The disaffection all came to an end when Queen Victoria's Government, acting on the advice of Lord Durham, who had been sent to Canada to inquire into the disturbances, united Upper Canada and Lower Canada into one province, and granted the people the power to manage their own affairs in a Parliament of their own. After a time, when the Canadian people could not agree upon a spot to be chosen for a capital town for their now united Provinces of Ontario and Quebec, they called upon Queen Victoria to select one for them. It so happened that there was on the banks of the Ottawa a little village named Bytown, not far from two beautiful falls, the Rideau and Chaudière. It was the scene of a prosperous lumbering camp, and several sawmills throve there; it was far removed from the stress and the struggle of the French and English parties, and from bitter political feeling. So the young Queen, who had seen some sketches of the {293} village, chose it for the meeting-place of Parliament and the residence of her Governor-General. All parties were pleased, and so it came about that Bytown was rechristened Ottawa, and it in course of a few years became filled with magnificent buildings and beautiful homes. Ottawa was destined to be still more important and famous as the capital of the entire DOMINION OF CANADA. For as time went on all the British provinces, both of the east and the west, that begun by Poutraincourt 250 years before in Acadia, and that founded by Selkirk on the Red River, all the colonies between the Atlantic and the Pacific north of the American border, had grown and flourished and sought to be welded into a single nation under the British flag. Thirty years after Papineau's rebellion, therefore, the desired union took place, and in 1867 the Canadian Dominion, under Sir John Macdonald's leadership, began its career. The new order of things involved many changes. Amongst others it was time in the Far West that the power of the Hudson's Bay Company over the vast region of Rupert's Land should come to a close. No longer was it meet and proper that a body of fur-traders should be lords paramount over all this territory. Yet neither the Company nor its dependents, the voyageurs, trappers, and hunters, were eager for any change. The Métis or Bois-Brulés, of whom we spoke in the last chapter, had grown accustomed to the Company's rule. "If," said they, "the Company is no longer to govern us, then we should govern ourselves." When they saw the first {294} advance guard of Canadians from the east coming in to take their land for farms, to lay out roads and townships, the Bois-Bruits met in angry protest; they defied the Canadians to take their country without their consent. They were joined by a number of American immigrants, who regarded any political trouble with pleasure as hastening the annexation which was the object of their desire.