The legislature would undoubtedly soon declare the land-grant forfeited, unless the construction promised was completed. To fill the cup, in the middle seventies Minnesota and the neighbouring lands were visited by unprecedented swarms of grasshoppers or Rocky Mountain locusts. Swarming down from the plateau lands of the Rockies in columns miles high, covering the ground from horizon to horizon, they swept resistlessly forward, devouring every green thing in their way. When they had passed, hundreds of deserted shacks stood silent witnesses to the settlers' despair. [Illustration: Lord Strathcona. From a photograph by Lafayette, London] It was in 1876 that the further allies needed came from the East. Thirty years earlier George Stephen, a younger cousin of Donald Smith, had left his Highland hills to seek his {135} fortune in London, and after a short apprenticeship there had gone still farther afield, joining an uncle in Montreal. He rose rapidly to a foremost place in the wholesale trade of Montreal; selling led him into manufacturing, and manufacturing into financial activities. In 1876 he became president of the Bank of Montreal. Associated with him in the same bank was still another shrewd, forth-faring Scot, Richard B. Angus, who had risen steadily in its service until appointed to succeed E. H. King as general manager in 1869. A lawsuit in connection with the bank's affairs took both Stephen and Angus to Chicago in 1876. A week's adjournment left them with unwonted leisure. A toss of a coin sent them to St Paul rather than to St Louis to spend the week. Smith had already spoken of the project while in Montreal, but at that distance caution had prevailed. Now Stephen, who had never before seen the prairie, was immensely taken with the rich, deep soil he saw before him. He knew from reading and experience that grasshopper plagues did not last for ever. He decided, therefore, to join in the attempt to get control of the Minnesota road and its land-grant, and the famous group was complete. {136}