procure from England, by means of
the Hudson's Bay Fur Company's ships, which sail once a year from
Gravesend, laden with supplies for the trade carried on with the
Indians. And the bales containing these articles are conveyed in boats
up the rivers, carried past the waterfalls and rapids overland on the
shoulders of stalwart voyageurs, and finally landed at Red River, after
a rough trip of many weeks' duration. The colony was founded in 1811,
by the Earl of Selkirk, previously to which it had been a trading-post
of the Fur Company. At the time of which we write, it contained about
five thousand souls, and extended upwards of fifty miles along the Red
and Assiniboine Rivers, which streams supplied the settlers with a
variety of excellent fish. The banks were clothed with fine trees; and
immediately behind the settlement lay the great prairies, which extend
in undulating waves--almost entirely devoid of shrub or tree--to the
base of the Rocky Mountains.

Although far removed from the civilised world, and containing within its
precincts much that is savage and very little that is refined, Red River
is quite a populous paradise as compared with the desolate, solitary
establishments of the Hudson's Bay Fur Company. These lonely dwellings
of the trader are scattered far and wide over the whole continent--
north, south, east, and west. Their population generally amounts to
eight or ten men--seldom to thirty. They are planted in the thick of an
uninhabited desert--their next neighbours being from two to five hundred
miles off; their occasional visitors, bands of wandering Indians; and
the sole object of their existence being to trade the furry hides of
foxes, martens, beavers, badgers, bears, buffaloes, and wolves. It will
not, then, be deemed a matter of wonder that the gentlemen who have
charge of these establishments, and who, perchance, may have spent ten
or twenty years in them, should look upon the colony of Red River as a
species of Elysium--a sort of haven of rest, in which they may lay their
weary heads, and spend the remainder of their days in peaceful felicity,
free from the cares of a residence among wild beasts and wild men. Many
of the retiring traders prefer casting their lot in Canada; but not a
few of them _smoke_ out the remainder of their existence in this
colony--especially those who, having left home as boys fifty or sixty
years before, cannot reasonably expect to find the friends of their
childho