Plans continued to be formed for reaching the Western or Pacific ocean even in the middle of the eighteenth century.  The Jesuit Charlevoix, the historian of New France, was sent out to Canada by the French government to enquire into the feasibility of a route which Frenchmen always hoped for.  Nothing definite came out of this mission, but the Jesuit was soon followed by an enterprising native of Three Rivers, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, generally called the Sieur de la Verendrye, who with his sons ventured into the region now known as the province of Manitoba and the north-west territory of Canada.  He built several forts, including one on the site of the city of Winnipeg.  Two of his sons are believed to have reached the Big Horn Range, an “outlying buttress” of the Rocky Mountains, in 1743, and to have taken possession of what is now territory of the United States.  The youngest son, Chevalier de la Verendrye, who was the first to see the Rocky Mountains, subsequently discovered the Saskatchewan (Poskoiac) and even ascended it as far as the forks—­the furthest western limits so far touched by a white man in America.  A few years later, in 1751, M. de Niverville, under the orders of M. de St. Pierre, then acting in the interest of the infamous Intendant Bigot, who coveted the western fur-trade, reached the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains and built a fort on the Saskatchewan not far from the present town of Calgary.

We have now followed the paths of French adventurers for nearly a century and a half, from the day Champlain landed on the rocks of Quebec until the Verendryes traversed the prairies and plains of the North-west.  French explorers had discovered the three great waterways of this continent—­the Mississippi, which pours its enormous volume of water, drawn from hundreds of tributaries, into a southern gulf; the St. Lawrence, which bears the tribute of the great lakes to the Atlantic Ocean; the Winnipeg, with its connecting rivers and lakes which stretch from the Rocky Mountains to the dreary Arctic sea.  La Verendrye was the first Frenchman who stood on the height of land or elevated plateau of the continent, almost within sight of the sources of those great rivers which flow, after devious courses, north, south and east.  It has been well said that if three men should ascend these three waterways to their farthest sources, they would find themselves in the heart of North America; and, so to speak, within a stone’s throw of one another.  Nearly all the vast territory, through which these great waterways flow, then belonged to France, so far as exploration, discovery and partial occupation gave her a right to exercise dominion.  Only in the great North, where summer is a season of a very few weeks, where icebergs bar the way for many months, where the fur-trade and the whale-fishery alone offered an incentive to capital and enterprise, had England a right to an indefinite dominion.  Here a “Company of Gentlemen-Adventurers trading into Hudson’s