Canada To-day and To-morrow

by Arthur E. Copping

Thus early and artfully did the fur-traders of the North-West Company seek to thwart colonising. But the emigrants sailed, and two months later they arrived on the shores of Hudson Bay, where they remained in huts during a long, wearisome winter and spring. In the first week of July they started in boats down Hayes River to Lake Winnipeg, and so to the Forks, on the Red River, where they arrived by the end of August. Wondering Indians came to gaze at the white strangers who had arrived on the prairie, not to collect furs and not to hunt, but—by all that was mysterious and incredible—to make things grow in the ground.

Meanwhile another party of Lord Selkirk’s colonists had left Scotland. Again there were unseen enemies at work. Mutiny was fomented on the voyage, but, after one man had had an arm cut off, the affair fizzled out. Of that second party to arrive at Hudson Bay, some eight or ten men pushed on in the same year to Red River. Three of them tarried by the way to do some fishing, and when they set out to accomplish the last stage of their journey, winter set in, they ran short of provisions, and their strength gave out. Two lay down on the windswept ice to die. “The third,” Agnes Laut tells us, “hurried desperately forward, hoping against hope, doggedly resolved, if he must perish, to die hard. Suddenly a tinkling of dog-bells broke the winter stillness, and the pack-trains of North-West hunters came galloping over the ice. In a twinkling the overjoyed colonist had signalled them and told his story, and in less time than it takes to relate, the Nor’-Westers were off to the rescue. The three starving men were cared for till they regained strength. Then they were given food enough to supply them for the rest of the way to the settlement.”

Yearly contingents went out, and it is recorded that the emigrants of 1813 included young girls going to make a home for aged parents, a patriarch and his wife who had been evicted from their Scottish home, Irish Catholics, staid Scotch Presbyterians, dandified Glasgow clerks, red-cheeked Orkneymen, younger sons of noble families, and shy and demure Moravian sisters and brethren. They had their trials. There was an outbreak of typhus on the voyage; on their subsequent trek across country, they cut their feet on ridge stones, and sometimes had to wade waist-deep through swamps; and once they ran short of food and were reduced to eating nettle leaves.

To pave the way for his colony, Lord Selkirk had bought a controlling interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company. But that company and the Nor’-Westers were still at deadly feud. The peaceful settlers found themselves in a hornets’ nest. They were terrified by the portents of a gathering storm. Half-breeds went about singing their war songs; musketry firing was heard at night. A section of the colonists suffered the Nor’-Westers to escort them to the security of Eastern Canada. The others remained to see the forts of the rival traders dealing out death and destruction. At one time the colony buildings were set on fire, the Selkirk settlers fled in terror to Lake Winnipeg, and nothing remained but their charred homes and trampled crops. Then came two hundred fighting men under the Hudson’s Bay flag, and as they brought word that Governor Semple was on his way to take command, bringing with him 160 additional colonists, and that Lord Selkirk himself would arrive in the following year, the agriculturists returned to Red River and started all over again.

Governor Semple had not been long at Red River before he and his staff, with a few other persons, were killed, whereupon the Hudson’s Bay stronghold (Fort Douglas) fell into the enemy’s hands. Poor colonists! they were tilling the soil in a very noisy neighbourhood. New excitement was provided in the following year, when Lord Selkirk (now a very warlike philanthropist) arrived with several hundred discharged soldiers and retook Fort Douglas. After that, the colonists experienced less troubled times; and when the two fur-trading companies coalesced in 1821 an era of peace dawned for the district. Meanwhile, harassed, weary and ill, the founder of the colony had gone to France, where on November 8th, 1820, a noble life drew to a pathetic close.

Fate lavished her favours on Thomas Douglas, fifth Earl of Selkirk and Baron Daer. He possessed youth, health, wealth, position and power. And he applied those blessings, not to selfish ends, but to the service of humanity. I like the simple words in which Lord Selkirk’s character was described by his contemporary and friend, Sir Walter Scott. The great novelist testified to his “generous and disinterested disposition,” and to his “talents and perseverance.”

Lord Selkirk is to have a memorial, and a memorial worthy of the man and his work. The Centenary of the foundation of the Selkirk settlement (from which Manitoba has sprung) is likely to be celebrated in 1914 by an exhibition at Winnipeg—an exhibition of a character and on a scale to arouse interest in, and attract visitors from, all quarters of the globe. Indeed, the Dominion has thoughts of celebrating the occasion by holding its first “World’s Fair,” after the pattern set by London forty-nine years ago, by Philadelphia twelve years later, by Paris in the opening year of this century, and by Chicago in 1893.

There are several reasons why a Winnipeg Exhibition justifies high hopes. On previous occasions, millions of people, travelling across oceans and continents, have visited a World’s Fair in order to see—a World’s Fair. People would be attracted to the Manitoba capital in 1914 to see that and something more. It would be an opportunity to witness a rare spectacle—the rising of a new nation that is destined to be big and powerful. For thousands of people it would be a chance to take a peep at the prairie—to see with their own eyes the Great North-West.

These International Expositions are occasions when one part of the world says to the rest of the world: “Come and see what we are doing.” Visitors go with the intention of combining business with pleasure; and certainly no World’s Fair would ever have been held in a country that presents such opportunities for investment and enterprise. The Winnipeg Show would take its international public to the very border of probably the greatest area of rich, unoccupied land to be found in the world. It would reveal a territory that is producing sufficient wheat to supply the whole population of England with bread, and producing it from soil which, for the most part, was only recently brought under cultivation.

Moreover, the Winnipeg Exhibition would serve to celebrate an event of which I have endeavoured to measure the significance. The one hundredth anniversary of the Selkirk settlement will witness the opening of through communication, via Hudson Bay, between Western Canada and Europe.