accomplices, none of whom appear ever to have been brought to justice
for their participation in a crime by which France lost one of the
bravest and ablest men who ever struggled for her dominion in North
America.

Some years later the famous Canadians, Iberville and Bienville, founded
a colony in the great valley, known by the name of Louisiana, which was
first given to it by La Salle himself. By the possession of the Sault,
Mackinac, and Detroit, the French were for many years supreme on the
lakes, and had full control of Indian trade. The Iroquois and their
English friends were effectively shut out of the west by the French
posts and settlements which followed the explorations of Joliet, La
Salle, Du Luth, and other adventurers. 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.