To Pembina at length they came—­worn out, dusty and despondent.  Here they erected tents or built huts.  The settlers reached Pembina on the 11th of September, and Macdonell and an escort of three men, all on horseback, arrived on the 12th.  Arrived at Pembina Macdonell examined the ground carefully, and selected the point on the south side of the Pembina River at its juncture with the Red River as a site for a fort.  His men immediately camped here.  Great quantities of buffalo meat were brought in by the French Canadians and Indians.  Some of this was sent down to the Forks to the party which had remained to built a hut at that point for stores.  At Pembina a storehouse was built immediately, and having given directions to erect several other buildings, the Governor returned by boat to the Forks.  On the 27th of October Owen Keveny, in charge of the second detachment of Colonists, arrived with his party, largely of Irishmen.  These men were taken on to Pembina.  After great activity the buildings were ready by the 21st of November to house the whole of the two parties now united in one band of Colonists.  The Governor and officers’ quarters were finished on December 27th.  Macdonell reports to Lord Selkirk that “as soon as the place at Pembina took some form and a decent flagstaff was erected on it, it was called Fort Daer.”  It is said that in most years the buffaloes were very numerous and so tame that they came to the Trader’s Fort and rubbed their backs upon its stockaded enclosure.  There was this year plenty of buffalo meat and the Scotch women soon learned to cook it into “Rubaboo,” or “Rowschow,” after the manner of the French half-breeds.  Toward spring food was scarcer.

[Illustration:  Hon.  Donald Gunn Schoolmaster, Naturalist and Legislator.  York Factory, 1813; Red River, 1823; Died at Little Britain. 1878.]

In May the winterers of Pembina returned to their settlement at the Colony.  They sought to begin the cultivation of their farms, but they were helpless.  The tough prairie sod had to be broken up and worked over, but the only implement which the Colonist had to use was a simple hoe, the one harrow being incomplete.  The crofters were poor farmers, for they were rather fishermen.  But the fish in Red River were scarce in this year, so that even the fisher’s art which they knew was of little avail to them.  The summer of 1813 was thus what the old settlers would call an “Off-Year,” for even the small fruits on the plains were far from abundant.  These being scarce, the chief food of the settlers for all that summer through was the “Prairie turnip.”  This is a variety of the pea family, known as the Astragalus esculenta, which with its large taproot grows quite abundantly on the dry plains.  An old-time trader, who was lost for forty days and only able to get the Prairie turnip, practically subsisted in this way.  Along with this the settlers gathered quantities of a very succulent weed known as “fat-hen,” and so were kept alive.  The Colonists knowing now what the soil could produce obtained small quantities of grain and even with their defective means of cultivation, in the next year demonstrated the fertility of the soil of the country.