So ardent was Verendrye’s passion for the glory of discovering the way to the western sea that, encouraged by the Canadian authorities, he kept up the quest for more than ten years longer. On January 12, 1743, the Chevalier Verendrye, as related, climbed one of the foothills of the Shining or Rocky Mountains, and gave it over. Sixty years later Lewis and Clark passed that barrier and won their way to the Pacific. CHAPTER II THE ENGLISH DOMINION If the French failed to establish any permanent settlement in Minnesota, it was not wholly because their passion for trade discouraged home-building and cultivation; they had interests elsewhere in America more important than those of the northwest. La Salle’s proclamation of 1682 asserted dominion of the whole region drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries. For a time the Ohio was regarded as the main river and the upper Mississippi as an affluent. Before the close of the seventeenth century both French and English were awake to the beauty and richness of the Ohio valley and the Illinois country. The building of a fort by Cadillac at Detroit in 1701 revealed the firm purpose of the French to maintain their claim of sovereignty. In the treaty of Utrecht, 1713, the English, with a long look ahead, secured the concession that the Iroquois were the “subjects” of England. In a series of negotiations culminating in a treaty at Lancaster, Pa., the Iroquois ceded to the English all their lands west of the Alleghanies and south of the great lakes. On this cession the English put the liberal construction that the Iroquois were owners of all territory over which they had extended their victorious forays, and these they had good right to convey. In 1748 the Ohio Company, formed in Virginia, sent Christopher Gist to explore the Ohio valley. The next year a governor of Canada sent an expedition down the Ohio to conciliate the Indians and to bury leaden plates at chosen points, asserting the dominion of France. A line of fortified posts was stretched by the French from Quebec to Fort Charles below St. Louis, on the Mississippi. When in 1754 a French battalion drove off the party of English backwoodsmen who had begun the erection of a fort at the forks of the Ohio, and proceeded to build Fort Duquesne, the French and Indian War began. The course of this struggle, exceeding by far in point of magnitude the war of the Revolution, cannot here be followed. At the close of the campaign of 1757 the French seemed triumphant. In the year following they lost Fort Duquesne, in 1759 Quebec, and in 1760 Montreal. The power of the French in North America was broken. Historians of Canada still name the epoch that of “the Conquest.”