Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/98

80 to fame as pathfinders of the Northwest. They discovered the Red River of the North, the Assiniboine and Mouse Rivers, and the upper Missouri—that is to say, the great plains country of northwestern Minnesota, Manitoba, North Dakota, northern South Dakota, and eastern Montana. They established a post (Fort La Reine) 500 miles farther west than any that had been before located. In their quest for a route to the western ocean, they went more than half the distance from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and it was fifty years later that MacKenzie pushed on across the remaining distance. It was fifty-nine years after their first trip that David Thompson retraced their route up the Mouse River, past the present town of Verendrye, across from the Mouse River loop to the Missouri, where he established trade relations with the Mandans for the North West Company and then took up the western explorations that carried him, in 1808, through the Kootenai and Flathead country, thence down the Columbia to be, in 1811, the first white man to traverse that great river from its source to its mouth. Lewis and Clark spent a winter among the Mandan villages, just sixty-six years after the Verendryes' first visit.

Great as were the achievements of the first adventurous Frenchmen, more important still was their influence in hastening other explorations, as reports of their exploits spread among the trading po^ts and camps. The only recompense La Verendrye received from the government which, at no expense to itself, profiled greatly by his services, was the gift of the order of St. Louis. This honor reached him shortly before his death in 1749, when he was about to set out once more for the far west. His sons were deprived (not only of the posts they had built, but of supplies with which they had stocked these posts, by the authorities. All three sons were military officers. Pieree Gaultier, a lieutenant, was drowned off the coast of Cape Breton, in 1761, when