seen, they gave up all claim to Hudson Bay and yielded that
region to the English.

Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Verendrye, was a member
of the Canadian noblesse, a son of the Governor of Three Rivers
on the St. Lawrence. He was born in 1685 and had taken part in
the border warfare of the days of Queen Anne. He was a member of
the raiding party led against New England by Hertel de Rouville
in 1704 and may have been one of those who burst in on the little
town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and either butchered or carried
off as prisoners most of the inhabitants. Shortly afterwards we
find him a participant in warfare of a less ignoble type. In 1706
he went to France and became an ensign in a regiment of
grenadiers. Those were the days when Marlborough was hammering
and destroying the armies of Louis XIV. La Verendrye, took part
in the last of the series of great battles, the bloody conflict
at Malplaquet in 1709. He received a bullet wound through the
body, was left for dead on the field, fell into the hands of the
enemy, and for fifteen months was a captive. On his release he
was too poor to maintain himself as an officer in France and soon
returned to Canada, where he served as an officer in a colonial
regiment until the peace of 1713. Then the ambitious young man,
recently married, with a growing family and slight resources, had
to work out a career suited to his genius.

His genius was that of an explorer; his task, which fully
occupied his alert mind, was that of finding the long dreamed of
passage to the Western Sea. The venture certainly offered
fascinations. Noyon, a fellow-townsman of La Verendrye at Three
Rivers, had brought back from the distant Lake of the Woods, in