The colonists continued to hunt buffalo in Minnesota during the winter and to cultivate their farms in the summer; but what to do for a market? Colonists in Oregon could sell their produce to the Spaniards, or the Russians, or the Yankee skippers passing up and down the coast. Colonists in British Columbia found a market with the miners, but to whom could the Red River farmer sell but to the fur company? For his provisions from England, he paid a freight of 33 per cent. ocean rate, 58 per cent. profit to the Company, and another 20 per cent. land rate from Hudson Bay to Red River--a total of over 110 per cent. advance on all purchases. For what he sold to the Company, he received only the lowest price, and he might on no account sell furs. Furs were the exclusive prerogative of the Company. For his produce, he was credited on the books, but the credit side seldom balanced the debit side; and on the difference the Red River settler was charged 5 per cent.--not a high debtors’ rate when it is considered that it was levied by a monopoly, that had absolute power over the debtor; and that the modern debtors’ rate is legalized at 6 and 8 percent. It was not the rate charged that discouraged the Red River settler; but the fact that paying an advance of 110 per cent. on all purchases and receiving only the lowest market price for all farm produce--two shillings-six pence for wheat a bushel--he could never hope by any possibility to make his earnings and his spendings balance. Mr. Halkett, a relative of Selkirk’s, came out in 1822, to settle up the affairs of the dead nobleman. The Company generously wrote off all debt, which was accumulated interest, and remitted one-fifth of the principal to all settlers. Mr. Halkett and Sir George Simpson then talked over plans to create a market for the colonist. These successive plans and their successive failures belong to the history of the colony rather than the history of the Company, and cannot be fully given here. There was the Buffalo Wool Company of 1822, under Pritchard’s management, which set all the farmers scouring the plains as buffalo hunters with schemes as roseate as the South Sea Bubble; and like the South Sea Bubble the roseate scheme came to grief. It cost $12.50 a yard to manufacture cloth that sold for only $1.10; and the Hudson’s Bay Company wrote a loss of $12,000 off their books for this experiment. Alex MacDonell, a bottle-loving Scotchman, who had acted as governor of the colony after Semple’s death, and who became notorious as “the grasshopper governor” because his régime caused the colonists as great grief as the grasshopper plague--now gave place to Governor Bulger. Over at the Company fort, John Clarke of Athabasca fame, now returned from Montreal with an aristocratic Swiss lady as his bride--acts as Chief Factor under Governor Simpson.