Dakota: The Story of the Northern Plains

3. Explorers and Fur Traders, 1730–1800

chapter three Explorers and Fur Traders, 1730–1800 T he Virginians were just beginning to settle the Shenandoah Valley, and no Europeans had yet crossed the Appalachians to visit Kentucky or Tennessee when the first Frenchman, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, the sieur de la Vérendrye, ventured onto the northern plains. Born in Three Rivers, a fur trade entrepot on the St. Lawrence River, Vérendrye had served in the French army—both in Canada and in France—during the conflict with England known in the American colonies as Queen Anne’s War (1701–13). After the war he became a successful fur merchant, and the combination of military experience and fur trade connections brought him to the attention of the governor of New France. In 1727 the governor named Vérendrye commander of the French outpost on Lake Nipigon, a large body of water that drains into Lake Superior. The fort on Lake Nipigon had once been a vital link in the fur trade because the lake and the rivers flowing into it were part of a canoe route connecting Lake Superior with Hudson Bay. Shipping furs through posts on Hudson Bay 38 explorers and fur traders was faster and cheaper than sending them all the way to Montreal. The strategic value of Nipigon evaporated, however , when the Peace of Utrecht (1713) ended Queen Anne’s War and gave Britain exclusive control of Hudson Bay. The French were left with only the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence for their fur exports; for their supply of furs, they had to turn to the Indians who resided in the woodlands west of Lake Superior. A further complication was that west of the Laurentian Divide, which lay only a few miles inland from Lake Superior, the waters flowed west and north to Lake Winnipeg and from there, by way of the Nelson River, to Hudson Bay. This meant that in addition to winning the friendship of the Indians west of Lake Superior, the French had to persuade them to send their furs east to Montreal rather than north to the British. Although it would seem that the twin goals of befriending the Indians and securing their custom in furs ought to have been a primary objective of French policy, neither the governor in Quebec nor the minister of marine in Paris was disposed to provide financial assistance to any western ventures that Vérendrye might undertake. (It was precisely this sort of myopia that contributed to the loss of the French empire in North America thirty years later.) Vérendrye, to be sure, expected to profit personally by the expansion of his fur business west of Nipigon, and in all of his explorations he obtained his own supplies on credit, expecting to repay his debts from fur trade proceeds. As so often happens with venture capital, short-term expenses obscured the promise of long-term gains, and difficulties with his creditors delayed his ventures and abbreviated his travels. The French government became impatient with him and never fully exploited militarily or diplomatically his immense contributions to European knowledge of the North American heartland. explorers and fur traders 39 As soon as he arrived at his post on Lake Nipigon, Vérendrye began to debrief the resident Cree Indians concerning their knowledge of the western waters. Incredibly he located a Cree chief who had actually traveled as far as a great freshwater “sea” (later named Lake Winnipeg) a great many days’ journey to the west. The Indian spoke of a great arm of Lake Superior, Thunder Bay, just to the west of Nipigon, into which flowed the Kaministiquia River. Following this stream through a series of strenuous portages, a voyager could cross over the divide and onto westward-flowing waters that led into long, narrow Rainy Lake. From this body of water the Rainy River flowed northwest to another great lake with many bays and islands, the Lake of the Woods. From the north shore of this lake the Winnipeg River ran a course (145 miles) over rapids that caused the canoeist to make some thirty portages before dropping into the great inland sea, Lake Winnipeg. The Cree chief knew little of what lay beyond this body of water except that a stream entering from the south (the Red River) turned the waters of the lake “red like vermillion ” (in Vérendrye’s phrase), and at the...