in 1821, and Garry entered particularly into the arrangement of the Forts at the Forks.  The old Fort Douglas was retained as Colony Fort, and the small Hudson’s Bay Company trading house as well as Fort Gibraltar were absorbed into the new fort which was erected on the banks of the Assiniboine between Main Street and the bank of the Red River.  All the letters and documents of the time speak of Governor Garry’s visits as carrying a gleam of sunshine wherever he went and it was appropriate that the new fort built in the following year should bear the name Fort Garry.  This was the wooden fort, which still remained in existence though superseded as a fort in 1850.

At the time of Governor Garry’s visit the population of the settlement may be considered to have been about five hundred.  These were made up of somewhat less than two hundred Selkirk Colonists, about one hundred De Meurons, a considerable number of French Voyageurs and Freemen, Swiss Colonists perhaps eighty, and the remainder Orkney, employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company.  The Colony was, however, beginning to organize itself.  The accounts of the French settlers are very vague, an occasional name flitting across the page of history.  One family still found on Red River banks, gains celebrity as possessing the first white woman who came to Rupert’s Land.  With her husband she had gone to Edmonton in ——­, and had wandered over the prairies.  In 1811, with her husband, she first saw the Forks of Red River and wintered in 1811-12 at Pembina, the winter which the first band of Colonists spent at York Factory.  Lajimoniere became a fast adherent of Lord Selkirk, and made a famous and most dangerous winter journey through the wilds alone, carrying letters from Red River to Montreal, delivered them personally to Lord Selkirk in 1815.

The Lajimonieres received with great delight in 1818 the first Roman Catholic missionaries who reached Red River.  These were sent through Lord Selkirk’s influence, and the large gift of land known as the Seigniory lying east of St. Boniface was the reward given to the early pioneer missionaries—­Provencher and Dumoulin, men of great stature and manly bearing.  In the year of their arrival James Sutherland, the Presbyterian chaplain of the Selkirk Colonists, was taken by the Nor’-Westers to Upper Canada, whither his son, Haman Sutherland, had gone in 1815 with Duncan Cameron.  The Earl of Selkirk had promised to send to his Scottish Colonists a minister of their own faith.  On his death in France his agent in London was Mr. John Pritchard.  Seventeen days after the death of Lord Selkirk, Rev. John West was appointed to come as chaplain to the Colonists and the other Protestants of Red River.  Pritchard arrived by Hudson’s Bay ship at York Factory 15 Aug., 1820, having Mr. West in company with him.