r officers and over one hundred privates who
had served in the late War with the United States to accompany him to
the Red river. He was to pay them, give them lands, and send them home
if they wished to return.

When he reached Sault Ste. Marie he heard that his colony had again been
destroyed.

War was raging between the Hudson Bay people and the Northwest Company,
in which Governor Semple, chief governor of the factories and
territories of the Hudson Bay Company was killed. Selkirk proceeded to
Fort William, on Lake Superior, and finally reached his settlement on
the Red river.

The colonists were compelled to pass the winter of 1817 in hunting in
Minnesota, and had a hard time of it, but in the spring they once more
found their way home, and planted crops, but they were destroyed by
grasshoppers, which remained during the next year and ate up every
growing thing, rendering it necessary that the colonists should again
resort to the buffalo for subsistence.

During the winter of 1819-20 a deputation of these Scotchmen came all
the way to Prairie du Chien on snowshoes for seed wheat, a distance of a
thousand miles, and on the fifteenth day of April, 1820, left for the
colony in three Mackinaw boats, carrying three hundred bushels of wheat,
one hundred bushels of oats, and thirty bushels of peas. Being stopped
by ice in Lake Pepin, they planted a May pole and celebrated May day on
the ice. They reached home by way of the Minnesota river, with a short
portage to Lake Traverse, the boats being moved on rollers, and thence
down the Red River to Pembina, where they arrived in safety on the third
day of June. This trip cost Lord Selkirk about six thousand dollars.

Nothing daunted by the terrible sufferings of his colonists, and the
immense expense attendant upon his enterprise, in 1820 he engaged Capt.
R. May, who was a citizen of Berne, in Switzerland, but in the British
service, to visit Switzerland and get recruits for his colony. The
captain made the most exaggerated representations of the advantages to
be gained by emigrating to the colony, and induced many Swiss to leave
their happy and peaceful homes to try their fortunes in the distant,
dangerous and inhospitable regions of Lake Winnipeg. They knew nothing
of the hardships in store for them, and were the least adapted to
encounter them of any people in the world, as they were mechanics, whose
business had been the delicate work of making watches and clocks. The