Were they going to return to the settlement? That was the question that troubled Mr. Perier and Walter. It led to many debates, as the two families sat around the fire after the evening meal. There was that hundred acres of land to be considered. A vast estate it seemed to the Swiss apothecary. The promise of that great tract of land had dazzled him when he first talked with Captain Mai in Geneva. Since his coming to the new country, however, the hundred acres of unbroken prairie had grown less alluring. He had learned that not one of the older colonists had been able to cultivate more than a few acres. He had no farming tools and he could obtain nothing but hoe and spade at the Colony store. There was not a plough to be bought for credit or cash. Breaking tough prairie sod with hoe and spade would be slow and painful toil for Walter and himself.
Because of the depredations of the locusts, seed grain was very scarce. The little Mr. Perier might buy would be high in price. From his first crop he would have to pay for seed as well as rent for the land. If he did not succeed in raising a crop, if the grasshoppers came again and destroyed it, he would be far in debt to the Colony, with no immediate hope of getting out. Already he had learned to his cost that prices were high at the Colony store, and that bills were sometimes rendered for things that had not been bought. In the end he might easily lose his land and have nothing to show for his labor. The prospect was not bright. Hopeful though he was by nature, he doubted his ability to make a success of farming under such discouraging conditions.
Walter was strongly against returning to Fort Douglas. It would be better to remain where they were, he argued, and trust to making a living, as the bois brulés did, by hunting, fishing, and planting a small garden. Perhaps the Company would let Mr. Perier have his hundred acres in the neighborhood of Pembina. Both Louis and Jean Lajimonière,—who was consulted,—shook their heads at the latter suggestion. Pembina was included in Lord Selkirk’s grant, but the real Colony was established at and near Fort Douglas. It was there that the land was allotted. They thought it unlikely that Mr. Perier could obtain his anywhere else. In any case there would be the same difficulty about tools, seed, supplies, and rent. And so the argument went on.
In the meantime spring had come in earnest. The ice was gone from the rivers. Birds were nesting in the woods, in the marshes, and on the prairie, according to their habit. As the rivers subsided from flood stage, fishing was resumed and yielded good results. The snow had melted from the prairie, though it still lingered in shaded places in the woods and along the river banks. The burned stretches showed new green. The sun was drying up the excess of moisture that had turned the prairie into ponds and spongy expanses and had converted the rambling paths and cart tracks of Pembina into sticky mud.
In May the old colonists and most of the new began to prepare for the return to Fort Douglas. Still Mr. Perier and Walter were undecided. At last they came to a decision suddenly and almost by accident. Through Lajimonière, Mr. Perier met a man named St. Antoine who had traveled more widely than most of the Pembina mixed bloods. Two years before, he had been far to the south and east with Laidlaw, the Colony superintendent of farming, when the latter had gone to Prairie du Chien on the Mississippi River for seed grain. St. Antoine had many tales to tell of the country along the Mississippi and the St. Peter rivers.
“That is a fine land,” he told Mr. Perier, “a land with hills and forests,—not flat and bare like this, though there is open country there too, good land for farming. At Prairie du Chien now, there the soil is rich and the crops grow well and ripen. It is not so cold as here. The spring comes earlier and the frost later.”
“Are there grasshoppers there?” Mr. Perier inquired.
“The kind that eat up everything? No, no. Those grasshoppers have never been seen in that country, the people say. And where the two rivers come together, where the Americans are building a fort, it is beautiful there, with high hills and bluffs like mountains, and woods and waterfalls.”
Mr. Perier’s brown eyes were wistful. St. Antoine’s description sounded good to a Swiss homesick for his mountains. “How does one go to that country?” he asked. “Can land be bought or rented?”
“Oh,” replied St. Antoine confidently, “you do not have to buy or rent it, that land. There is no Hudson Bay Company to say where you shall live and where you shall not, and to charge you so many bushels of wheat a year. You find a place that you like and you build a house and plant your crops and it is yours. That is the way folk do on the east side of the Rivière Mississippi. On the west side the American government does not want people to settle. That is Indian country. You may live there if you are a trader. But there is plenty of land on the east side, fine land too. Some time I am going back there to stay,—when I get old and want to settle down.”