After this, though the colony lost by desertions, as we have seen, yet it continued to gain by the addition of retiring Hudson's Bay Company officers and servants, who took up land as allowed by the Company in strips along the river after the Lower Canadian fashion, for which they paid small sums. There were in many cases no deeds, simply the registration of the name in the Company's register. A man sold his lot for a horse, and it was a matter of chance whether the registration of the change in the lot took place or not. This was certainly a mode of transferring land free enough to suit an English Radical or even Henry George. The land reached as far out from the river as could be seen by looking under a horse, say two miles, and back of this was the limitless prairie, which became a species of common where all could cut hay and where herds could run unconfined. Wood, water, and hay were the necessaries of a Red River settler's life; to cut poplar rails for his fences in spring and burn the dried rails in the following winter was quite the authorized thing. There was no inducement to grow surplus grain, as each settler could only get a market for eight bushels of wheat from the Hudson's Bay Company. It could not be exported. Pemmican from the plains was easy to get; the habits of the people were simple; their wants were few; and while the condition of Red River settlement was far from being that of an Arcadia, want was absent and the people were becoming satisfied. To Governor McKenzie, who ruled well for eight years, credit is due largely for the peace and progress of the period. Alexander Ross, who came from the Rocky Mountains to Red River in 1825, is the chronicler of this period, and it is with amusement we read his gleeful account of the erection of the first stone building, small though it was, on the banks of Red River. Lime had been burnt from the limestone, found abundantly along the lower part of the Red River, during the time of Governor Bulger. It was in 1830 that the Hudson's Bay Company built a small powder magazine of stone, near Fort Garry. This was the beginning of solid architecture in the settlement.