CHAPTER V. The Early Settlers on Red River.
On the banks of the Red River of the North for well nigh forty years before the coming of John Black, there had existed the Red River Settlement. Fort Garry was its centre for upwards of thirty years of that period. The fur trader on the Mackenzie River looked to the settlement as his probable haven of rest when he should have finished his days of active service and retired; the half-breed hunter of the plains thought of it as the paradise to which he might make his annual visit, or the place where he might at last settle, while the Kildonan settler boasted that there was no place like his "oasis" in the Northwest wilderness, and that the traveller who had tasted the magical waters of Red River would always return to them again. The Canadian youth read in his school-book of a far distant outpost, Fort Garry, and chilled by the very sound of the name, whispering "cold as Siberia," passed on to the next subject. The Canadian statesman dreamed of a Canada from ocean to ocean, but as he thought of the thousand miles of impassable rocks and morasses between him and the fur-traders, he could only shudder and say, "perhaps sometime," while the secretary of the Hudson's Bay Company House in London with darkest secrecy folded together his epistles, addressed them "via Pembina," and then slipped quietly away to his suburban residence, knowing that he had the key in his pocket to unlock the door to half a continent, around which was built an impenetrable Chinese wall.
As early as 1802 the Earl of Selkirk, a man of philanthropic and liberal views, stirred by the accounts given by Sir Alexander Mackenzie (1801) and other traders to the Indian country, wrote to the British Government of the day a letter now in the British archives, proposing the establishment in Red River of a colony for the purpose of relieving Irish disaster and Highland misery. It was not until 1811 that Lord Selkirk succeeded in obtaining, by purchase from the Hudson's Bay Company, of which in the meantime he had become a member, the district of Assiniboia on Red River, comprising 116,000 square miles. By way of Hudson Bay was the route chosen, and in the letters of the founder occur the words—words of still unfulfilled, but no doubt true prophecy: "To a colony in these territories the channel of trade must be the river of Port Nelson."