It was no mean ambition of William McDougall to be the first Canadian administrator of this vast region with its illimitable prospects; a man of talent, experience, and breadth of view, such as McDougall was, might reasonably hope there to carve out a great career for himself and do the state some service. He was appointed on September 26, 1869, lieutenant-governor of the 'North-West Territory'--an indefinite term meant {161} apparently to cover the whole western country--and left at once for his post. He appears to have been quite in the dark concerning the perilous nature of the mission. At any rate, he could not foresee that, far from bringing him distinction, the task would shortly end, as Sir John Macdonald described it, in an inglorious fiasco. At this time, it should be remembered, the actual conditions in the West were but vaguely known in Canada. Efforts towards communication and exploration, it is true, had begun as early as 1857, when Simon Dawson made surveys for a road from Fort William and Professor Henry Youle Hind undertook his famous journey to the plains for scientific and general observation. A number of adventurous Canadians had gone out to settle on the plains. There was a newspaper at Fort Garry--the _Nor'Wester_--the pioneer newspaper of the country--which had been started by Mr William Buckingham and a colleague in 1859. But even in official circles the community to which Governor McDougall went to introduce authority was very imperfectly understood. The Red River Settlement in 1869 contained about twelve thousand inhabitants. The English-speaking portion of the population {162} consisted of heterogeneous groups without unity among them for any public purpose. Some were descendants or survivors of Lord Selkirk's settlers who had come out half a century before; others were servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, both retired and active; a third group were the Canadians; while a fourth was made up of a small though noisy body of Americans. Outnumbering the English, and united under leaders of their own race, the French and French half-breeds dwelt chiefly on the east bank of the Red River, south of Fort Garry. These half-breeds, or Métis, were a hardy race, who subsisted by hunting rather than by farming, and who were trained to the use of arms. They regarded with suspicion the threatened introduction of new political institutions, and were quite content under the paternal sway of the Hudson's Bay Company and under the leadership of their spiritual advisers, Bishop Taché and the priests of the Métis parishes.