Pierre de la Verendrye survived Indian raids, English cannon and a stinking prison hospital to lead four sturdy sons halfway across North America. They sought the Sea of the West, convinced that it lay between the Great Lakes and the Pacific Ocean.
Instead they found the snow-capped Rockies, the most easterly ranges of a thousand miles of mountains. They were the first white men to marvel at the Dakota Badlands, to tread the high plains of Wyoming, to claim for France—and ultimately for the United States—a vast territory west of the Mississippi.
In 1727, New France was a wide swath from Acadia and Labrador all the way down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Pierre began his wilderness career as a commandant of a fur trading post established by Daniel Duhlut. Indian tales there rekindled a boyhood ambition to find the Western Sea.
The royal government in Paris gave permission to explore—but little else. La Verendrye had to finance his own journeys, feed his men, and pay his creditors by trading for furs.
He weathered jealousy, government suspicion, mutiny, murder, smallpox, prairie blizzards, and starvation. He made peace endlessly between hostile Indian tribes. Always he pressed on to find the "great lake with water that no one can drink."
No man could succeed in that quest. It was a mirage, a vision of a sea that didn't exist. Unfortunately, the real and impressive achievements of the La Verendryes were lost to sight in the collapse of New France.
They discovered Indian tribes and regions unknown to Europeans. They opened up canoe routes in Canada that are still used in the fur trade after two hundred years. They founded trading posts that have become the thriving cities of Winnipeg and Portage la Prairie.
—from the dust jacket
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lyn Harrington received a grant from the Canadian Centennial Commission for writing this story of the first of the North American explorers to be born on this continent. Research for the book led Mrs. Harrington over the La Verendryes' trail-by canoe on the Ottawa and French Rivers, Lake Superior and the border waters leading to Lake of the Woods, by car through Wyoming, and by barge down the waterways of the Saskatchewan delta.
An interest in writing for young people grew out of the author's professional background, for after her graduation from the Collegiate Institute of Sault Sainte Marie and the Library School of the University of Toronto, she was children's librarian in the Soo and later in a boys' club in Toronto. Mrs. Harrington takes an active interest in the work of the Canadian Library Association and has been president of the Canadian Women's Press Club, Toronto Branch.
With her photographer-husband, she travels part of each year, collecting material and pictures for magazine articles and books. Together, they produced Greece and the Greeks and, more recently, China and the Chinese as a result of their visits to these countries. The Luck of the La Verendryes is Mrs. Harrington's seventh book for young people.
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