The next essay is to send Laidlaw down to Prairie du Chien on the Mississippi to buy a stock of seed wheat to be rafted up the Mississippi across a portage and down the Red River. He buys two hundred and fifty bushels at $2.40 a bushel, but what with rafting and incidentals before it reaches the colonist, it has cost the Hudson’s Bay Company £1,040. Next, an experimental farm must be tried to teach these new colonists how to farm in the new country. The same Mr. Laidlaw with the same grand ideas is put in charge of the Hayfield Farm. It is launched with the style of a baronial estate--fine houses, fine stables, a multitude of servants, a liberal tap in the wine cellar; and a total loss to the Hudson’s Bay Company of £2,000. There follow experiments of driving sheep to Red River all the way from Missouri, and of a Wool Company that ends as the Buffalo Company had, and of flax growing, the flax rotting in the fields for lack of a purchaser. What with disastrous experiments and a grasshopper plague and a flood that floats the houses of half the population down the ice-jammed current of the raging Red, the De Meurons and Swiss become discouraged. It was noticed during the flood that the De Meurons had an unusual quantity of hides and beef to sell; and that the settlers had extraordinary difficulty finding their scattered herds. What little reputation the De Meurons had, they now lost; and many of them with their Swiss neighbors deserted Red River for the new settlements of Minnesota. From ranging the plains with the buffalo hunters of Pembina, the Swiss came on south to Fort Snelling, near modern St. Paul, and so formed the nucleus of the first settlements in Minnesota. It has been charged that the Hudson’s Bay Company never meant any of these experiments to succeed; that it designed them so they would fail and prove to the world the country was unfit for settlement. Such a charge is far-fetched with just enough truth to give the falsity semblance. The Company were not farmers. They were traders, and it is not surprising that fur men’s experiments at farming should be a failure; but that the Hudson’s Bay Company deliberately went to work to throw away sums of money ranging from $5,000 to $17,000 will hardly be credited with those who know the inner working of an organization whose economy was so strict it saved nails when it could use wooden pegs. [Illustration: Interior of Fort Garry or Winnipeg in 1870. The figure standing with arm extended a little to the left of the flag is Donald Smith, now Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, then but newly come from the wilds of Labrador and commissioned by the Canadian Government to try and pacify the Half-breed Rebels led by Riel.]