RED RIVER OF THE NORTH.

From Ross's History of the Red River Settlement, we gather the fol lowing facts:

Forty-five years ago the most powerful potentate on this continent was one Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk. Mr. Madison had power enough to contend with all the might of Great Britain; but Thomas Douglas uled a far wider realm than he. He was the chief of the Hudson Bay Company. No carpet knight he; in the depth of the pathless woods, on the virgin streams, in the bosom of the arctic snows, his spurs were won. A man of private means, which he sacrificed to this Company, he was also brave and enterprising. Neither expense, nor danger, nor obstacles, I could deter him from his resolves. To the perseverence of the Scot he united the fire of the Celt; with the proud self-reliance of the peer, he combined the shrewd tact of the merchant.

At that time the great fur country was disputed by two rival companies, the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Company. Their charters were distinct, and so were their territories. But there was not room for both. Every man in the Northwest knew that one of the two must perish, and those who measured the respective strength of the rivals, said confidently that the Hudson Bay Company was doomed. Thomas, Earl of Selkirk, made up his mind that it must conquer, and that the Northwesters must go to the wall.

Examining with the eye of a soldier the country where the war was to be carried on, he saw that two grand essentials were wanting to his side -physical strength, and a basis of operations. To supply both, he obtained from the Company, and from various Indian tribes claiming to hold dominion over the territory, a grant of land in the neighborhood of Red River, a tributary of lake Winnipeg, which joins the lake about 100 miles northwest of Fort William, and made arrangements to trans port thither colonists from the Scotch Highlands. A stout colony firmly established there would not only equalize the strength of the combatants, but would afford the Hudson Bay Company an unrivaled basis of operations, as well as a convenient stepping-stone to the trade of the West. Accordingly, in the summer of 1812, the Earl of Selkirk transplanted .he "first brigade" of colonists to Red River. The settlers were to ave a hundred acres of land each, to be paid for in produce (the pay ment was afterwards remitted); they were to have a minister of their own persuasion; they were to enjoy the rights of British subjects; and they were guaranteed a market at their own doors for all their produce On these terms hardy Highlanders were not wanting to risk the adventure. But neither were the Northwesters blind. Their preparations were made silently, effectively. No sooner had the "first brigade" arrived, than a band of men, begrimmed with war-paint, dressed in Indian dress, and armed to the teeth, rode down upon them and bade them depart. Strange to say, there was not an intelligent word spoken on either side. The colonists spoke nothing but Gaelic; their assailants Indian-French. But the gestures of the latter were too plain to be mistaken. Out of

charity they agreed to carry the women and children on the cruppers of their horses; the men were to walk. For the "services" of their guides they paid as they could. A woman gave her wedding-ring; a Gael the cherished musket his father had borne at Culloden. So they traveled, sore of heart and foot, by the side of their conquerers, to Pembina.

After living there on charity during the winter, they returned to Red River in the spring. A year's peace enabled them to break ground and rear shelter. In 1815 the Northwesters were upon them again. This time there was resistance. Accordingly the Northwesters burned down the Colonial House, took the Governor prisoner, killed his aid. Then more fighting; and finally, the brief mandate from the Northwest headquarters: "All settlers to retire immediately from the Red River, and no appearance of a colony to remain." A command executed to the letter. Three hundred miles over the wilderness the Highlanders were sent in exile, and their houses burned down.

Nothing discouraged, the Hudson Bay Company sent a strong force to escort the exiles back to the settlement. A new brigade arrived just in time to help them rebuild their houses. The Northwesters changed their tactics. They too hired Gaels, and sent them to Red River, with instructions to seduce the colonists to leave the place. The Highlanders, proof against corruption, could not resist the old familiar sounds of the Gaelic. They deserted in droves. Depopulation menaced the settlement. The Earl of Selkirk calmly prepared to import more brigades.

At length, in June, 1816, matters came to a crisis. News reached Governor Semple at Red River that a body of 300 horsemen, warpainted and heavily armed, was approaching the settlement. In a rash moment he armed himself and twenty-seven others, and marched out to parley. At a short distance from the enemy he halted, and consulted his aids. At that moment a ball from the enemy struck a man at his side. A volley followed, and twenty-one of the twenty-eight, including the Governor, were shot dead; the other seven escaped, wounded. The victors marched into the settlement, sacked and burned the houses, carried off all that was worth stealing, and drove out the colonists, warning them that they would be hunted down and shot like wild beasts if they appeared there again. It was some consolation afterwards to the survivors of the ruthless attack to discover that twenty-six out of the sixtyfive Northwesters who fired on Governor Semple perished violently within a short period.

