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THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY
THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY
The present work tells the romantic story of the Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists in Manitoba, and is appropriate and timely in view of the Centennial celebration of this event which will be held in Winnipeg in 1912. The author was the first, in his earlier books, to take a stand for justice to be done to Lord Selkirk as a Colonizer, and he has had the pleasure of seeing the current of all reliable history turned in Lord Selkirk's favor. Dr. Doughty, the popular Archivist at Ottawa, has pu
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CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER I.
This is the City of Winnipeg. Its growth has been wonderful. It is the highwater mark of Canadian enterprise. Its chief thoroughfare, with asphalt pavement, as it runs southward and approaches the Assiniboine River, has a broad street diverging at right angles from it to the West. This is Broadway, a most commodious avenue with four boulevards neatly kept, and four lines of fine young Elm trees. It represents to us "Unter den Linden" of Berlin, the German Capital. The wide business thoroughfare
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CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER II.
Inasmuch as this tale is chiefly one of Scottish and of Colonial life, the story of the movement from Old Kildonan, on the German Ocean, to New Kildonan, on the Western Prairies—we may be very sure, that it did not take place without irritation and opposition and conflict. The Scottish race, while possessing intense earnestness and energy, often gains its ends by the most thoroughgoing animosity. In this great emigration movement, there were great new world interests involved, and champions of t
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CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER III.
Oh dreadful war! It is not only in the deadly horror of battle, and in the pain and anguish of men strong and hearty, done to death by human hands. It is not only in the rotting heap of horses and men, torn to pieces by bullets and shell, and thrust together within huge pits in one red burial blent. It is not only in the helpless widow and her brood of dazed and desolate children weeping over the news that comes from the battlefield, that war become so hideous. It is always, as it was in the tim
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CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER IV.
The Emigrant ship has landed its living freight at Fort Factory, upon the Coast of Hudson Bay—a shore unoccupied for hundreds of miles except by a few Hudson's Bay Company forts such as those at the mouth of the Nelson River, and of Fort Churchill, a hundred miles or more farther north. It was now the end of the season, and it will not do to trifle with the nip of cold "Boreas" on the shore of Hudson Bay. The icy winter is at hand, and all know that they will face such temperatures as they never
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CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER V.
The weary winter passing at Nelson Encampment had its bright spots. Miles Macdonell in the building erected for himself, on the south side of the Nelson River, kept up his mess, having with him Mr. Hillier, Priest Bourke, Doctor Edwards, and Messrs. John McLeod, Whitford and Michael Macdonell, officers and clerks. Those Immigrants who took no part in the rebellion fared well. True, the scurvy seized several of them, but proved harmless to those who obeyed the orders and took plentiful potations
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CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VI.
Pioneering to-day is not so serious a matter as it once was. To the frontiers' man now it involves little risk, and little thought, to dispose of his holding, and make a dash further West for two or three hundreds of miles across the plains. When he wishes more land for his growing sons, he "sells out," fits up his commodious covered wagon, called "the prairie schooner," and with implements, supplies, cattle and horses, starts on the Western "trail." His wife and children are in high spirits. Wh
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CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VII.
The year 1815 was a year of world-wide disaster. Napoleon's Europe-shadowing wings had for years been over that continent and he like a ravenous bird had left marks of his ravages among the most prominent European nations. The world had a breathing spell for a short time with Napoleon a virtual prisoner in Elba, but now in March of this year he broke from the perch where he had been tethered and all Europe was again in terror. The nations were thunderstruck; the alarm was deepened by the appeara
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CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER VIII.
The crisis has come. The Colony seems to be blotted out. The affair may appear small, being nothing more than the defence of the smithy, with one gun and the most primitive contrivances, yet as Mercutio says of his wound: "'Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but it is enough." The plucky McLeod, with three men held his fort and though the dusky Bois-brulés on their prairie ponies for a time hovered about yet they did not dare to approach the spiteful little field piece. The
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CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER IX.
Semple's course is on trial. Self-assertion and dictation bring their own penalty with them. That so experienced a leader as Colin Robertson, who had been in both Companies, who knew the native element, and was acquainted with the daring and recklessness of the Nor'-Wester leaders, hesitated about demolishing Fort Gibraltar should have given Governor Semple pause. Ignorance and inexperience sometimes give men rare courage. But while Semple was self-confident he could not be exonerated from payin
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CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER X.
The Seven Oaks affair was the most shocking episode that ever occurred in North-Western history. The standing of the victims, including a Governor appointed by the Hudson's Bay Company, his staff men of position, the unexpectedness of the collision, the suddenness of the attack, the destruction of life, the cruelty and injustice of the killing, and the barbarous treatment of the bodies of the dead, by the Bois-brulés war party, fill one with horror, and remind one of scenes of butchery in dark A
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CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XI.
