Likewise, on the part of the French half-breeds, there was the same distrust in regard to the limiting of the privileges which they enjoyed, while along with this it had been noised about that during the Papineau trouble in Canada, the Judge was no favorite of the French.  The French half-breeds, accordingly, became strongly prejudiced against the new Recorder.

In the year after the arrival of Recorder Thom, a most startling and mysterious event—­which indeed has never been solved to the present day, happened in the case of Thomas Simpson, who it will be remembered had roused by his crushing blow on the head of Larocque, the rage of the whole French half-breed community.  The case was that Thomas Simpson, with a party of natives, had been going southward through Minnesota, ahead of the main body of sojourners.  In a state of frenzy he had shot two of his four companions.  The other two returned to the main body, and got assistance.  He was seen to be alive as they approached him, a shot was heard, and then shots were fired in his direction by those observing him.  Whether he committed suicide or was killed by those approaching, some of whom were French, will never be known.  The fact that he had quarreled with the French half-breeds, five years before this event, was used to throw suspicion.  The body of Simpson was carried back to St. John’s Cemetery in Winnipeg, and it is said was buried along the wall in token of the belief that he had committed suicide.

What the body of the people had feared in the tightening of the legal restrictions by the new laws and new officials, did actually take place.  The French half-breeds were, as we have seen, chiefly given to hunting.  In theory, the Hudson’s Bay Company possessed all hunting rights under their charter.  A French-Canadian, Larant, and another half-breed also, had the furs, which they had hunted for, forcibly taken from them by legal authority, while in a third case an offender against the game laws had been actually deported to York Factory.  Alarm was now general among the French half-breeds.  Hitherto the English half-breeds had been loyal to the Company.  Alexander Ross gives an incident worth repeating as to how even the English half-breeds became rebellious.  He says:  “One of the Company’s officers, residing at a distance, had placed two of his daughters at the boarding-school in the Settlement.  An English half-breed, a comely well-behaved young man, of respectable connections, was paying his addresses to one of these young ladies, and had asked her in marriage.  The young lady had another suitor in the person of a Scotch lad, but her affections were in favor of the former, while her guardian, the chief officer in Red River, preferred the latter.  In his zeal to succeed in the choice he had made for the young lady, this gentleman sent for the half-breed and reprimanded him for aspiring to the hand of a lady, accustomed, as he expressed it, to the first society.  The