The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists: The Pioneers of ManitobaBryce, George
History
The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists: The Pioneers of Manitoba
Bryce, George
Red River Settlement
In seventeen days from the first rise, the water reached its height, and
hope began immediately to return. On the 22nd of May the waters
commenced to assuage, and twenty days afterward the Settlers were able
with difficulty to reach their homes again.
But every disaster has its side of advantage. During the escape of the
Settlers to the heights, the De Meurons, losing all sense of restraint,
stole the cattle of the Settlers and actually sold them meat from their
own slaughtered cattle. So intense was the feeling of the Scottish
Settlers against the De Meurons that the Selkirk Colonists chose another
situation and moved to it.
Now that the flood was over, the De Meurons and Swiss became more
restless than ever. They decided to move to the United States. The
Selkirk Colonists were glad to see them go, and furnished them, free of
cost, sufficient supplies for their journey. They departed on the 24th
of June, their band numbering 243, and the sturdy pioneers who held to
their land shed no tears of sorrow at their going.
With remarkable courage and hope the Settlers returned after what was to
some of them, their fourth Hegira, and immediately planted potatoes and
small quantities of wheat and barley. This grew well and supplied food
for them, and in the next two or three years no less than two hundred
and four houses were built. The Settlement, now freed from dissension,
had not gone through its fiery ordeal in vain. The news of a home for
themselves and their dusky wives and half-breed children, had spread
over the whole of Rupert's Land, and now began, what Lieutenant-Governor
Archibald, the first Governor of Manitoba, afterward spoke of as the
floating down the rivers with their wives and children of the Hudson's
Bay Company officers and men to the paradise of Red River. The great
majority of the employees of the Company were Orkneymen. They gradually
took up the most of the Red River lots surveyed, lying below Kildonan,
and forming the Parishes of St. Paul's and St. Andrew's on Red River,
down to St. Peter's Indian Reserve and St. James' and Headingly up the
Assiniboine. The French half-breeds who removed from Pembina and
different parts of Rupert's Land, made the great French parishes of St.
Boniface, St. Norbert, St. Vital on the Red River, with St. Charles, St.
Francois Xavier and Baie St. Paul on the Assiniboine. And now of
Scottish Settlers with French and English half-breeds, the population of
Red River Settlement had reached the number of 1,500 souls.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE JOLLY GOVERNOR.
Great crises in the world's history generally produce the men who solve
them. Cromwell, Washington, Garibaldi--each of them was the movement
itself. A wider philosophy may see that the age or the Community evolves
the man, but as Carlyle shows, it is the man who reacts upon the
community, becomes the embodiment of its ideal, and is the mouthpiece
and the right hand of the age which produces him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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