rong of merchant
adventurers, he would have foreseen his victory. In his first tilt
with the Nor'westers he was to be successful. The opposition was
strong, but it wore down before the onslaught of his friends. Then
came the show of hands. There was no uncertainty about the vote:
two-thirds of the court had pledged themselves in favour of Lord
Selkirk's proposal.

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By the terms of the grant which the general court made to Selkirk, he
was to receive 116,000 square miles of virgin soil in the locality
which he had selected. The boundaries of this immense area were
carefully fixed. Roughly speaking, it extended from Big Island, in
Lake Winnipeg, to the parting of the Red River from the head-waters of
the Mississippi in the south, and from beyond the forks of the Red and
Assiniboine rivers in the west to the shores of the Lake of the Woods,
and at one point almost to Lake Superior, in the east. If a map is
consulted, it will be seen that one-half of the grant lay in what is
now the province of Manitoba, the other half in the present states of
Minnesota and North Dakota.[1]

A great variety of opinions were expressed in London upon the subject
of this grant. Some wiseacres said that the earl's proposal was as
extravagant as it was visionary. One of Selkirk's acquaintances met
him strolling along Pall Mall, and brought him up short on the street
with the query: 'If you are bent {34} on doing something futile, why do
you not sow tares at home in order to reap wheat, or plough the desert
of Sahara, which is nearer?'

The extensive tract which the Hudson's Bay Company had bestowed upon
Lord Selkirk for the nominal sum of ten shillings had made him the
greatest individual land-owner in Christendom. His new possession was
quite as large as the province of Egypt in the days of Caesar Augustus.
But in some other respects Lord Selkirk's heritage was much greater.
The province of Egypt, the granary of Rome, was fertile only along the
banks of the Nile. More than three-fourths of Lord Selkirk's domain,
on the other hand, was highly fertile soil.

[1] It will be understood that the boundary-line between British and
American territory in the North-West was not yet established. What
afterwards became United States soil was at this time claimed by the
Hudson's Bay Company under its charter.

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CHAPTER IV

STORNOWAY--AND BEYOND

On June 13, 1811, the deed was given to Selkirk of his wide possessio