It was close by the present site of Calgary and apparently in full view, on clear days, of the white peaks of the Rocky Mountains that Hendry visited the Blackfeet.He lingered in the far western country through the greater part of the winter.On a portion of his return journey he used a horse.When the spring thaw came, once more he took to the water in canoes.He complains of the idleness of his Indian companions who would remain in their huts all day and never stir to lay up a store of food even when game was abundant.Conjuring, dancing to the hideous pounding of drums, feasting and smoking, were their amusements.
On his way back Hendry revisited the French post on the Saskatchewan.The leader, no doubt St.Luc de la Corne, had returned from Montreal and now had with him nine men."The master," says Hendry, " invited me in to sup with him, and was very kind.He is dressed very Genteel." He showed Hendry his stock of furs; "a brave parcel," the admiring rival thought.
Hendry admits the superiority of the French as traders.They "talk Several Languages to perfection; they have the advantage of us in every shape." In the West, as in the East, France was recognized as a formidable rival of England for the mastery of North America.
When Hendry was making his peaceful visit to the French fort in 1755, the crisis of the struggle had just been reached.In that year the battle line from Acadia to the Ohio and the Mississippi was already forming, and the fate of France's eager efforts to hold the West was soon to be decided in the East.If Britain should conquer on the St.Lawrence, she would conquer also on the Saskatchewan and on the Mississippi.
Conquer she did, and thus it happened that it was Britain's sons who took up the later burdens of the discoverer.In the summer of 1789, just at the time when the great Revolution was beginning in France, Alexander Mackenzie, a Scotch trader from Montreal, starting from Lake Athabasca, north of the farthest point reached by Hendry, was pressing still onward into an unknown region to find a river which might lead to the sea.This river he found; we know it now as the Mackenzie.For two weeks he and his Indians and voyageurs paddled with the current down this mighty stream, and on July 14, 1789, the day of the fall of the Bastille, he saw whales sporting in Arctic waters.
The real goal which Mackenzie sought was that of La Verendrye, a western and not a northern ocean.Three years later, after months of preparation, he attempted the great feat of crossing the Rocky Mountains to the sea.After nine months of rugged travel, across mountain streams and gorges, in peril daily from hostile savages, on July 22, 1793, he reached the shore of the Pacific Ocean, the first white man to go by land over the width of the continent from sea to sea.It was thus a Scotchman who achieved that of which La Verendrye had so long dreamed; and with no aid from the state but with only the resources of a trading company.
Ten years later, 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.
