the Red River with their treasure till about the end of June, 1820, and while the wheat grew well it was sown too late to ripen well, although it gave the settlers grain enough to sow the fields of the coming year.  This expedition cost Lord Selkirk upwards of a thousand pounds sterling.  In the following year the grasshoppers again visited the Red River fields, but by a sudden movement which, by some of the good Colonists was interpreted to be a direct interference of Providence on their behalf, the swarms of intruders passed away never to appear again in the Red River for half a century.

The presence of the grasshoppers upon the Canadian prairies is one of interest.  It is known that they appeared throughout the territory of Red River a dozen years or so before the coming of the Selkirk Colonists, also during the period we have been describing, and then not till the period from 1868 to 1875.  During the latter half of this period the writer saw their devastations in Manitoba.  The occurrence of the grasshopper at times in all agricultural districts in America is very different from the grasshopper or locust plague which we are describing.  The red-legged Caloptenus or the Rocky Mountain locust are provided for lofty flight and pass in myriads over the prairies, lighting whenever a cloud obscures the sun.  At one time the writer saw them in such hordes that they were found from Winnipeg to Edmonton, over a region about one thousand miles in breadth.  In that year they devoured not only crops and garden products but almost completely ate up the grass on the prairie to such an extent as to make it useless for hay.  In the year 1875 they appeared, in the main, for the last time in Manitoba, and in that year their disappearance was as sudden as in the former case of 1821.  Under the wing upon the body of each grasshopper was to be found one or more scarlet red parasites which drew all the juices from the body of the insect and produced death.  For a third of a century they have been almost unknown, and the area of cultivated ground in the States of North and South Dakota, where they may supply their hunger renders it likely that Manitoba will know them no more.  It cannot be wondered at that such continuous disasters made the settler whether Scottish, De Meuron, or Swiss, extremely discontented.  During the period of the scourge, the only resource was to winter at Pembina in reasonable distance from the buffalo-herds.  In one of these years a number of the Selkirk Colonists did not return to their farms but emigrated to the United States.  As we shall see in a few years after the grasshopper scourge the flood of the Red River took place, when the De Meurons and Swiss, with one or two exceptions, disappeared from the Colony and became citizens of the United States.

CHAPTER XIII.

English Lion and Canadian bear lie down together.