Then the Earl of Selkirk acted. He was in the country. He had brought with him from Europe a battalion of Swiss mercenaries of the Dalgetty stamp-men who were called De Meurons, from an old colonel of theirs, and who "feared neither God, man, nor beast." With these he marched directly on Fort William, the head-quarters of the Northwest Company, and took it. This was a fine piece of strategy, as it threw the Northwesters on the defensive, and made the Hudson Bay party the assailants. Under cover of the capture of Fort William, the Earl led back the exiles, for the third time, to Red River, remitted the price of their lands, and reestablished the colony on a new and solid basis He chose mill-sites, set apart lards for religious and educational

establishments, surveyed the colony, advanced the settlers tools and stock. Under his directions agricultural operations were commenced on a sound principle, and in some spots a yield of forty-fold rewarded the Highlanders' industry.

Still, as farming had been begun too late, the harvest was scanty, and at the approach of winter the whole colony abandoned the place. They fled to Pembina, there hoping to subsist on the product of the chase. When they arrived there, they found they must join a party of Indians and half-breeds which had set out some days previously. Off they started, through the snow. They were ill clad, and ill supplied with food. The thermometer ranged from 35° to 40° below zero. "Our sufferings," said one of the wretched Highlanders, "were almost beyond human endurance, and even at this distant day we shudder at the painful recollection; for many a time, when the last mouthful was consumed, and our children crying for more, we knew not how or where the next morsel was to come from. A rabbit, a crow, a snow-bird, or even a piece of parchment, would be found, perhaps; and thus from time to time we kept body and soul together. We reached the camp when the last morsel of food was gone, and we were at the last gasp on the eve of Christmas-day."

Starvation avoided by entering the service of the Indian hunters as camp drudges, the Highlanders returned to Red River in the spring. This fourth beginning was the most promising of all. The Northwesters only carried off a man from time to time. The weather was fine; the crops promised well. Hope began to cheer the settlers; when, alas! "just as the corn was in ear and the barley almost ripe, a cloud of grasshoppers from the west darkened the air, and fell like a heavy shower of snow on the colony." In one night crops, gardens, and every green herb in the settlement perished. The Highlanders wept.

To Pembina again that fall, and more sickening misery there. In the spring a fifth attempt to settle Red River. But the June heats quickened the larvae the grasshoppers had left in the ground. They arose from the earth in masses. They lay four solid inches deep on some spots. They poisoned the water. Men shoveled them aside with spades to make a way into their hovels. No green thing-neither the herbs, nor the leaves of the bushes, nor the bark of the trees, nor the grass of the plain-saw the September of that year. Even out-door fires were extinguished by the shower of insects, and the air was infected by the effluvia from their putrifying corpses. To return to Pembina was a necessity.

But the perseverence of the Highlanders grew nobler with obstacles. For the sixth time, in the spring of 1820, they returned to Red River. Lord Selkirk's iron will knew no such thing as failure. The men had not even saved seed out of the general ruin. At a cost of $5000 he procured 250 bushels of seed wheat from Missouri. Again the land was sowed; and again the bright days of June were darkened by the grass. hoppers. But man can always live down obstacles. The plague abated Early in the season the grasshoppers disappeared, never to return; and for the first time in their eight years' experience, the Red River colonists

gathered in their harvest safely. More colonists arrived-Swiss, Germans, and Scotch. Men still starved at seed time. The poor Swiss suffered horribly; bartered their all for the meanest pittance. Men gave their guns, women their rings, or what was dearer still, for a cat-fish. But the colonial roots had struck, and, in comparison with the past, these seemed very bright times.

But the end was not yet. Lord Selkirk died an exile in France, having escaped from the sheriff sent to arrest him for the affair of June, and his death was the signal for a new plague. His deputy, the Governor of the settlement, a fellow named M'Dowell, was as great a pest as the grasshoppers. In the wilds of Red River he kept baronial house, with "secretaries, assistant secretaries, accountants, orderlies, grooms, cooks, and butlers." From the time the stores of rum arrived till the puncheons were empty, the Governor was never wholly sober. When his guests were assembled to make a night of it, the heel of a broken bottle, filled with wheat, would be set on a cask, and a man stationed beside it, with orders to take out a grain for every bottle filled. As the carouse went on, his Excellency would call, "Bob, how stands the hourglass?" To which the sentinel would reply, "High, your honor, high!" And the guests would set to work to lower the pile of grains with renewed energy. This fellow plundered the colonists shamefully. Lord Selkirk's orders were that they should be supplied with all necessary tools, seed, etc., on credit. The Governor received their orders, charged the goods against them, but often forgot to furnish the articles required. He forgot, in the same way, to credit them with the work they performed; and had no doust realized a handsome fortune at the time he was relieved of his duties.

