We have now followed the paths of French adventurers for nearly a century and a half, from the day Champlain landed on the rocks of Quebec until the Verendryes traversed the prairies and plains of the North-west. French explorers had discovered the three great waterways of this continent--the Mississippi, which pours its enormous volume of water, drawn from hundreds of tributaries, into a southern gulf; the St. Lawrence, which bears the tribute of the great lakes to the Atlantic Ocean; the Winnipeg, with its connecting rivers and lakes which stretch from the Rocky Mountains to the dreary Arctic sea. La Verendrye was the first Frenchman who stood on the height of land or elevated plateau of the continent, almost within sight of the sources of those great rivers which flow, after devious courses, north, south and east. It has been well said that if three men should ascend these three waterways to their farthest sources, they would find themselves in the heart of North America; and, so to speak, within a stone's throw of one another. Nearly all the vast territory, through which these great waterways flow, then belonged to France, so far as exploration, discovery and partial occupation gave her a right to exercise dominion. Only in the great North, where summer is a season of a very few weeks, where icebergs bar the way for many months, where the fur-trade and the whale-fishery alone offered an incentive to capital and enterprise, had England a right to an indefinite dominion. Here a "Company of Gentlemen-Adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay" occupied some fortified stations which, during the seventeenth century, had been seized by the daring French-Canadian corsair, Iberville, who ranks with the famous Englishman, Drake. On the Atlantic coast the prosperous English colonies occupied a narrow range of country bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Alleghanies. It was only in the middle of the eighteenth century--nearly three-quarters of a century after Joliet's and La Salle's explorations, and even later than the date at which Frenchmen had followed the Saskatchewan to the Rocky Mountains--that some enterprising Virginians and Pennsylvanians worked their way into the beautiful country watered by the affluents of the Ohio. New France may be said to have extended at that time from Cape Breton or Isle Royale west to the Rocky Mountains, and from the basin of the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. SECTION 4.--End of French dominion in the valley of the St. Lawrence.