The scene changes to the home of the founder of the Colony. The Earl of Selkirk is living at his interesting seat—St. Mary's Isle, and letter after letter arrives which has taken many weeks on the road, coming down through trackless prairie, across the middle and Eastern States of America and reaching him via New York. These letters continue to increase in being more and more terrible until his island home seems to be in a state of siege. St. Mary's Isle lies at the mouth of the Dee on Solway Fr
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CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XII.
Many Canadian Settlements have had a military origin. It was considered a wise, strategic move in the game of national defence when Colonel Butler and his Rangers, after the Treaty of Paris, were settled along the Niagara frontier, and when Captain Grass and other United Empire Loyalists took up their holdings at Kingston and other points on the boundary line along the St. Lawrence. The town of Perth was the headquarters of a military settlement in Central Canada. Traces of military occupation c
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CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIII.
That such violence and bloodshed as that about Fort Douglas, should be seen by British subjects under the flag which stands for justice and equal rights made sober-minded Britons blush. While Lord Selkirk's agents on the banks of the Red River may have been aggressive in pushing their rights, yet to the Canadians was chargeable the greater part of the bloodshed. This was but natural. To the hunter, the trapper, and the frontiersman the use of firearms is familiar. The fur trader protects himself
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CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XIV.
"Woe to the Nation," says a high authority, "whose King is a child," but far worse than even having a child-ruler is the fate of a Kingdom or Principality whose ruler is a hireling. The Roman Empire was ruled in the different provinces by selfish and dishonest adventurers, who tyrannized over the people, farmed out the revenues, bribed their favorites and defrauded their masters. Turkish Government or Persian Rule is to-day an organized system of extortion and oppression by unscrupulous Satraps.
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CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XV.
With fire and flood some of the greatest catastrophies of the world have been closely connected. The tradition of the Noachian deluge has been found among almost all peoples. Horace speaks of the mild little Tiber becoming so unruly that the fishes swam among the tops of the trees upon its banks. Tidal waves devastated the shores of England and France on several occasions. It is most natural that prairie rivers should exceed their banks and spread over wide areas of the land. Old Trader Nolin, o
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CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVI.
Great crises in the world's history generally produce the men who solve them. Cromwell, Washington, Garibaldi—each of them was the movement itself. A wider philosophy may see that the age or the Community evolves the man, but as Carlyle shows, it is the man who reacts upon the community, becomes the embodiment of its ideal, and is the mouthpiece and the right hand of the age which produces him. That Andrew Colville, a brother-in-law of Lord Selkirk, should select a young clerk in London and send
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CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVII.
The struggle has always been between the masses and the classes. Privilege always strives to confine itself to a few. It could not be but that the echoes of the great British Reform Bill of 1832 should reach even the remote banks of Red River. The struggle for constitutional freedom was also going on in Upper Canada, as well as in Lower Canada where the French-Canadians were fighting bitterly for their rights. Besides all this in the Red River Settlement the existence of a Company store—a monopo
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CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
The wild life of the prairie or mountain cultivates a spirit of freedom. When individuals must become a law unto themselves, when the absence of steamers, railways, electric power, work-shops, and mills, throws men on their own resources, they find it irksome to obey the law. They regard its restrictions as tyrannical. The prairie horse becomes free. He must be caught with the lasso, he needs to be hobbled near the camp, it is necessary to curb him in his temper, but in his wild state he can pro
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CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XIX.
Canada looks with patriotic delight not only on her sons who remain at home to work out the problems of her developing life, but follows with keenest interest those Canadians who have gone abroad and made a name for themselves, and their country in other parts of the Empire or the world. Some of these are Judge Haliburton, Satirist; Roberts and Bliss Carman, Poets; Gilbert Parker, Grant Allen and Barr, Novelists; Romanes and Newcombe, Scientists; Girouard, Kennedy and Scott in the Army, and many
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CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XX.
Stone forts and ermined judges were not, to the mind of the unbridled and ungovernable Metis. True, the French mind has a love for show and circumstance and dignity of demeanor, but the conviction had taken hold of the people of Red River, and especially of the French half-breeds, that these meant curtailment of their freedom. They felt the dice were loaded against them. But, now, in the year after Sinclair and his friends had shown such a firm front to Governor Christie, and when something like
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CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXI.