Having got rid of him, the colony was afterwards blessed with a new ruler who had the advantage of being a cousin of the Governor of the Company. His name was Pelly. His plan was to take every thing easily, and lay trast in Providence. On one occasion, an Indian was brought before him to be tried on a charge of murder. It was proved that he had sallied forth with a party of warriors of his own tribe to make war on some enemies of theirs. Being unsuccessful in his search for the tribe in question, and at the same time unwilling to return home without a trophy, he met an old woman of his own tribe, killed her, and took her scalp. When the evidence was complete, the Governor turned to the culprit, and sternly remarked to the interpreter: "Tell him that he has manifested a disposition subversive of all order, and that if he should not be punished in this world, he is sure to be punished in the next. Let him be discharged!"

Struggling on as best they could under such rulers as these, the Red River colonists reached the year 1826. A fearful storm in the December of 1825 commenced a new catalogue of mishaps. The buffalo were driven from their haunts by the storm; the cold was intense: what from the frost, and what from famine, thirty-three persons perished, and many others were severely tried. That winter the thermometer often marked 45° below zero, and the snow lay three feet thick in the level plains. On the 2d May the thaw began, and the river rose nine feet perpendicular in

twenty-four hours. The Indians stood aghast. On the 4th the wates reached the cellars; on the 5th every house in the village was abandoned The settlers flocked to the high grounds, some losing all their property A current set in toward Lake Winnipeg, and on the surface the survivor of the deluge watched their houses, barns, carriages, furniture, fencing and everything else that would float, drift steadily toward the great lake. For nineteen consecutive days the waters rose, and every trace of the colony was washed away. On the twentieth day the people held a counil on their hill-top, in order to decide whither they should sail in search of a new home. While they were debating, with weary hearts, not a few among them yet clinging to the scene of their miseries, news came that the waters had not risen an inch for many hours. The council broke up. So intense was the anxiety that no man spoke. Some seized rods and planted them in the water to serve as tide-guages. Others, less hopeful, sat sternly down by the side of the deluge, gazing at it with stony faces. Before long, men came running up to say that the news was correct. The water certainly did not rise; nay, more, it was falling. There could be no doubt of the fact, and the colonists unanimously resolved to stay where they were. They waited patiently, and on the 15th June stood once more on the site of their lost village. A new beginning was made, and seed sowed the 22d June, in time for the fall harvest.

This was the last of the beginnings of Red River settlement. From 1826 to the present time it has been continuously occupied. But its fortunes after it became a fixed fact-still fluctuated widely and erratically. Who would expect to find a Rue Quincampoix or a fancy stock fever at Red River? Wall street must look to its laurels.

The first bubble was the Buffalo Wool Company. This was so wonderful a concern, and so certain to make the fortunes of every stockholder, that it was incomprehensible how sane men had lived a week at Red River without lighting upon it. Nothing to be done but to walk out into the plains, kill buffalo, take their wool, dress and weave it; cure their hides and tan them. Here were woolen goods and leather not only for the whole of Rupert's Land, but for export. A company formed, a palatial factory erected, and orders sent to England for machinery, implements, dyes, and skilled workmen, the work began. Every soul was enlisted. Women left their babies, men their fields. Who would till the fields for a beggarly subsistence, when the Buffalo Wool Company offered wealth in exchange for a few months' exertion? Every body was either a skinner, sorter, wool-dresser, teaser, or bark manufacturer: wages were no object; so little girls got $3 a day. Net results: every body at the factory got drunk day after day; the little wool collected was spoiled; the hides rotted; cloth which cost $12 a yard to make, sold for $1 in England; the Company failed, and the colonists lived on short commons that winter.

But failures seem to have been regarded as encouraging on Red River. The Earl of Selkirk sunk no less a sum than $425,000 in planting the colony; his successors and their assignee, the Hudson Bay Company, continued to extend liberality to the settlement on an undiminished scale. All at once the Governor discovered that immense fortunes were to be