Charles. It must have
seemed imposing to the natives. On walls one hundred feet square
were four bastions and a watchtower; evidence of the perennial
need of alertness and strength in the Indian country. There were
a chapel, houses for the commandant and the priest, a
powder-magazine, a storehouse, and other buildings. La Verendrye
cleared some land and planted wheat, and was thus the pioneer in
the mighty wheat production of the West. Fish and game were
abundant and the outlook was smiling. By this time the second
winter of La Verendrye's adventurous journeying was near, but
even the cold of that hard region could not chill his eagerness.
He himself waited at Fort St. Charles but his eldest son, Jean
Baptiste, set out to explore still farther.
We may follow with interest the little group of Frenchmen and
Indian guides as they file on snowshoes along the surface of the
frozen river or over the deep snow of the silent forest on, ever
on, to the West. They are the first white men of whom we have
certain knowledge to press beyond the Lake of the Woods into that
great Northwest so full of meaning for the future.
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