wonderingly among the white-faced newcomers, marveling at men who have crossed the Great Waters "to dig gardens and work land." The barracks knocked up hastily is known after Selkirk's family name as Fort Douglas; but the store of deer meat has been exhausted, and the colonists are on the verge of a second winter. They at once join the Plain Rangers, or Bois Brulés (Burnt Wood Runners), half-breed descendants of French and Nor'west fur traders, who have become retainers of the Montreal Company. With them the Selkirk settlers proceed south to Pembina and the Boundary to hunt buffalo. No instructions had yet come to Red River of the Northwest Company's hostility to the colony, and the lonely Scotch clerks of Fort Gibraltar were glad to welcome men who spoke their own Highland tongue. Volumes might be written of this, the colonists' first year in their Promised Land: how the rude Plain Rangers conveyed them to the buffalo hunt in their {387} creaking Red River carts,--carts made entirely of wood, hub, tire, axle, and all, or else on loaned ponies; how when storm came the white settlers were welcomed to the huts and skin tents of the French half-breeds, given food and buffalo blankets; how many a young Highlander came to grief in the wild stampede of his first buffalo hunt; how when the hunters returned to Fort Gibraltar (Winnipeg), on Red River, with store enough of pemmican for all the fur posts of the Nor'westers, many a wild happy winter night was passed dancing mad Indian jigs to the piping of the Highland piper and the crazy scraping of some Frenchman's fiddle; how when morning came, in a gray dawn of smoking frost mist, a long line of the colonists could be seen winding along the ice of Red River home to Fort Douglas, Piper Green or Hector McLean leading the way, still prancing and blowing a proud national air; how when spring opened, ten-acre plots were assigned to each settler, close to the fort at what were known as the Colony Buildings, and one hundred-acre farms farther down the river. All this and more are part of the story of the coming of the first colonists to the Great Northwest. The very autumn that the first settlers had reached Red River in 1812 more colonists had arrived on the boats at {388} Hudson Bay. These did not reach Red River till October of 1812 and the spring of 1813. By 1813, and on till 1817, more colonists yearly came. The story of each year, with its plot and counterplot, I have told elsewhere. Spite of Nor'westers' threats, spite of the fact there would be no market for the colonists when they had succeeded in transforming wilderness prairie into farms, Selkirk's mad dream of empire seemed to be succeeding. [Illustration: FORT GARRY, RED RIVER SETTLEMENT]