Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/99

Rh l'Auguste was wrecked; Francois, the Chevalier, gave his life for New France at the siege of Quebec; Louis Joseph died in 1775.

It is interesting to follow the development which has taken place in the territory first explored by the Verendryes. When the four young Frenchmen left the Mandan villages they entered a virgin land of unlimited possibilities. They had seen corn, pumpkins, beans and melons flowering under the rude implements of the Mandan women—a hoe made from the shoulder blade of an elk, and a pointed stick hardened by fire; they found rich prairies of waving grass furnishing sustenance to numerous great herds of buffalo, to deer and antelope; and, pasturing on the highlands, they saw multitudes of elk and mountain sheep.

But they were Frenchmen; they gave little thought to this obvious fertility, except as a means of sustenance in their eternal quest for new horizons. The history of the French in America is a history of exploration. The Anglo-Saxons were primarily settlers, the French were not; and in this failure lay the cause of their own elimination from the vast new world they were the first to penetrate.

Nor were the early adventurers alone in ignoring the potentialities of the rich lands stretching from the Mouse River and the first great western bend of the Missouri almost to the Rocky Mountains. When the fur traders had cleared the streams of beaver and the plains of buffalo, the region that is now the Dakotas and Montana, was regarded for the most part, as a barren no man's land to be got over as quickly as possible in the rush to the Pacific. Then the time came to build railroads and these it was believed must be carried by heavy government subsidies over territories from which they could derive little revenue. In fact, from the time of the Veren-