hence for several years the little
stream on which they lived was called German Creek. The writings of the
time are full of rather severe criticism of these bello-agricultural
settlers. Of course no one expects an old soldier to be of much use to a
new country. He is usually a lazy settler. His habits of life are formed
in another mould from that of the farm. He is apt to despise the hoe and
the harrow and many even of the half-pay officers who came to hew out a
home in the Canadian forest, never learned to cut down a tree or to hold
a plough, though it may be admitted that they lived a useful life in
their sons and daughters, while the culture and decision of character of
the old officer or sturdy veteran were an asset of great value to the
locality in which he settled.

But the De Meurons were not only bachelors, but they came from the
peasantry of Austria and Italy, they had not fought for home and
country, and their life of mercenary soldiering had made them selfish
and deceitful. A writer of the time speaks, and evidently with much
prejudice, against the De Meurons. "They were," he says, "a medley of
almost all nations--Germans, French, Italians, Swiss and others. They
were bad farmers and withal very bad subjects; quarrelsome, slothful,
famous bottle companions and ready for any enterprise however lawless
and tyrannical." A few years later we find it stated that they made free
with the cattle of their neighbors, and the chronicler does not hesitate
to say that the herds of the De Meurons grew in number in exactly the
same ratio as those of the Scottish settlers decreased.

Some four years after the settlement of the De Meurons a sunburst came
upon them quite unexpectedly.

Lord Selkirk in the very last years of his life planned to bring a band
of Protestant settlers from Switzerland. A Colonel May, late of another
of the mercenary regiments, accepted the duty of going to Switzerland,
issuing a very attractive invitation to settlers, and succeeded in
shipping a considerable number of Swiss families to his so-called Red
River paradise.

This band of Colonists, consisting as they did of "watch and
clock-makers, pastry cooks and musicians," were quite unfit for the
rough work of the Selkirk Colony. In 1821 they were brought by way of
Hudson Bay, over the same rocky way as the earlier Colonists came. They
were utterly poverty stricken, though honest, and well-behaved. Their
only possession of value was a plenty of