North-Western America as

most important highways of the continent, by way of Hayes
River and the Saskatchewan, to within sight of the foot-
hills of the Rockies, was laughed to scorn by the officials of
the company, but its courses have been followed part of the
way by Matthew Cocking, and the travels and discoveries
of later explorers and traders have verified his most important
statements. ‘he Hudson’s Bay Company therefore up to
1772 had to its credit the explorations of Samuel Hearne
in the Barren Lands as far as the Arctic shores, and a very
important reconnaissance by Anthony Hendry to the edge
of the foothills of the Rockies.

The original impulse to discover a route to Cathay, which
seems to have spent itself for the time being when Cartier
reached and named Lachine, received renewed energy from
time to time during the French régime. It is hardly necessary
to recount Champlain’s journey up the Ottawa and over to
Lake Huron by a canoe route which is of classic interest in
the literature of the fur-trade, nor the discovery of Lakes
Ontario, Huron, and Superior by Etienne Brule, and that
of Michigan by Jean Nicolet. Radisson, Chouart,and Dulhut
added the headwaters of the Mississippi and the waterways
immediately north and west of Lake Superior to the ever-
unfolding map.

Both man and nature conspired to impose upon the French |
the duty of exploring the west. The St. Lawrence River
Basin provided only narrow strips of land for settlement.
The north was rough and forbidding. The southern gate-
ways were held by the powerful Iroquois, but westward
the river and lake routes led to low waterpartings between
the St. Lawrence Basin and the watersheds that drained
into Hudson Bay and down the Mississippi. Champlain,
who ranks among the foremost of the French explorers,

had by his indefatigable journeyings blocked out New