The tide of American colonization rolling westward to Minnesota, to Dakota, to Oregon, was not without effect on the little isolated settlement of Red River. Oregon had been wrested from the fur trader, not by diplomacy, but by the rough-handed toiler coming in and taking possession. The same thing happened in British Columbia when the miner came. What was Red River--the pioneer of all the Western colonies--doing? The union of Nor’Wester and Hudson’s Bay had thrown many old employés out of work. These now retired to Red River, where they were granted one hundred acres of land and paid a few shillings an acre for another twenty-eight acres, making up farms of one hundred and twenty-eight acres, all facing the river and running back in long, narrow lots to the highway now known as St. John’s Road. St. John’s and Kildonan expanded to St. Paul’s and St. Andrew’s settlements northward. Across the river were three sets of settlers--the French Plain Rangers, descendants of the old Nor’Westers, the De Meuron soldiers, and the Swiss. These gradually clustered round the settlement just opposite the Assiniboine, where the Catholic missionaries were building chapel and school, and the place became known as St. Boniface, after the patron saint of the Germans. In the old buildings of Fort Douglas lived the colony governor distinct from the Company governor, Sir George Simpson, whose habitat was Fort Garry, near the site of old Fort Gibraltar, when he was in the West, and Lachine, at Montreal, when he was in the East.