That brave old Englishman, Thomas More—afterwards, unhappily for his head—Lord High Chancellor of England—wrote out, in fair Latin,—in his chambers in the City of London, over three centuries ago—his idea of an Utopia. This, modest as are its requirements, has yet found no practical illustration, even among the many seats of the great colonizing race of mankind.
The primitive history of all the colonies that faced the Atlantic—when the new-found continent first felt the abiding foot of the stranger—from Oglethorpe to Acadia, reveals, alas! no Utopia. It remained for a later time,—the earlier half of the present century, amid some severity of climate, and under conditions without precedent, and incapable of repetition,—to evolve a community in the heart of the continent, shut away from intercourse with civilized mankind—that slowly crystalized into a form beyond the ideal of the dreamers—a community, in the past, known but slightly to the outer world as the Red River Settlement, which is but the bygone name for the one Utopia of Britain—the clear-cut impress of an exceptional people living under conditions of excellence unthought of by themselves until they had passed away.
THE UTOPIAN COLONY.
A people, whose name in the vast domain, was in days by gone, sought out and coveted by all. Unknown races had rested here and gone away, leaving only their careful graves behind them. The "Mandans"—the brave, the fair, the beautiful, and the "Cheyennes," pressed by the "Nay-he-owuk," and the "Assin-a-pau-tuk," had quitted their earthen forts on the banks of the streams and urged their way to the broader tide of the Missouri. More fatal to the conquerors came afterward, the white man, "Nemesis" of all Indian life, spying with the instinct of his race, a spot of abounding fertility, where the great water-reaches stretched from the mountains to the sea, and southward touched almost the beginning of the great River of the Gulf.
Quick changing his errant camp for barter into a stronghold for the trade, making the "Niste-y-ak" of the "Crees" his settled home, the white man's grasp of the fair domain but grew with years. From the seas of the far north came with the men, fair-haired, blue-eyed women and children. The glamour of the spot, the teeming soil, the great and lesser game, that swam past,—or wandered by their doors—soon drew to this Mecca of the Plains and Waters—the roving, scattered children of the trade—Bourgeois and voyageur alike heading their lithe and dusky broods. Here touched and fused all habitudes of life, the blended races, knit by ties conserving every divergence of pursuit, all forms of faith and thought, free from assail or taint begotten of contact with aught other than themselves. A people whose unchecked primal freedom was afterward strengthened by the light hand of laws that conserved what they most desired; whose personal relations with their rulers were of such primitive character as to make the Government in every sense paternal; the petty tax on imports attending its administration one practically unfelt!
A people whose land was dotted with schools and churches, to whose maintenance their contributions were so slight as to be unworthy of mention. The three separate religious denominations, holding widely different tenets—elsewhere the cause of bitter sectarian feeling,—was with them so unthought of as to give where all topics were eagerly sought—no room for even fireside discussion. Side by side, "upon the voyage,"—as they termed their lake or inland trips—the Catholic and the Protestant knelt and offered up their devotions—following the ways of their fathers,—no more to be made a subject of dispute than a difference in color or height.
The cursings and obscenities that taint the air and brutalize life elsewhere, were in this quaint old settlement unknown. Sweet thought, pure speech, went hand in hand, clad in nervous, pithy old English, or a "patois" of the French, mellowed and enlarged by their constant use of the liquid Indian tongues, flowing like soft-sounding waters about them, their daily talk came ever welcome to the ear.
AN ARCADIA.
Where locks for doors were unknown, or, known, unused, where a man's word, even in the transfer of land, was held as his bond—honesty became a necessity. Lawyers were none. Law was held to be a danger. Still the importance attached by simple minds to an appearance in public, the amusing belief cherished by some, that, if permitted to plead his own case, exert his unsuspected powers, there could be but one result, brought some honest souls to the Red River forum, with matter of much moment, "the like never heard before." None can read the quaint, minutely-detailed record of these "causes celébres" that shook the little households as with a great wind, without a smile, or resist the conviction that no scheme of an English Utopia can safely be pronounced perfect without some such modest tribunal to afford vent for that ever-germinating desire for battle inherent in the race.
