Chronicles of Canada Volume 19 - Pathfinders of the Great Plains

In the 1730s and 1740s, a French-Canadian explorer and his four sons pushed into the unmapped wilderness of North America's interior, driven by a seemingly impossible goal: finding a water passage to the Pacific Ocean. Pierre La Vérendrye and his family spent nearly two decades navigating the vast Great Plains, the boreal forests of the Canadian Shield, and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, encountering indigenous nations, surviving brutal winters, and enduring near-starvation, all in pursuit of the legendary 'Western Sea' that European cartographers had speculated about for over a century. Their journey stands as one of the most ambitious and least celebrated expeditions in North American history. Burpee brings these pathfinders to vivid life, capturing both their stubborn determination and the complex, often tragic, dynamics between European explorers and the Indigenous peoples who made their survival possible. For readers who crave adventure narratives grounded in real history, this is a window into an overlooked era when the interior of a continent remained genuinely unknown.