But the De Meurons were not only bachelors, but they came from the peasantry of Austria and Italy, they had not fought for home and country, and their life of mercenary soldiering had made them selfish and deceitful.  A writer of the time speaks, and evidently with much prejudice, against the De Meurons.  “They were,” he says, “a medley of almost all nations—­Germans, French, Italians, Swiss and others.  They were bad farmers and withal very bad subjects; quarrelsome, slothful, famous bottle companions and ready for any enterprise however lawless and tyrannical.”  A few years later we find it stated that they made free with the cattle of their neighbors, and the chronicler does not hesitate to say that the herds of the De Meurons grew in number in exactly the same ratio as those of the Scottish settlers decreased.

Some four years after the settlement of the De Meurons a sunburst came upon them quite unexpectedly.

Lord Selkirk in the very last years of his life planned to bring a band of Protestant settlers from Switzerland.  A Colonel May, late of another of the mercenary regiments, accepted the duty of going to Switzerland, issuing a very attractive invitation to settlers, and succeeded in shipping a considerable number of Swiss families to his so-called Red River paradise.

This band of Colonists, consisting as they did of “watch and clock-makers, pastry cooks and musicians,” were quite unfit for the rough work of the Selkirk Colony.  In 1821 they were brought by way of Hudson Bay, over the same rocky way as the earlier Colonists came.  They were utterly poverty stricken, though honest, and well-behaved.  Their only possession of value was a plenty of handsome daughters.  The Swiss families on arrival were placed under tents nearby Fort Douglas.  As soon as possible many of the Swiss settlers were placed alongside the De Meurons on German Creek.  Good Mr. West, who had just been sent out as chaplain by the Hudson’s Bay Company, in place of the minister of their own faith promised to the Scottish settlers, did a great stroke of work in marrying the young Swiss girls to the De Meuron bachelors of German Creek.  The description of the way in which the De Meurons invited families having young women in them to the wifeless cabins is ludicrous.  A modern “Sabine raid” was made upon the young damsels, who were actually carried away to the De Meuron homesteads.  The Swiss families which had the misfortune to have no daughters in them were left to languish in their comfortless tents.  The afflictions of the earlier Selkirk settlers were increased by the arrival of these settlers.  With the Selkirk settlers in their first decade the first consideration was always food.  Till that question is settled no Colony can advance.  Probably the most alarming and hopeless feature of their new colonial life was the appearance of vast flights of locusts or grasshoppers, which devoured every blade of wheat and grass in the country.  To those who