ir own Highland
tongue. Volumes might be written of this, the colonists' first year in
their Promised Land: how the rude Plain Rangers conveyed them to the
buffalo hunt in their {387} creaking Red River carts,--carts made
entirely of wood, hub, tire, axle, and all, or else on loaned ponies; how
when storm came the white settlers were welcomed to the huts and skin
tents of the French half-breeds, given food and buffalo blankets; how
many a young Highlander came to grief in the wild stampede of his first
buffalo hunt; how when the hunters returned to Fort Gibraltar (Winnipeg),
on Red River, with store enough of pemmican for all the fur posts of the
Nor'westers, many a wild happy winter night was passed dancing mad Indian
jigs to the piping of the Highland piper and the crazy scraping of some
Frenchman's fiddle; how when morning came, in a gray dawn of smoking
frost mist, a long line of the colonists could be seen winding along the
ice of Red River home to Fort Douglas, Piper Green or Hector McLean
leading the way, still prancing and blowing a proud national air; how
when spring opened, ten-acre plots were assigned to each settler, close
to the fort at what were known as the Colony Buildings, and one
hundred-acre farms farther down the river. All this and more are part of
the story of the coming of the first colonists to the Great Northwest.
The very autumn that the first settlers had reached Red River in 1812
more colonists had arrived on the boats at {388} Hudson Bay. These did
not reach Red River till October of 1812 and the spring of 1813. By
1813, and on till 1817, more colonists yearly came. The story of each
year, with its plot and counterplot, I have told elsewhere. Spite of
Nor'westers' threats, spite of the fact there would be no market for the
colonists when they had succeeded in transforming wilderness prairie into
farms, Selkirk's mad dream of empire seemed to be succeeding.

[Illustration: FORT GARRY, RED RIVER SETTLEMENT]

The cardinal mistake in the contest between Hudson's Bay Company and
Nor'westers, between feudalism and democracy, was now committed by the
governor of the colony, Miles MacDonell. The year 1813 had proved poor
for the buffalo hunters. Large numbers of colonists were coming, and
provisions were likely to be scarce. Also, note it well, while the War
of 1812 did not cut off supplies through Hudson Bay to the English
Company, it did threaten access to the West by the Great Lakes, a