he had been attending school, for the North-West.  He was stationed at Rainy Lake, but did not care for his occupation.  He returned, therefore, to civilization and entered as a novice in the community of the Oblat Fathers, where he remained for two years.  There was a strong yearning for the free, wild life of the boundless prairies in this man, and Red River, with its herds of roaming buffalo, its myriads of duck, and geese and prairie hens, began to beckon him home again.  He followed his impulse and departed; joining the Metis hunters in their great biennial campaigns against the herds, over the rolling prairie.  Many a buffalo fell upon the plain with Louis Riel’s arrow quivering in his flank; many a feast was held around the giant pot at which no hunter received honours so marked as stolid male, and olive-skinned, bright-eyed, supple female, accorded him.  Surfeited for the time of the luxury of the limitless plain, Riel took rest; and then a girl with the lustrous eyes of Normandy began to smile upon him, and to besiege his heart with all her mysterious force of coquetry.  He was not proof; and the hunter soon lay entangled in the meshes of the brown girl of the plains.  In the autumn of 1843 he married her.  Her name was Julie de Lagimodiere, a daughter of Jean Baptiste de Lagimodiere.

Louis pere was now engaged as a carder of wool; and having much ability in contrivance he constructed a little model of a carding mill which, with much enthusiasm, he exhibited to some officers of the Hudson Bay Company.  But the Company, though having a great body, possessed no soul, and the disappointed inventor returned to his waiting wife with sorrow in his eyes.  He next betook himself to the cultivation of a farm upon the banks of the little Seine; and his good, patient wife, when the autumn came, toiled with him all day, with her sickle among the sheaves.

Tilling the soil proved too laborious, and he determined to erect a grist mill; but the stream that ran through the clayey channel of the Seine petite was too feeble to turn the ponderous wheels.  So he was obliged to move twelve miles to the east, where flowed another small stream bearing the aesthetic name “Grease River.”  This was not large enough either for his purposes, so with stupendous enterprise he cut a canal nine miles long, and through it decoyed the waters of the little Seine into the arms of the “Greasy” paramour.  At this mill was ground the grain that grew for many a mile around; and in a little while Louis Riel became known as the most enterprising and important settler in Red River.  But he was not through all his career a man of peace.  The most deadly feud had grown up through many long years between the Hudson Bay Company and the Metis settled upon their territory; and it is only bald justice to say that the, reprisals of the half-breeds, the revolts, the hatred of everything in official shape, were not altogether undeserved.  Louis Riel was at the head of many a jarring discord.  How such an unfortunate condition grew we shall see later on, and we may also be able to determine if there are any shoulders upon which we can lay blame for the murder and misery that since have blighted one of the fairest portions of Canada.