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He followed the fur traders' route up the Kaministikwia to Dog Lake, thence, by way of the waters which connect with Rainy Lake, on to the Lake of the Woods, and down the rushing Winnipeg.
Slowly they made their way along the north shore, buffeted by storms and in constant peril of their lives, until at last, on August 26, they reached the Grand Portage, near the mouth of the Pigeon river, or about fifteen leagues south-west of Fort Kaministikwia, where the city of Fort William now stands.
He told them that the posts he had established were in the very heart of the fur country; that the Assiniboines and Crees had engaged to bring large quantities of beaver skins to the forts; that the northern tribes were already turning from the English posts of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Far North to the more accessible posts of the French; that the richly watered and wooded country between Kaministikwia and Lake Winnipeg abounded in every description of fur-bearing animal; that over the western prairies roamed the buffalo in vast herds which seemed to blacken the green earth as far as eye could reach.
La Vérendrye had now carried out, and more than carried out, the agreement made with the governor Beauharnois. He had established a chain of posts strung like beads on a string from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg, from the river Kaministikwia to the open prairie.
Skirting the settlement at Fort William, they ascended the river Kaministikwia for about half a mile, and on the opposite bank from the fort, at a spot since known as Point De Meuron, they erected their temporary habitations. The trader was probably Charles Grant, a clerk in the North-West Company's fort at Fond du Lac, and not Cuthbert Grant, the leader at Seven Oaks.
Once in the Kaministikwia, the map has no territorial divisions other than those between the different tribal hunting grounds, each one of which was watered by a hundred streams and marked by the 'carrying places' where the canoes had to be 'portaged. There lived the 'Nation of the Bear' and the 'Nation of the Snake, whose special totems of course were worked in coloured quills on every war canoe; and there flowed many a river 'the course of which is uncertain. Along the great Assiniboine lay the 'Warrior's track from the River of the West, and just where the prairies ran out into the complete unknown there was the vista of a second Eldorado in the hopeful suggestion that 'Hereabouts are supposed to be the Mountains of Bright Stones mentioned in the Map of ye Indian Ochagach.
Nepigon and the Kaministikwia were the two most important junctions of routes at the western end of the lake. Under British rule the Montreal 'fur lords' used the 'Grand Portage, which ends on a bay of Lake Superior some way south of the modern Fort William. It was a regular bush road, nearly ten miles long, made to avoid the falls of the Pigeon.
For three or four years he remained in command of the Nipigon post, faithfully discharging his duties as a fur-trader, but with his mind always alert for any information that might help him later to discover a way to the Western Sea. One day there came to him from the Kaministikwia river on which the city of Fort William now stands an Indian named Ochagach.
The others gradually weakened in their opposition, and at last it was agreed that La Jemeraye, with half the men, should go on to Rainy Lake and build a fort there, while La Vérendrye, with the other half, should spend the winter at Kaministikwia, and keep the expedition supplied with provisions. In this way the winter passed.
After it had been discovered that the Grand Portage was situated partly on land awarded by treaty to the United States, the Nor'westers, in 1803, had erected a new factory thirty or forty miles farther north where the Kaministikwia river enters Thunder Bay.
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