It was a long and tragic journey. At the western end of Lake of the Woods, Vérendrye built a fort among the Crees. Some of these Indians one day fired on a party of Sioux, and then pretended that the French had done it. In revenge, the Sioux set upon a French detachment, on its way to fetch up supplies from Michilimackinac, and killed every man, including a priest and the explorer’s eldest son. The merchants at home in Canada were grumbling because the cargoes sent down to them were not as large as they had expected, and jealous rivals falsely accused Vérendrye of keeping some of the furs for himself. More than once he had to go back east before he could get enough goods for trading. At last, in the February of 1737, he got as far as the south end of Lake Winnipeg, where his sons had already built a fort. The year after, he made his way up the Red River to its junction with the Assiniboine and established a trading post—Fort Rouge, now part of the city of Winnipeg. Pressing on to the West, he built another fort at Portage la Prairie, where Indians bound for Hudson Bay used to lift their canoes from the Assiniboine for the overland carry to Lake Manitoba. Surely the ocean could not be far away now! Montreal was fifteen hundred miles behind him in the East—how could he know that the ocean of his dreams was still nearly as far again to the West? The Assiniboines knew nothing of such a sea, but they had heard tales of it through the Mandans, farther south. Southward, accordingly, the captain marched for a month and a half across the plains, till he found the Mandans on the Missouri River. But even they could only tell him a vague story of white men in armor who were said to have built stone houses beside salt water, somewhere away in the south-west—the Spaniards, perhaps, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Back to the north tramped the disappointed captain over the snowy plain, and spent the rest of the winter among the Assiniboines; but his sons made one excursion to the unknown country north-west. There they discovered two more great rivers, the North and South Saskatchewan, and started a trading post where the rivers joined. In the spring their father had once more to make his weary way to Montreal, where the discontented merchants had refused to send him any fresh goods, and even threatened to seize his property for goods already supplied. He never saw the West again. It was years before he succeeded in getting leave to make another expedition, and then it was too late—he died in Montreal in the midst of his preparations.