Alexander Ross was a Scottish Highlander, who came to Glengarry in Canada, quite a century ago, joined Astor's expedition, went around Cape Horn and in British Columbia rose to be an officer in the Northwest Company. He married the daughter of an Indian Chief at Okanagan, came over the Rocky Mountains, and was given by Sir George Simpson a free gift of a farm, where Ross and James Streets are now found in Winnipeg. This land is to-day worth many millions of dollars. Ross was also fond of hunting
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CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXII.
The writer remembers meeting in Boston, a good many years ago, a scientific explorer, who along with two companies, one of whom is the greatest astronomer in the United States, as an astronomical party in 1860, made a visit through Red River Settlement, on their way to the North Saskatchewan to observe an eclipse. The disappointment of the party was very great, for, after travelling three thousand miles, their fate was "to sit in a marsh and view the eclipse through the clouds, so heavy was the
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CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Shakespeare's play of "As You Like It" is an eulogy of the flight from the highly formal life of city life to the simplicity of the forest and the retirement of the plains. Even in the banished Duke, there is a strain of oddity and quaintness. Not many years after the middle of last century, a Detroit lawyer fled from the troubles of society and city life to the peaceful plains of secluded Assiniboia. Marrying, after his arrival, a daughter of one of our best native families, and on her death, a
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CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Lord Selkirk's Colonists never had, as have seen, a bed of roses. Adversity had dodged their steps from the time that they put the first foot forward toward the new world—and Stornoway, Fort Churchill, York Factory, Norway House, Pembina and Fort Douglas start, as we speak of them, a train of bitter memories. Flood and famine, attack and bloodshed, toil and anxiety were the constant atmosphere, in which for a generation they existed. Higher civilization is impossible when the struggle for shelte
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CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXV.
The conception of Red River Settlement being an Idyllic Paradise was not confined to the writer, whose picture we have described as "Apples of Gold." It was a self-contained spot, distant from St. Anthony Falls (now Minneapolis) some four or five hundred miles, and this was its nearest neighbor of importance. Our astronomers thus describe it as an orb in space, and the celebrated Milton and Cheadle Expedition of 1862 looked upon it as an "oasis." It was often represented as being enclosed behind
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CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVI.
The agitation for freedom which we have described in Red River Settlement, and the efforts of Canada to introduce Rupert's Land into the newly-formed Dominion of Canada had, after much effort, and the overcoming of many hindrances, resulted in the British Government agreeing to transfer this Western territory to Canada, and in the Hudson's Bay Company accepting a subsidy in full payment of their claim to the country. This payment was to be paid by Canada. Somewhat careless of the feelings of the
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CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVII.
On Christmas Day, 1870, John Bruce, who was but a figurehead, resigned his office of President of the so-called Provisional Government of Red River Settlement, and the ambitious Louis Riel was chosen in his stead. The Dominion Government had at length, been awakened to the danger. Divided counsels still prevailed. Two Commissioners, Grand Vicar Thibault and Col. De Salaberry, arrived at Fort Garry, but they were safely quartered at the Bishop's palace at St. Boniface, and as they professed to ha
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CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Canada's military experience, ever since the excitement of the "Trent Affair," had been in dealing with a persistent band of Irishmen, posing as Fenians, and egged on by sympathizers in the United States. Now there was trouble, as we have seen, in her own borders, and though here again, American influence of a hostile nature played its part, yet it was those connected with one of the two races in Canada who were now giving trouble in the Northwestern prairies. Such an outbreak was more dangerous
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CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Close in the wake of Wolseley's Expedition, there arrived on the 2nd of September, Adams G. Archibald, the newly-appointed Governor of the new Province of Manitoba. His arrival was greeted with joy, for he was a man of high character, and of much experience in his native Province of Nova Scotia. The two volunteer regiments, the Quebec and Ontario battalions, were quartered for the winter, the former in Lower Fort Garry, the latter in Fort Garry. The new Governor took up his abode in Fort Garry,
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CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXX.
How strange and wonderful is the web of destiny, which is being woven in our national, provincial and family life, which we poor mortals are simply the individual strands. How marvellous it is to look into the seeds of time—yes, and these may be small as mustard seeds—which are the smallest of all seeds—and see the bursting of the husks, the peering out of the plumule, the feeding of the sprout, the struggle through the clods, the fight with frost and hail and broiling sun, and canker worm and b
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APPENDIX
APPENDIX
The author notes the fact that the agents sent out by Lord Selkirk engaged (1) Labourers for the Company, (2) Settlers for the Red River Settlement. On this account in the lists given in the archives and other official documents, the labourers were often sent to the Posts of the Company, and after serving several years often became settlers. (List given in Manitoba Historical Society Transactions, 33.) List of men who arrived at Hudson Bay in 1811 and left York Factory for the interior in July,
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