that "there are no buildings round the fort,
except three or four log-houses on the banks of the river, in
which some subaltern agents of the Southwest Company live among the
frogs."[500] This position was also upon low land, and on April 21,
1826, when the ice began to move, Faribault's houses were carried away,
while he and his family escaped in canoes.[501] After this second
disaster Faribault's establishment was erected at Mendota, where Alexis
Bailly had already located.[502] The growth of this village was very
slow. But gradually old fur traders settled about it with their
families; voyageurs, when not employed on the rivers, lounged about the
trading house; and the agents and clerks of the American Fur Company had
their permanent homes in the rude log cabins which were clustered about.

In the meantime a new element had been added to the surroundings of the
fort. It was already three-quarters of a century since the traders had
erected the first trading post upon the Red River of the North. The
early French voyageurs had left a race of half-breeds, popularly called
_bois-brules_, who were the vassals of the two great companies. When
their strength had been spent in the labors of hunting and trapping,
they retired to the vicinity of some post--the largest of these
settlements being Fort Garry, the germ of the modern city of Winnipeg,
which as early as 1823 boasted of a population of about six
hundred.[503]

But not all of these half-breeds were traders. Thomas Douglas, the fifth
Lord Selkirk had secured from the Hudson's Bay Company the grant of an
immense tract of land on the Red River, and in 1811 he began the
colonization of the region with poor immigrants from Scotland and
Ireland. But the knowledge of the internal troubles of the company put
an end to the immigration from these two countries, and Lord Selkirk
turned to Switzerland for new recruits. In 1821 a ship full of Swiss
sailed for Fort York on Hudson's Bay, and late in the fall the party
reached the Red River after a toilsome journey up the Nelson River and
across Lake Winnipeg. Being artisans and city-dwellers they were unable
to endure the rough agricultural labors in the bleak north. Cold,
floods, grasshoppers, and uncongenial neighbors rendered the location
unpleasant.[504]

Travellers from the south brought news of a better locality, and towards
this place there soon began a movement which, while not great in any one
year, was long continued. I