guely known in Canada. Efforts towards communication
and exploration, it is true, had begun as early as 1857, when Simon
Dawson made surveys for a road from Fort William and Professor Henry
Youle Hind undertook his famous journey to the plains for scientific
and general observation. A number of adventurous Canadians had gone
out to settle on the plains. There was a newspaper at Fort Garry--the
_Nor'Wester_--the pioneer newspaper of the country--which had been
started by Mr William Buckingham and a colleague in 1859. But even in
official circles the community to which Governor McDougall went to
introduce authority was very imperfectly understood.

The Red River Settlement in 1869 contained about twelve thousand
inhabitants. The English-speaking portion of the population {162}
consisted of heterogeneous groups without unity among them for any
public purpose. Some were descendants or survivors of Lord Selkirk's
settlers who had come out half a century before; others were servants
of the Hudson's Bay Company, both retired and active; a third group
were the Canadians; while a fourth was made up of a small though noisy
body of Americans. Outnumbering the English, and united under leaders
of their own race, the French and French half-breeds dwelt chiefly on
the east bank of the Red River, south of Fort Garry. These
half-breeds, or Metis, were a hardy race, who subsisted by hunting
rather than by farming, and who were trained to the use of arms. They
regarded with suspicion the threatened introduction of new political
institutions, and were quite content under the paternal sway of the
Hudson's Bay Company and under the leadership of their spiritual
advisers, Bishop Tache and the priests of the Metis parishes.

The Canadian population numbered about three hundred, with perhaps a
hundred adults, and they, conscious that they represented the coming
regime, were not disposed to conciliate either the company or the
native settlers. It was mooted among the half-breeds that they {163}
were to be swamped by the incoming Canadians, and much resentment was
aroused among them against the assumption of authority by the Dominion
government. To make matters worse, a Canadian surveying party, led by
Colonel J. Stoughton Dennis, had begun in the summer of 1869 to make
surveys in the Province. This created alarm among the half-breed
settlers, whose titles did not rest in any secure legal authority, and
who were fearful that they we