The Canadian Courant had an early rival in the Montreal Herald, which published its first number on Saturday, October 19, 1811. Its first printer and founder was a young Scotchman, William Gray, of Huntly, Aberdeenshire, born on August 12, 1789. He arrived in Montreal in June, 1811. In 1812, May 25th, he was married to Agnes Smith, of Aberdeen, by the Reverend Mr. Somerville. William Gray, as surmised by Doctor Campbell in his “History of St. Gabriel’s Church,” seems to have been related in some degree of cousinship to Alexander Skakel, the most noted of the Montreal early British schoolmasters. He died at the early age of thirty-three, on February 28, 1822, having caught a cold on a journey in a Durham boat on his way from Toronto to attend to his business affairs, on hearing that in his absence his office had been mobbed by a crowd of French-Canadians, displeased with the tone of some of his articles. This young editor has left behind him a record of personal probity, good discernment and strong personal courage. His task in 1811 was no easy one--to establish an independent and unsubsidized paper in a small town. The files of the early Herald give a contemporary picture of life of the community. Canada then had about four hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom most were in the Lower province; about four thousand five hundred regular British troops were mostly stationed there, also. Upper Canada consisted of only a few settlements, scattered here and there on the highways. Fur trading was the basic industry of the colony and its headquarters was at Montreal, the home and storage centre of the wealthy fur traders of the Beaver Hall Club. Agriculture was neglected till after the War of 1812, when it became realized that farming should be the staple industry of the colony. Unskilled labour was then performed by French Canadians, for there was yet no British immigrant labouring class. The skilled artisans came mostly from across the border, but the lesser storekeepers and merchants, chiefly Scotch, with an admixture of English and Yankees, were beginning to build up the permanent commerce of the city that was not always to be exclusively that of the fur trade. Among the business men then building up Montreal trade who were already well established before the war of 1812 were Alexander Henry, auctioneer; Benaiah Gibb, merchant; John Dillon, lumber merchant; James Brown, book-seller and owner of the Gazette; Peter McCutcheon, merchant; James and Andrew McGill, Forsyth, Richardson & Company, Maitland, Garden & Auldjo, Woolrich & Cooper, John Shuter, Samuel Gerrard, John Molson & Son, brewers and steamboat proprietors; Daniel Arnoldi, surgeon, and others.