warriors, the La Verendryes reached the foot of the mountains, "well wooded with timber of every kind and very high."Was it the Rocky Mountains which they saw? Had they reached that last mighty barrier of snow-capped peaks, rugged valleys, and torrential streams, beyond which lay the sea? That they had done so was long assumed and many conjectures have been offered as to the point in the Rockies near which they made their last camp.
Their further progress was checked by an unexpected crisis.One day they came upon an encampment of the dreaded Snake Indians which had been abandoned in great haste.This, the Bow Indians thought, could only mean that the Snakes had hurriedly left their camp in order to slip in behind the advance guard of the Bows and massacre the women and children left in the rear.Panic seized the Bows and they turned homeward in wild confusion.Their chief could not restrain them."I was very much disappointed," writes one of the brothers, "that I could not climb the mountains"--those mountains from which he had been told that he might view the Western Sea.
There was nothing for it but to turn back through snowdrifts over the bleak prairie.The progress was slow for the snow was sometimes two feet deep.On the 1st of March the brothers parted with their Bow friends at their village and then headed for home.
By the 20th they were encamped with a friendly tribe on the banks of the Missouri.Here, to assert that Louis XV was lord of all that country, they built on an eminence a pyramid of stones and in it they buried a tablet of lead with an inscription which recorded the name of Louis XV, their King, and of the Marquis de Beauharnois, Governor of Canada, and the date of the visit.
Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.One hundred and seventy years later, on February 16, 1913, a schoolgirl strolling with some companions on a Sunday afternoon near the High School in the town of Pierre, South Dakota, stumbled upon a projecting corner of this tablet, which was in an excellent state of preservation.
Thus we know exactly where the brothers La Verendrye were on April 2, 1743, when they bade farewell to their Indian friends and set out on horseback for Fort La Reine.
