Policing the Plains | Page 4

by the English Company, whose employees, it may be
said, were largely the hardy Scots from the Highlands and Islands. But
the leaders of the Hudson's Bay Company, "stabbed broad awake" by
this opposition and strengthened by the trustworthiness and endurance
of their employees, held their ground and extended their operations till
they by degrees absorbed all opponents and became in 1821 monarchs
of all they surveyed.
Meanwhile in the Old Land many things of world-wide interest and
influence had been transpiring. The years around the opening of the
nineteenth century were made stormy by the Napoleonic effort to
subjugate Europe and while their men of military age were away
fighting for the liberty of Europe against "the little giant of Corsica,"
certain areas in the north of Scotland were "cleared" of their inhabitants
by heartless landlords who felt that sheep were more profitable for the
owner of estates than human tenants. To these evicted crofters in the
Highlands came that noble altruist and philanthropic colonizer, the Earl
of Selkirk, who, having obtained from the Hudson's Bay Company an
immense district principally in what is now Manitoba, offered the
outcasts of a tyrannous land system homes in the great free spaces of
Rupert's Land, as the Hudson Bay territory was called. The offer was
accepted thankfully, and in the years from 1812 to 1815 these Selkirk
colonists came to the Red River of the North.
It is not part of this story to follow the fortunes of these famous
colonists of whom I have written more particularly in The Romance of
Western Canada. They encountered unaccustomed climatic obstacles,
they were persecuted and hunted by the fur-trading opponents of their
benefactor, they were tried by the disasters of floods and by plagues of
devouring locusts, but with the dogged and stern determination of their
race and creed they held on and demonstrated to the world the
possibilities of a country which is now the granary of the Empire.

And the world got to hearing of this Arcadian Colony of Scots in the
new North-West. So when the old Provinces of the East were brought
together under the name of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, the men
of light and leading at Ottawa lost no time in looking westward to
secure the vast western domain for the new Confederation. Despite the
difficulty of travel, settlers had already begun to percolate from Eastern
Canada through the States or the wilderness spaces west of the Great
Lakes, into the Red River country made famous by the Selkirk Colony.
And it had been becoming more and more apparent to the Hudson's
Bay Company itself as well as to others that the great fur-trading and
mercantile organization could no longer adequately administer an area
which was soon to overflow with the human sea of an incoming
population. For many years previous to Confederation the Hudson's
Bay monopoly in trade had been more or less of a figment of the
imagination and no one knew that better than the Company itself. It
still retained its monopoly nominally, but it made very little effort to
restrain the half-breed and other "free traders" who opened up stores
and bartered for furs with the Indians. In any case in one form or other
all the trade of the country practically came, in the last analysis,
through the Hudson's Bay Company, who controlled the money market
by having their own bills in circulation. But the wise old Company saw
what was coming and began to get ready to let go its monopolistic
fur-trading charter and adjust itself to the new conditions.
Hence it was not a difficult matter to persuade the Company to give up
its charter for a consideration. My father, who was a member of the
Council of Assiniboia, a magistrate, and a close personal friend of
Governor McTavish, who was in charge at Fort Garry on the Red River
where settlement had begun, always used to say that the Hudson's Bay
Company was glad to find a reasonable way of getting the
responsibility for the government of the growing country off its hands.
Accordingly, when the Canadian Government deemed the time was
ripe, two members of that Government, the Hon. Sir George E. Cartier
and the Hon. William McDougall, were sent to London to negotiate
with the Imperial authorities for the transfer of the North-West to
Canada. In view of the attitude taken by the Hudson's Bay Company, as

stated above, the matter was not difficult to arrange. And after a brief
discussion in London, the famous old fur-trading organization, which
had held charter rights since the days of Charles II, relinquished those
rights to the Imperial Government for £300,000 sterling, certain
reservations around their trading posts, along with one-twentieth of the
land in the fertile belt. Then, as