uld open up and
maintain communication and provide for local administration. The
committee thought that if Canada were unwilling to take over the Red
River country at an early date some temporary means of government might
be devised. Nothing, however, had come of the suggestion. Had it been
carried out, and a crown colony created, comprising the territory which
is now the province of Manitoba, the Dominion would have been saved a
disagreeable and humiliating episode, as well as political
complications which shook the young state to its foundations. This was
the trouble known to history as the Red River Rebellion. As an armed
insurrection it was only a flash in the pan. But it awoke passions in
Ontario and Quebec, and revived all those dissensions, racial and
religious, which the union had lulled into a semblance of harmony.

{160}

One of the first steps taken by parliament in the autumn of 1867 was
the adoption of an address to the Queen, moved by William McDougall,
asking that Rupert's Land and the North-West Territory be united with
Canada. Two members of the government, Cartier and McDougall, went to
England to negotiate for the extinction of the rights of the Hudson's
Bay Company. After months of delay, caused partly by the serious
illness of McDougall, it was agreed that the company should receive
L300,000, one-twentieth of the lands lying within the Fertile Belt, and
45,000 acres adjacent to its trading-posts. The Canadian parliament
formally accepted the bargain, and the deed of surrender provided that
the change of rule should come into force on December 1, 1869.

It was no mean ambition of William McDougall to be the first Canadian
administrator of this vast region with its illimitable prospects; a man
of talent, experience, and breadth of view, such as McDougall was,
might reasonably hope there to carve out a great career for himself and
do the state some service. He was appointed on September 26, 1869,
lieutenant-governor of the 'North-West Territory'--an indefinite term
meant {161} apparently to cover the whole western country--and left at
once for his post. He appears to have been quite in the dark
concerning the perilous nature of the mission. At any rate, he could
not foresee that, far from bringing him distinction, the task would
shortly end, as Sir John Macdonald described it, in an inglorious
fiasco.

At this time, it should be remembered, the actual conditions in the
West were but va