Читать книгу Under the Lily and the Rose - Arthur G. Sir Doughty - Страница 6

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Off St. Mary’s Isle at the mouth of the Dee a proud ship with bellying sails dropped anchor in the summer of 1778. On the quarter-deck with measured tread paced that mariner bold, John Paul Jones. Fierce was his glance and mischief was in the air, or Paul Jones would not be there.

The boats are lowered and manned by as savage a looking crew as ever one wished to see. They reach the shore and Paul Jones leads his men, armed to the teeth, towards the vineclad mansion of the Selkirks, determined to capture the owner and carry him off to France. Great was the rage of Paul Jones when he discovered that Dunbar, first Earl of Selkirk, was absent, but he did not know that his young son Thomas, a boy of seven years, had watched the approach of the pirates and made himself scarce. Forward went the men, who terrorized the servants and carried off the silverware in bags to the ship; but they did not carry off young Thomas. The boy grew up and succeeded to the title. He took a keen interest in the welfare of the people, who had been well-nigh ruined by the Napoleonic Wars. He proposed several schemes to place them on lands in Canada, and, having obtained grants in Prince Edward Island, he sent a large party to that picturesque province in the summer of 1803. Here they set up poles, laced them with twigs and covered them with leaves. Under this shelter they lived until more substantial dwellings could be erected.

Lord Selkirk now turned his attention to the Red River Settlement. In 1811 a party under his direction reached York Fort, and as it was too late in the season to proceed to the interior, they wintered there in hastily built log cabins.

Scurvy overtook the men, but liberal doses of the juice of the white spruce seem to have restored them. Perhaps it had not all the virtues of the tree Annedda of the Indians, but there were several cures.

In 1813 several women accompanied the men. In the month of April twenty men and the same number of women started on snowshoes from the winter camp to York Factory, a journey of a hundred miles. The men dragged the sleighs laden with provisions, making a path for the women. On the morrow a halt was made to set up a tent, and bank it with snow. For within that tent on the following morn a Canadian child was born. The others had pressed on, for food was scarce, and it was not until twenty-one days after that the infant with its father and mother reached York Fort, and not until June that the Red River came in sight.

COURT HOUSE AND JAIL, YORK, UPPER CANADA, AUGUST, 1829

James Cockburn

The Red River was not without its romance. On board one of the Hudson’s Bay boats came a girl from the Orkney Islands disguised as a man. She believed that her lover was amongst the settlers and had followed him. She was possibly the first white woman in the West.

In the year following the settlers began their weary pilgrimage to the Red River. There were about seventy in the party, and it was autumn when they reached their destination. Soon the winter came, and but for the supply of potatoes, barley and oats, which had been brought from England at a great expense, they would have had a terrible time.

A small band of colonists arrived the next year, and suffered for lack of food, which was even more difficult to obtain in summer than in winter. With pluck they set to work with a hoe and sowed a quantity of wheat, which yielded a hundred fold, but the blackbirds and pigeons seemed to think that they had a better right to the grain than the settlers, and carried off nearly all the harvest.

The Prairie Provinces have been called the summer-land of harvests, and their white and golden sheaves are beautiful and wonderful; and then so much of the prosperity of Canada is dependent upon them. But old King Frost sometimes passes over this “summer-land” and nips the golden ears, and then the beautiful grain is spoiled. So that it is quite important to obtain grain that will ripen early like the famous Manitoba wheat known as Red Fife wheat. And how do you think they came to grow this wheat? I will tell you. Many years ago there lived in Canada a family named Fife. And Mr. Fife wrote to some seed growers in Scotland asking them what kind of grain was best to grow in Canada, where the winters were so long and the summers so short. Now the seed growers had been shipping a special grain to the Baltic, where conditions were not unlike those in Canada, and they sent a packet of this seed to Mr. Fife. And at the proper season Mr. Fife planted this seed in his garden, and he was delighted to find that it ripened at least ten days before any other kind. And one fine day he said to his wife: “To-morrow we cut the grain.” But to-morrow never came for that fine crop. In the night when the farmer was asleep a greedy cow broke through the fence and munched up all the luscious ears. In the morning bright and early off went Mr. Fife to his garden to gather in his wheat, and was terribly upset when he beheld the wanton destruction of the greedy cow. I hope the poor cow had made good her escape, for Mr. Fife was more than angry. Then Mrs. Fife came into the garden, and she was very sorry, for she hoped to give some of the seed to her neighbours. But in the corner she espied three ears of wheat which the gluttonous cow had overlooked. And these she carefully put away and the next year planted the seed from them in the garden. And from the crop she obtained quite a nice little packet of grain. This was planted the next year, and so on until she had several bags. In the course of time this grain was sown by some farmers in Ohio, and from there it was introduced into Manitoba, and the province became famous the world over for its wheat. We have now other kinds of wheat, such as the well-known Marquis wheat, but for many years Red Fife was king, and all through the forethought of Mrs. Fife; for I am quite sure Mr. Fife would never have saved those three ears—he was far too angry. It happens so often in this world that a simple act has momentous consequences.

A SETTLER’S HOME NEAR CARBERRY, ASSINIBOIA, 1884

C. Roper

From the first, the North West Company was opposed to the Selkirk Settlement, declaring that the people must be driven out, or they would ruin trade, and at last force was resorted to. From this time the lot of the settlers was precarious, and it seemed that the colony would be extinguished, but it struggled bravely and at length came into its own. On the spot where these colonists fought for existence stands Winnipeg, the foremost city of the plains.