Owing to competition Hudson's Bay stock had fallen from two hundred and fifty to fifty pounds sterling a share. On returning to Scotland Lord Selkirk had begun buying up Hudson's Bay stock in the market, along with Sir Alexander MacKenzie; but when MacKenzie learned that Selkirk's object was colonization first, profits second, he broke in violent anger from the partnership in speculation, and besought William MacGillivray to go on {381} the open market and buy against Selkirk to defeat the plans for settlement. What with shares owned by his wife's family of Colville-Wedderburns, and those he had himself purchased, Selkirk now owned a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company. Early in 1811 the Company deeds to Lord Selkirk the country of Red River Valley, exceeding in area the British Isles and extending, through the ignorance of its donors, far south into American territory. Colin Robertson, the former Nor'wester, who first interested Selkirk in Red River, has meanwhile been gathering together a party of colonists. Miles MacDonell, retired from the Glengarry Regiment, has been appointed by Selkirk governor of the new colony. [Illustration: SELKIRK] What of the Nor'westers while these projects went forward? Writes MacGillivray from London, where he has been stirring up enmity to Selkirk's project, "_Selkirk must be driven to abandon his project at any cost, for his colony would prove utterly destructive of our fur trade_." How he purposed doing this will be seen. Writes Selkirk to the governor of his colony, Miles MacDonell: "_The Northwest Company must be compelled to quit my lands. If they refuse, they must be treated as poachers_." Selkirk believed that the Hudson's Bay Company charter to the Great Northwest was legal and valid. He believed that the vast territory granted to him was legally his own as much as his parks in Scotland. He believed that he possessed the same right to expel intruders on this territory as to drive poachers from his own Scotch parks. It was the spirit of feudalism. As for the Nor'westers, let us look at their rights. They disputed that the charter of the Hudson's Bay Company applied beyond the bounds {382} of Hudson Bay. Even if it did so apply, they pointed out that by the terms of the charter it applied only to lands not possessed by any other Christian power; and who would dispute that French fur traders and Nor'westers, as their successors, had ascended the streams of the interior long before the Hudson's Bay men? It was the spirit of democracy. It needed no prophet to foresee when these two sets of claims came together there would be a violent clash.