Again we answer:  Three years from now will be the hundredth year since the landing on the banks of Red River of the first band of Selkirk Colonists.  It was as we have seen a struggle of an extraordinarily bitter type.  To us it seems that no other American Colony ever had such a continuous distressing and terrific struggle for existence as had these Scottish Settlers, but we say it was worth while, judging by the loss to Canada of the northern portions of the tier of states of Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana and Washington, which a line from Fond du Lac (Duluth) to the mouth of the Columbia would have given to us, and which should have been ours.  We say that had it not been for the Selkirk Colonists we would have stood to lose our Canadian West.  It was a settlement nearly a hundred years ago of families of men and women, and children that gave us the firm claim to what is now the three great provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.  Was it not worth while?  Was it not worth ten, yes, worth a hundred times more suffering and discouragement than even the first settlers of Red River endured to preserve our British connection which the Hudson’s Bay Company, loyal as it was, with its Union Jack floating on every fort, could not have preserved to us any more than it did in Oregon and Washington.  It was the Red River Settlement that held it for us.

We are beginning to see to-day that Canada could not have become a great and powerful sister nation in the Empire had the West not been saved to her.  The line of possible settlement has been moving steadily northward in Canada since the days when the French King showed his contempt for it by calling it “a few arpents of snow.”  The St. Lawrence route was regarded as a doubtful line for steamships, Rupert’s Land was called a Siberia, but all this is changing with our Transcontinental and Hudson’s Bay railways in prospect.  In territory, resources, and influence the opening up of the West is making Canada complete.  And, if so, we owe it to Lord Selkirk and to Selkirk Settlers, who stood true to their flag and nationality.  Very willingly will we observe the Selkirk Centennial in 1912.  “Many a time and oft” it looked in their case to be one long, continued and alarming drama, but on the 30th day of August, the day of their landing on the banks of the Red River, shall we recite the epic of Lord Selkirk’s Colonists, and it will be of the temper of Browning’s couplet: 

     God’s in His Heaven,
     All’s right with the world.

* * * * *

APPENDIX

The author notes the fact that the agents sent out by Lord Selkirk engaged (1) Labourers for the Company, (2) Settlers for the Red River Settlement.  On this account in the lists given in the archives and other official documents, the labourers were often sent to the Posts of the Company, and after serving several years often became settlers.  (List given in Manitoba Historical Society Transactions, 33.)