The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists / The Pioneers of Manitoba

by George Bryce

It was by no means the first experiment of facing in an unprepared way the rigors of a North American winter.

In the fourth year of the Seventeenth Century De Monts, a French Colonizer, had a band of his countrymen on Douchet's Island, in the Ste. Croix River, on the borders of New Brunswick. Though fairly well provided in some ways yet the winter proved so trying that out of the number of less than eighty, nearly one-half died. The winter was so long, weary and deadly, that in the spring the survivors of the Colony were moved to Port Royal in Acadia and the Ste. Croix was given up. This was surely dramatic; this was tragic indeed. But in the fourth year of this Century, the Tercentenary of this event was celebrated in Annapolis and St. John, as the writer himself beheld, and the shouts and applause of gathered thousands made a great and patriotic epic.

Again four years after De Monts, when knowledge of climate and conditions had become known to the French pioneers, Samuel de Champlain wintered with his crew and a few settlers on the site of Old Quebec, on the St. Lawrence. Discontent and dissension led to rebellion, and blood was shed in the execution of the plotters. Hunger, suffering and the dreadful scurvy attacked the founder's party of less than thirty, of whom only ten survived, and yet in July of 1908, the writer witnessed the grand Tercentenary celebration of Champlain's settlement of Quebec, and with the presence of the Prince of Wales, General Roberts, the idol of the British Army, a joint fleet, of eleven English, French and American first-class Men-of War, with pageantry and music, the Epic of Champlain was sung at the foot of the great statue erected to his memory.

In the Twentieth year of the Seventeenth Century, a company of very sober folk, came to the shore of the Atlantic Ocean in a trifling little vessel the "Mayflower," and brought about one hundred Immigrants from the British Isles to Plymouth Rock to build up a refuge and a home. What a mighty song of patriotism will burst out when in a few years the United States hold their Tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers.

And so we see the first Selkirk Colonists landed on the Hudson Bay numbering at the outside seventy, a number not greatly different from the French and Pilgrim Fathers and called on to pass through similar trials in the severe winter of Hudson Bay. Their experience has been less tragic than that of the other parties spoken of, but in it the same elements of discomfort, dissension and disease certainly present themselves. However distressing their winter was, the dramatic conditions passed away, in a short time we shall be engaged in commemorating the patience and the heroism of these settlers, and in 1912 we shall sing a new song—the epic of the Lord Selkirk Colonists.

But to be true we must look more closely at the trials, and sufferings of the untried, and somewhat turbulent band, on their way to the Red River.

York Factory as being the port of entry for the southern prairie country was a place of some importance. As in the largest number of cases, other than a few huts for workmen, and a few Indian families, the Fort was the only centre of life in the whole region. Two rivers, the Nelson and the Hayes, enter the Hudson Bay at this point—the Nelson being the more northerly of the two. Between the two rivers is really a delta or low swampy tongue of land. On the Nelson's north bank, the land near the Bay is low, while inland there is a rising height. Five or six different sites of forts are pointed out at this point. These have been built on during the history of the Company, which dates back to 1670. In Lord Selkirk's time the factory was more than half a mile from the Bay and lay between the two rivers. Miles Macdonell states that it was on "low, miry ground without a ditch." The stagnant water by which the post was surrounded would be productive of much ill-health, were there a longer summer. The buildings of the Factory were also badly planned, and badly constructed, so that the Fort was unsuitable for quartering the Colonists. Besides this, Messrs. Cook and Auld, the former Governor of York Factory, and the latter chief officer of Fort Churchill, having the old Hudson's Bay Company's spirit of dislike of Colonists, decided that the new settlers, being an innovation and an evil, should have separate quarters built for them at a distance from the Fort.

Poor Colonists! Miles Macdonell is wearied with them in their complaining spirit, berates them for indolence, and finds fault with their awkwardness as workmen. To Macdonell, who was a Canadian, accustomed as a soldier and frontiersman to dealing with canoes, boats, and every means of land transport, the sturdy, steady going Orkneyman was slow and clumsy.

The inexperienced new settler thus gets rather brusque treatment from the Colonial, more a good deal than he deserves.

Accordingly it was decided to erect log dwellings for the workmen and the settlers on the higher ground north of the Nelson River. Several miles distant from the Factory itself, Spruce trees of considerable size grew along the river, and so all hands were put to work to have huts or shanties erected to protect the Colonists from the severe cold of winter, which would soon be upon them, although on October 5th Miles Macdonell wrote home to Lord Selkirk: "The weather has been mild and pleasant for some days past."