That man who, bearing precious seed,
In going forth doth mourn,
He doubtless bringing back his sheaves,
Rejoicing shall return.
It was Friday afternoon when John Black arrived at his destination on Red River. On Sabbath following he went with the people to the Episcopal Church of St. John's, now on the north side of the city of Winnipeg, in which the Kildonan people always claimed a share. Expecting their minister, the people had made a compromise with the Hudson's Bay Company as to property, and had been given a glebe lot called "La Grenouilliere," Frog Plain, two or three miles down the river, as a site for church and manse. Here they had already erected a manse for their new minister, and though not quite finished, it served as a meeting-place for the people in their worship for the first year or two of the mission.
During the week after Mr. Black's arrival, the news went quickly about the settlement, so that on Sabbath, September 28th, 1851, three hundred of the Selkirk settlers, who had a week before met in St. John's, assembled for service in the manse at Kildonan. Here the first sermon was preached by a Presbyterian minister in the wide region west of Lake Superior, where now the Presbyterian Church is much the largest body engaged in spreading the Gospel.
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.