Thus early and artfully did the fur-traders of the North-West Company seek to thwart colonising. But the emigrants sailed, and two months later they arrived on the shores of Hudson Bay, where they remained in huts during a long, wearisome winter and spring. In the first week of July they started in boats down Hayes River to Lake Winnipeg, and so to the Forks, on the Red River, where they arrived by the end of August. Wondering Indians came to gaze at the white strangers who had arrived on the prairie, not to collect furs and not to hunt, but—by all that was mysterious and incredible—to make things grow in the ground. Meanwhile another party of Lord Selkirk’s colonists had left Scotland. Again there were unseen enemies at work. Mutiny was fomented on the voyage, but, after one man had had an arm cut off, the affair fizzled out. Of that second party to arrive at Hudson Bay, some eight or ten men pushed on in the same year to Red River. Three of them tarried by the way to do some fishing, and when they set out to accomplish the last stage of their journey, winter set in, they ran short of provisions, and their strength gave out. Two lay down on the windswept ice to die. “The third,” Agnes Laut tells us, “hurried desperately forward, hoping against hope, doggedly resolved, if he must perish, to die hard. Suddenly a tinkling of dog-bells broke the winter stillness, and the pack-trains of North-West hunters came galloping over the ice. In a twinkling the overjoyed colonist had signalled them and told his story, and in less time than it takes to relate, the Nor’-Westers were off to the rescue. The three starving men were cared for till they regained strength. Then they were given food enough to supply them for the rest of the way to the settlement.” Yearly contingents went out, and it is recorded that the emigrants of 1813 included young girls going to make a home for aged parents, a patriarch and his wife who had been evicted from their Scottish home, Irish Catholics, staid Scotch Presbyterians, dandified Glasgow clerks, red-cheeked Orkneymen, younger sons of noble families, and shy and demure Moravian sisters and brethren. They had their trials. There was an outbreak of typhus on the voyage; on their subsequent trek across country, they cut their feet on ridge stones, and sometimes had to wade waist-deep through swamps; and once they ran short of food and were reduced to eating nettle leaves.