The Earl of Selkirk, the fifth of that title, was a nobleman of enlightened and cultivated mind. He was the author of several literary productions esteemed in their day; amongst them, of a treatise on Emigration, which is spoken of by contemporaries as an exhaustive, standard work on the subject. For practically testing his theories, however, Lord Selkirk appears to have desired a field exclusively his own. Instead of directing his fellow-countrymen to one or other of the numerous prosperous settlements already in process of formation at easily accessible and very eligible spots along the St. Lawrence and the Lakes Ontario, Erie and Huron, he induced a considerable body of them to find their way to a point in the far interior of our northern continent, where civilization had as yet made no sensible inroad; to a locality so situated that if a colony could contrive to subsist there, it must apparently of necessity remain for a very long period dismally isolated. In 1803, Bishop Macdonell asked him, what could have induced a man of his high rank and great fortune, possessing the esteem and confidence of the Government and of every public man in Britain, to embark in an enterprise so romantic; and the reply given was, that, in his opinion, the situation of Great Britain, and indeed of all Europe, was at that moment so very critical and eventful, that a man would like to have a more solid footing to stand upon, than anything that Europe could offer. The tract of land secured by Lord Selkirk for emigration purposes was a part of the territory held by the Hudson's Bay Company, and was approached from Europe not so readily by the St. Lawrence route as by Hudson's Strait and Hudson's Bay. The site of the actual settlement was half-a-mile north of the confluence of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers, streams that unitedly flow northward into Lake Winnipeg, which communicates directly at its northern extremity with Nelson River, whose outlet is at Port Nelson or Fort York on Hudson's Bay. The population of the Settlement in the beginning of 1813 was 100. Mr. Miles Macdonell, formerly a captain in the Queen's Rangers, appointed by the Hudson's Bay Company first Governor of the District of Assiniboia, was made by the Earl of Selkirk superintendent of affairs at Kildonan. The rising village was called Kildonan, from the name of the parish in the county of Sutherland whence the majority of the settlers had emigrated. The Montreal North West Company of Fur Traders was a rival of the Hudson's Bay Company. Whilst the latter traded for the most part in the regions watered by the rivers flowing into Hudson's Bay, the former claimed for their operations the area drained by the streams running into Lake Superior.