before, had been in the service of his Company on Red River and whose Journal had no doubt fallen into the hands of his brother Miles.  He had written:  “From the Forks of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers the plains are quite near the banks, and so extensive that a man may travel to the Rocky Mountains without passing a wood, a mile long.  The soil on the Red River and the Assiniboine is generally a good soil, susceptible of culture, and capable of bearing rich crops.”

He goes on to state, “that the buffalo comes to the fords of the Assinboil, besides in these rivers are plenty of sturgeon, catfish, goldeyes, pike and whitefish—­the latter so common that men have been seen to catch thirty or forty a piece while they smoked their pipes.”  To reach this land of plenty, which his brother knew so well, Miles Macdonell became the leader of Lord Selkirk’s Colonists.  He arrived in Great Britain in the year for the starting of the Colony, and immediately as being a Roman Catholic in religion went to the West of Ireland to recommend the Emigration scheme, obtain subscriptions of stock, and to engage workmen as Colonists.  Glasgow was then, as now, the centre of Scottish industry, and it is to Glasgow that the penniless Highlanders flock in large numbers for work and residence.  Here was a suitable field for the Emigration Agent, and accordingly one of their countrymen, Captain Roderick McDonald, was sent thither.  The way to Canada was long, the country unknown, and it required all his persuasion and the power of the Gaelic tongue—­an open Sesame to an Highlander’s heart—­to persuade many to join the Colonists’ bank.  It required more.  The Highlander is a bargainer, as the Tourist in the Scottish Highlands knows to this day.  Captain Roderick McDonald was compelled to promise larger wages to clerks and laborers to induce them to join.  He secured less than half an hundred men at Stornoway—­the trysting place—­and the promises he had made of higher wages were a bone of contention through the whole voyage.

Perhaps the most effective agent obtained by Lord Selkirk was a returned trader of the Montreal merchants named Colin Robertson.  He had seen the whole western fur country, and the fact that he had a grievance made him very willing to join Lord Selkirk in his enterprise.

One of the Nor’-Westers in Saskatchewan a few years before the beginning of Lord Selkirk’s Colony, was “Bras Croche,” or crooked-arm McDonald.  He was of gentle Scottish birth, but his own acquaintances declared that he was of a “quarrelsome and pugnacious disposition.”  In his district Colin Robertson was a “Bourgeois” in charge of a station.  A quarrel between the two men resulted in Colin Robertson losing his position, and as we shall see he became one of the most active and serviceable men in the history of the Colony.  Colin Robertson went among his countrymen in the Island of Lewis and elsewhere.