HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY OFFICERS.
No element, however, did so much for Red River of old as the intelligent and high-spirited officers of the Hudson's Bay Company, of whom many settled in the country. There was among them also a strong Highland and Orkney strain. In few countries is the speech of the people generally so correct as it was in the Red River settlement. This undoubtedly arose from the influence of the educated Hudson's Bay Company officers. At their distant posts on the long nights they read useful books and kept their journals. Numbers of them collected specimens of natural history, Indian curiosities, took meteorological observations, and the like. Though all may not have been the pink of perfection, yet very few bodies of men retained, as a whole, so upright a character as they. We have but to mention such names as that of the notable governor, Sir George Simpson, of Pruden, Bird, Bunn, Stewart, Lillie, Campbell, Christie, Kennedy, Heron, Ross, Murray, MacKenzie, Hardisty, Graham, McTavish, Bannatyne, Cowan, Rowand, Sinclair, Sutherland, Finlayson, Smith, Balsillie, McLean, McFarlane, and Hargrave, and others who have settled on the Red River, to establish this.