The Canadian Monthly and National Review Volume 5 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874 Excerpt: ...To meet the power of the rivals it was necessary to gain a stronger foothold in the country, to have numbers who might be appealed to in case of necessity, and moreover to produce agricultural supplies at a point nearer even than Canada to the great fur-bearing region of the North. The courage of a man who could take a colony of men, women and children, after a sea voyage of thousands of miles, to winter on the frozen shores of Hudson's Bay, and then proceed five hundred miles inland, to settle fifteen hundred miles from the nearest white settlement, must have been considerable, the object he had in view an important one, and the necessity for such a course very great. Moreover the willingness of a colony of settlers to leave the old world and begin life in a land that they believed was infested by "wild beasts and wilder men" must ever seem strange. At this juncture, fortunately for Lord Selkirk's scheme, an expatriated people had the choice of going abroad or of being drowr.ed in the German Ocean. One of those harsh and selfish acts which have made many a colonist look back to the home of his childhood--in other respects a pleasing recollection--with the feeling of bitterness and retaliation, drove forth from the estates of the Duchess of Sutherland thousands of poor exiles to find homes in the New World. Lord Selkirk visited the hapless community and induced a number of them to colonize the land he had procured from the Hudson's Bay Company by purchase. It is not the object of this paper to enter with any minuteness into the history of this colony. Suffice it to say that the privations they endured were rarely if ever equalled in the early settlement of any country. Women carrying helpless children were compelled to walk with bleeding feet over...