He rose in his
place. A thrust of the steel-shod pole at a rock in mid-stream--the
rock raced past; a throb of the keel to the live waters below--the
bowman crouches back, lightening the prow just as a rider "lifts" his
horse to the leap; a sudden splash--the thing has happened--the canoe
has run the rapids or shot the falls.
[Illustration: "Each man landed with pack on his back, and trotted
away over portages."]
Pause was made at Lake Huron for favorable weather; and a rear wind
would carry the canoes at a bouncing pace clear across to
Michilimackinac, at the mouth of Lake Michigan. This was the chief fur
post of the lakes at that time. All the boats bound east or west,
Sioux and Cree and Iroquois and Fox, traders' and priests' and
outlaws'--stopped at Michilimackinac. Vice and brandy and religion
were the characteristics of the fort.
[Illustration: A Cree Indian of the Minnesota Borderlands.]
This was familiar ground to De la Verendrye. It was at the lonely fur
post of Nepigon, north of Michilimackinac, in the midst of a wilderness
forest, that he had eaten his heart out with baffled ambition from 1728
to 1730, when he descended to Montreal to lay before M. de Beauharnois,
the governor, plans for the discovery of the Western Sea. Born at
Three Rivers in 1686, where the passion for discovery and Radisson's
fame were in the very air and traders from the wilderness of the Upper
Country wintered, young Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Verendrye, at
the ambitious age of fourteen, determined that he would become a
discoverer.
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