Again four years after De Monts, when knowledge of climate and conditions had become known to the French pioneers, Samuel de Champlain wintered with his crew and a few settlers on the site of Old Quebec, on the St. Lawrence.  Discontent and dissension led to rebellion, and blood was shed in the execution of the plotters.  Hunger, suffering and the dreadful scurvy attacked the founder’s party of less than thirty, of whom only ten survived, and yet in July of 1908, the writer witnessed the grand Tercentenary celebration of Champlain’s settlement of Quebec, and with the presence of the Prince of Wales, General Roberts, the idol of the British Army, a joint fleet, of eleven English, French and American first-class Men-of War, with pageantry and music, the Epic of Champlain was sung at the foot of the great statue erected to his memory.

In the Twentieth year of the Seventeenth Century, a company of very sober folk, came to the shore of the Atlantic Ocean in a trifling little vessel the “Mayflower,” and brought about one hundred Immigrants from the British Isles to Plymouth Rock to build up a refuge and a home.  What a mighty song of patriotism will burst out when in a few years the United States hold their Tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers.

And so we see the first Selkirk Colonists landed on the Hudson Bay numbering at the outside seventy, a number not greatly different from the French and Pilgrim Fathers and called on to pass through similar trials in the severe winter of Hudson Bay.  Their experience has been less tragic than that of the other parties spoken of, but in it the same elements of discomfort, dissension and disease certainly present themselves.  However distressing their winter was, the dramatic conditions passed away, in a short time we shall be engaged in commemorating the patience and the heroism of these settlers, and in 1912 we shall sing a new song—­the epic of the Lord Selkirk Colonists.

But to be true we must look more closely at the trials, and sufferings of the untried, and somewhat turbulent band, on their way to the Red River.

York Factory as being the port of entry for the southern prairie country was a place of some importance.  As in the largest number of cases, other than a few huts for workmen, and a few Indian families, the Fort was the only centre of life in the whole region.  Two rivers, the Nelson and the Hayes, enter the Hudson Bay at this point—­the Nelson being the more northerly of the two.  Between the two rivers is really a delta or low swampy tongue of land.  On the Nelson’s north bank, the land near the Bay is low, while inland there is a rising height.  Five or six different sites of forts are pointed out at this point.  These have been built on during the history of the Company, which dates back to 1670.  In Lord Selkirk’s time the factory was more than half a mile from the Bay and lay between the two rivers.  Miles Macdonell states that it was