It was in 1811 that Lord Selkirk obtained a large tract of land on the Red river from the Hudson Bay Company (of which he was a member), with the view of settling upon it an agricultural colony. The first party of British immigrants—drawn chiefly from Scotland—came in, it will be noted, by way of Hudson Bay, a route which it is prophesied may yet be preferred by British colonists as the shortest road to the great West. But no Hudson Bay Railroad was dreamed of when those first immigrants arrived, late in 1811, and it was not till the following summer that they reached their destination on the Red river. There they received anything but a hospitable welcome. In fact, the Hudson Bay Company’s rivals in the fur trade deliberately set themselves to make the place too hot to hold them, for, not altogether unreasonably, they regarded farming and fur trading as mutually exclusive industries. But neither their ill-will, which at last culminated in bloodshed, nor other disasters of various descriptions, sufficed to destroy the colony. Through all, a few of Selkirk’s settlers succeeded in the end in making good their footing; and many modern Manitobans are proud to claim descent from these sturdy and steadfast folk who, with no better implements than hoes, broke up the ancient sod, and sowed and reaped the first of Manitoba’s famous wheat crops. A few years later the rival trading companies amalgamated; but for the next half-century the growth of the colony—still under the rule of the Hudson Bay Company—was extraordinarily slow. Then it was affected by events in the eastern provinces. Immediately after Confederation, resolutions were passed in the Canadian parliament asking the British Government to add to the Dominion these great regions in the north and west, and in 1869 the Hudson Bay Company consented to give up its trade monopoly and sovereign rights in consideration of a sum of £300,000 in money, and of about a twentieth part of the land yet to be surveyed south of the north branch of the Saskatchewan river and west of Lake Winnipeg.