et his wrongs
prey upon his spirit. On March 19, 1819, he addressed a letter to Lord
Liverpool, asking that the Privy Council should intervene in order to
correct the erroneous findings of the Canadian courts. Sir James
Montgomery, Selkirk's brother-in-law, moved in the House of Commons, on
June 24, that all official correspondence touching Selkirk's affairs
should be produced. The result was the publication of a large
blue-book. An effort was made to induce Sir Walter Scott to use his
literary talents on his friend's behalf. But at the time Scott was
prostrate with illness and unable to help the friend of his youth.

Meanwhile, Lord Selkirk's attachment for his colony on the Red River
had not undergone any change. One of the last acts of his life was to
seek settlers in Switzerland, and a considerable number of Swiss
families were persuaded to migrate to Assiniboia. But the heads of
these families were not fitted for pioneer life on the prairie. For
the most part they were poor musicians, pastry-cooks, {137}
clock-makers, and the like, who knew nothing of husbandry. Their chief
contribution to the colony was a number of buxom, red-cheeked
daughters, whose arrival in 1821 created a joyful commotion among the
military bachelors at the settlement. The fair newcomers were quickly
wooed and won by the men who had served in Napoleon's wars, and
numerous marriages followed.

Selkirk's continued ill-health caused him to seek the temperate climate
of the south of France, and there he died on April 8, 1820, at Pau, in
the foothills of the Pyrenees. His body was taken to Orthez, a small
town some twenty-five miles away, and buried there in the Protestant
cemetery. The length of two countries separates Lord Selkirk's place
of burial from his place of birth. He has a monument in Scotland and a
monument in France, but his most enduring monument is the great
Canadian West of which he was the true founder. His only son, Dunbar
James Douglas, inherited the title, and when he died in 1885 the line
of Selkirk became extinct. Long before this the Selkirk family had
broken the tie with the Canadian West. In 1836 their rights in the
country of Assiniboia, in so far as it lay in British territory, {138}
were purchased by the Hudson's Bay Company for the sum of L84,000.

The character of the fifth Earl of Selkirk has been alike lauded and
vilified. Shortly after his death the _Gentleman's Magazine_ commended
his benefactio