At this juncture (1818) they were surprised at the arrival of two Roman Catholic priests sent from Montreal, on the request of Lord Selkirk, for the Roman Catholic colonists taken out by him, and the French halfbreeds of Red River. But no Presbyterian minister was sent. It is to be said for Lord Selkirk that the financial difficulties of his colony and the strife and opposition which had arisen preyed on his mind to such an extent that he died in the south of France in 1820. He had, however, given strict charges to his agent, then in London, to send out a minister as promised. The agent was an Englishman and seemed to have used his position with the directors of the Hudson Bay Company very unfairly. In 1820 there arrived in Red River Rev. John West, a good and suitable man, but the settlers complained that he was of the Church of England, and that there were not "twenty individuals in the whole colony belonging to the Church of England." Much dissatisfied, the colonists, in 1822, applied to Lord Selkirk's executors for redress, but no answer was made to them. Governor Donald Mackenzie, who was in charge at Fort Garry, made them, in the year following, a promise that a minister of their own persuasion would be sent them. A petition sent to Scotland for assistance received no reply. Years rolled on, the people still adhering in their homes to the customs of their fathers, holding prayer meetings from house to house and teaching the Shorter Catechism in their families. In 1843 they saw six Roman Catholic priests in the settlement, and four Church of England ministers, but none of their own faith. The state of depression produced by these unavailing efforts may be seen in the fact that in 1835 a party of one hundred and ten persons, all Scotch settlers, left the colony for the United States, "solely because at the Selkirk settlement they had neither minister nor church of their own." Two years after a number of additional families left the country for the same reason. The indiscreet and uncalled for public address of one of their ministers, who had been once a Presbyterian but was so no longer, did much to influence their feeling and stir up resentment. In the year 1844, Duncan Finlayson, a Scotchman, who was Governor at Fort Garry, advised another application to be made to the company in London. The petition of the people is really a most pathetic one. In it they say that "they are in danger of forgetting that they have brought with them into this land, where they have sought a home, nothing so valuable as the faith of Christ, or the primitive simplicity of their form of worship; and that their children are in danger of losing sight of those Christian bonds of union and of worship, which everywhere characterize the sincere follower of Christ."