The Buffalo Runners: A Tale of the Red River Plains

by R. M. Ballantyne

“Well, if you will loan him to me in the spring, I will pay for him when I come back. It takes all I have to fit me out to start, you see.”

Dechamp did not quite see his way to that—but there was plenty of time to think over it!

“Have you heard,” said Dechamp, willing to change the subject, “there is some talk that Perrin has been killed? George McDermid was out, like many others, huntin’ about for the starvin’ people, an’ he came across the wives of Blanc and Pierre—poor things! they’re widows now, for Blanc and Pierre are both dead. Well, the women had well-nigh given in. I had dropped down, they were so tired, and were crawlin’ on their hands and knees when McDermid found them. I didn’t hear all the outs and ins of it, but there is no doubt that poor Perrin has been murdered, for he was shot right through the breast.”

“Perhaps he shot hisself,” suggested La Certe.

“No—that could not be, for the women have brought his coat, which shows that the ball went in at the breast and came straight out at the back. If he had shot himself he must have pulled the trigger with his toe, an’ then the ball would have slanted up from his breast to somewhere about his shoulders.”

“It was a Saulteaux, may be,” said Slowfoot, who had been listening with all the eagerness of a gossip.

“There were no marks of Redskins’ snow-shoes about,” returned Dechamp, “an’ the tracks were too confused to make them out. A knife was found, but there were no marks about it to tell who owned it—only it was a settler’s knife, but there are lots of them about, an’ many have changed hands since the settlers came.”

At the time we write of, the colony of Red River of the north was in a very unhappy and disorganised condition. There were laws indeed, but there was no authority or force sufficiently strong to apply the laws, and discord reigned because of the two great fur companies—the Hudson’s Bay, and the Nor’-West—which opposed each other with extreme bitterness, carrying fire-water, dissension, and disaster all over the wilderness of Rupert’s Land. Happily the two companies coalesced in the year 1821, and from that date, onward, comparative peace has reigned under the mild sway of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

But at the period which we describe the coalition had not taken place, and many of the functionaries of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Red River, from the Governor downward, seem to have been entirely demoralised, if we are to believe the reports of contemporary historians.

Some time previous to this, the Earl of Selkirk—chiefly from philanthropic views, it is said—resolved to send a colony to Red River. At different times bands of Scotch, Swiss, Danes, and others, made their appearance in the Settlement. They had been sent out by the agents of the Earl, but there was a great deal of mismanagement and misunderstanding, both as to the motives and intentions of the Earl. The result was that the half-breeds of Red River—influenced, it is said, by the Nor’-West Company—received the newcomers with suspicion and ill-will. The Indians followed the lead of the half-breeds, to whom they were allied. Not only was every sort of obstruction thrown in the way of the unfortunate immigrants, but more than once during those first years they were driven from the colony, and their homesteads were burned to the ground.