company-servant chanced to be a countryman of their own.  They were without money, they were dependent upon Lord Selkirk’s agents for shelter and rations.  The land which they hoped to possess was there awaiting them, but they had no means for purchasing implements, nor were the farming requisites to be found in the country.  Horses there were, but there were only two or three individual cattle within five hundred miles of them.

If they had sung on their sorrowful leaving, “Lochaber no more,” the words were now turned by their depressed Highland natures into a wail, and they sang in the words of their old Psalms of “Rouse’s” version: 

    “By Babel’s streams we sat and wept,
     When Zion we thought on.”

They thought of their crofts and clachans, where if the land was stingy, the gift of the sea was at hand to supply abundant food.

But this was no time for sighs or regrets.

The Hudson’s Bay traders from Brandon House were waiting for expected goods, and Messrs. Hillier and Heney, who were the Hudson’s Bay Company officers for the East Winnipeg District, had arduous duties ahead of them.  But though the orders to prepare for the Colonists had been sent on in good time, there was not a single bag of pemmican or any other article of provision awaiting the hapless settlers.  The few French people who were freemen, lived in what is now the St. Boniface side of the river, were only living from hand to mouth, and the Company’s people were little better provided.  The river was the only resource, and from the scarceness of hooks the supply of fish obtainable was rather scanty.

As the Colonists and their leader were strangers they desired leisure to select a suitable location for their buildings.  For the time being their camp was at the Forks, on the east side of the river, a little north of the mouth of the Assiniboine.

The Governor, Miles Macdonell, on the 4th of September, summoned three of the North-West Company gentlemen, the free Canadians beside whom they were encamped, and a number of the Indians to a spectacle similar to that enacted by St. Lawson, at Sault Ste. Marie, nearly a hundred and fifty years before.  The Nor’-Westers had not permitted their employees to cross the river.  Facing, as he did, Fort Gibraltar, across the river, the Governor directed the patent of Lord Selkirk to his vast concession to be read, “delivering and seizin were formally taken,” and Mr. Heney translated some part of the Patent into French for the information of the French Canadians.  There was an officers’ guard under arms; colors were flying and after the reading of the Patent all the artillery belonging to Lord Selkirk, as well as that of the Hudson’s Bay Company, under Mr. Hillier, consisting of six swivel guns, were discharged in a grand salute.

At the close of the ceremony the gentlemen were invited to the Governor’s tent, and a keg of spirits was turned out for the people.