But every disaster has its side of advantage.  During the escape of the Settlers to the heights, the De Meurons, losing all sense of restraint, stole the cattle of the Settlers and actually sold them meat from their own slaughtered cattle.  So intense was the feeling of the Scottish Settlers against the De Meurons that the Selkirk Colonists chose another situation and moved to it.

Now that the flood was over, the De Meurons and Swiss became more restless than ever.  They decided to move to the United States.  The Selkirk Colonists were glad to see them go, and furnished them, free of cost, sufficient supplies for their journey.  They departed on the 24th of June, their band numbering 243, and the sturdy pioneers who held to their land shed no tears of sorrow at their going.

With remarkable courage and hope the Settlers returned after what was to some of them, their fourth Hegira, and immediately planted potatoes and small quantities of wheat and barley.  This grew well and supplied food for them, and in the next two or three years no less than two hundred and four houses were built.  The Settlement, now freed from dissension, had not gone through its fiery ordeal in vain.  The news of a home for themselves and their dusky wives and half-breed children, had spread over the whole of Rupert’s Land, and now began, what Lieutenant-Governor Archibald, the first Governor of Manitoba, afterward spoke of as the floating down the rivers with their wives and children of the Hudson’s Bay Company officers and men to the paradise of Red River.  The great majority of the employees of the Company were Orkneymen.  They gradually took up the most of the Red River lots surveyed, lying below Kildonan, and forming the Parishes of St. Paul’s and St. Andrew’s on Red River, down to St. Peter’s Indian Reserve and St. James’ and Headingly up the Assiniboine.  The French half-breeds who removed from Pembina and different parts of Rupert’s Land, made the great French parishes of St. Boniface, St. Norbert, St. Vital on the Red River, with St. Charles, St. Francois Xavier and Baie St. Paul on the Assiniboine.  And now of Scottish Settlers with French and English half-breeds, the population of Red River Settlement had reached the number of 1,500 souls.

CHAPTER XVI.

The jolly governor.

Great crises in the world’s history generally produce the men who solve them.  Cromwell, Washington, Garibaldi—­each of them was the movement itself.  A wider philosophy may see that the age or the Community evolves the man, but as Carlyle shows, it is the man who reacts upon the community, becomes the embodiment of its ideal, and is the mouthpiece and the right hand of the age which produces him.

That Andrew Colville, a brother-in-law of Lord Selkirk, should select a young clerk in London and send him out to Athabasca to see the great fur-region of the Mackenzie River District, is not a wonderful thing, but that after one year of active service this young man should be chosen to guide the destinies of the great united fur company, made up of the Hudson’s Bay and Nor’-Wester Companies is a wonder.