9}
sinking ships. He gathers up his troops and retreats in a scare of
haste,--such a fright of unseemly, unsoldierly haste that nearly one
thousand of his soldiers desert in sheer disgust. Down at Nova Scotia
are raid and counter-raid too. The British and American fleets wage
fierce war that is not part of Canada's story; but in the contest the
public buildings of Washington are burned in retaliation for the
burning of Newark; and down at New Orleans the English suffer a
crushing defeat.

Meanwhile the peace commissioners have been at work; and the war that
ought never to have taken place, that settled not one jot of the
dispute which caused it, was closed by the Treaty of Ghent, Christmas
Eve of 1814. All captured forts, all plunder, all prisoners, are to be
restored. Michilimackinac and Fort Niagara and Astoria on the Columbia
go back to the United States; but of "impressment" and "right of
search" and "embargo of neutrals" not a word. The waste of life and
happiness accomplished not a feather's weight unless it were the lesson
of the criminal folly of a war between nations akin in aim and speech
and blood.

{380}

CHAPTER XV

FROM 1812 TO 1846

Selkirk's colony--Troubles on passage--Winter on the bay--First winter on
Red River--First conflict--Nor'westers rally to defense--The storm
gathers--The Nor'westers victorious--Selkirk to the rescue--Banditti
warfare in Athabasca--In Athabasca--Robertson escapes--Frobisher's
death--The Pacific empire--Secede from Oregon

When Sir Alexander MacKenzie, the discoverer, went home to retire on an
estate in Scotland, he found the young nobleman and philanthropist, Lord
Selkirk, keenly interested in accounts of vast, new, unpeopled lands,
which lay beyond the Great Lakes. A change in the system of farming,
which dispossessed small farmers to turn the tenantries into sheep runs,
had caused terrible poverty in Scotland at this period. Here in Scotland
were people starving for want of land. There in America were lands idle
for lack of people. Selkirk had already sent out some colonists to the
Lake St. Clair region of Ontario and to Prince Edward Island, but what he
heard from MacKenzie turned his attention to the new empire of the
prairie. Then in Montreal, where he had been dined and wined by the
Northwest Company's "Beaver Club," he had heard still more of this vast
new land, of its wealth of furs, of its untimbered fields, where man had
but to put in the