McGee at various times had made visits to the British colonies. He had delivered public lectures in Montreal. He had summered on Lake Huron, had written letters to his paper from the upper Ottawa, and had passed through the rich meadows and orchards of the Annapolis valley in Nova Scotia. At all times he was struck with the orderly and secure society of the British provinces, while his imagination had been kindled by the magnificent future which stretched before them. He early visualized them as the germ cells of a new nation. He was, therefore, prepared in 1857 to accept readily the invitation of some Canadian Irishmen to become their leader in Lower Canada. A delegation consisting of such prominent Irish Canadians of the period as Frank Smith, Patrick Brennan, and James Donnelly went to New York, interviewed McGee, and obtained his acceptance of their invitation. In the spring of 1857 he moved to Montreal, and there began his Canadian career. To McGee British North America seemed on the threshold of a new and promising era. The steam-boat was drawing the provinces closer to Britain. The telegraph and Atlantic cable were making possible more intimate co-operation between the various provinces themselves, and between them and the mother country. The building of railways promised in the near future to bridge the dreary distances of forest and rock which severed the various colonies from one another and kept them as far apart as Europe is from America. In addition to these facts was another laden with rich hope, the prospective annexation to the Canadas of the vast hinterland then under the dominion of the Hudson's Bay Company. What are now the rolling wheat fields of Manitoba and Saskatchewan were in 1857 merely the hunting grounds of trappers, employed by one of the mightiest of British mercantile corporations. Yet there were some men who had caught a glimpse of the potential value of those extensive lands beyond Lake Superior. They described them as the natural field of expansion for the eastern colonies and advocated their annexation. Under the inspiration of these pregnant facts, McGee in May, 1857, established in Montreal a tri-weekly paper, called the _New Era_ as indicative of the time of its birth.