_In a Swift Current_ [Illustration] _On the Winter Highway_ [Illustration] _Lord Selkirk,_ _Father of Western Settlement_ [Illustration] _Fort Douglas, (in background),_ _Where Winnipeg Now Stands_ The Nor’-westers hid their anger, and watched for a chance to pay off the score. A party of them, on their way to an Indian camp, met a Hudson’s Bay party bound in the same direction. They started a camp fire, and began talking and drinking in the friendliest way. The Bay men took all that was offered them; but the wily Nor’-westers only sipped their liquor and secretly poured the rest on the snow. At last the Bay men fell asleep. The Nor’-westers then tied them on their sledges and whipped up the dog teams, which carried the sleepers safely home to their fort, while their sober rivals went on to the Indian camp and got the whole of the furs. Many deeds of violence remained hidden in the breasts of the perpetrators. Of those that came to light, the most notorious was the “Battle of Seven Oaks,” or “Red River Massacre,” in 1816. * * * * * It was the foundation of the first white settlement in the West that led to that shocking event. Until 1811, the Hudson’s Bay Company had been steadily opposed to any colonizing of its land. A permanent white population, it thought, would injure the fur trade. The Company’s officials even declared, and some of them doubtless believed, that the country was unfit for settlement or cultivation. But Thomas Douglas, the Earl of Selkirk, who was Governor of the Company in 1811, knew better. He had already, in 1803, taken oversea a party of poor Scottish Highlanders, who established a colony in Prince Edward Island, and a little later he tried to start a settlement in Ontario. Seeing prospects of greater success in the West, he and his relations bought a majority of the Hudson’s Bay shares, and so controlled the whole of the Company’s operations. His next step was to buy from the Company 116,000 square miles of land, stretching north and south across Manitoba into Dakota and Minnesota, and including the present site of Winnipeg, where the Assiniboine flows into Red River.