Bay more than a thousand miles from their source, flowing through
rich prairie land which is still but scantily peopled. On the
Saskatchewan, as on the remaining two systems, the St. Lawrence
and the Mississippi, the French were the pioneers. Though today
the regions drained by these four rivers are dominated by the
rival race, the story which we now follow is one of romantic
enterprise in which the honors are with France.

More perhaps by accident than by design had the French been the
first to settle on the St. Lawrence. Fishing vessels had hovered
round the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence for years before,
in 1535, the French sailor, Jacques Cartier, advanced up the
river as far as the foot of the torrential rapids where now
stands the city of Montreal. Cartier was seeking a route to the
Far East. He half believed that this impressive waterway drained
the plains of China and that around the next bend he might find
the busy life of an oriental city. The time came when it was
known that a great sea lay between America and Asia and the
mystery of the pathway to this sea long fascinated the pioneers
of the St. Lawrence. Canada was a colony, a trading-post, a
mission, the favorite field of Jesuit activity, but it was also
the land which offered by way of the St. Lawrence a route leading
illimitably westward to the Far East.

One other route rivaled the St. Lawrence in promise, and that was
the Mississippi. The two rivers are essentially different in
their approaches and in type. The mouth of the St. Lawrence opens
directly towards Europe and of all American rivers lies nearest
to the seafaring peoples of Europe. Since it flows chiefly in a
rocky bed, its course changes little; its waters are clear, and