three years no less than two hundred
and four houses were built. The Settlement, now freed from dissension,
had not gone through its fiery ordeal in vain. The news of a home for
themselves and their dusky wives and half-breed children, had spread
over the whole of Rupert's Land, and now began, what Lieutenant-Governor
Archibald, the first Governor of Manitoba, afterward spoke of as the
floating down the rivers with their wives and children of the Hudson's
Bay Company officers and men to the paradise of Red River. The great
majority of the employees of the Company were Orkneymen. They gradually
took up the most of the Red River lots surveyed, lying below Kildonan,
and forming the Parishes of St. Paul's and St. Andrew's on Red River,
down to St. Peter's Indian Reserve and St. James' and Headingly up the
Assiniboine. The French half-breeds who removed from Pembina and
different parts of Rupert's Land, made the great French parishes of St.
Boniface, St. Norbert, St. Vital on the Red River, with St. Charles, St.
Francois Xavier and Baie St. Paul on the Assiniboine. And now of
Scottish Settlers with French and English half-breeds, the population of
Red River Settlement had reached the number of 1,500 souls.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE JOLLY GOVERNOR.

Great crises in the world's history generally produce the men who solve
them. Cromwell, Washington, Garibaldi--each of them was the movement
itself. A wider philosophy may see that the age or the Community evolves
the man, but as Carlyle shows, it is the man who reacts upon the
community, becomes the embodiment of its ideal, and is the mouthpiece
and the right hand of the age which produces him.

That Andrew Colville, a brother-in-law of Lord Selkirk, should select a
young clerk in London and send him out to Athabasca to see the great
fur-region of the Mackenzie River District, is not a wonderful thing,
but that after one year of active service this young man should be
chosen to guide the destinies of the great united fur company, made up
of the Hudson's Bay and Nor'-Wester Companies is a wonder.

This was the case with George Simpson, a Scottish youth, who was the
illegitimate son of the maternal uncle of Thomas Simpson, the famous
Arctic explorer, who is known as having followed out a portion of the
coast line of the Arctic Sea.

Anyone can see that from the proverbial energy that is developed in
those of inferior birth, there was here one of Nature's commanding
spirits