Читать книгу The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier - Charles E. Flandrau - Страница 8

"Vast and sudden deeds of violence,

Adventures wild and wonders of the moment."

The offspring of their intercourse with the Indian women were numerous, and called "Bois Brules." They were a fine race of hunters, horsemen and boatmen, and possessed all the accomplishments of the voyageur. They spoke the language of both father and mother.

In 1812 a small advance party of colonists arrived at the Red River of the North, in about latitude fifty degrees north. They were, however, frightened away by a party of men of the Northwest Fur Company, dressed as Indians, and induced to take refuge at Pembina, in what is now Minnesota, where they spent the winter, suffering the greatest hardships. Many died, but the survivors returned in the spring to the colony, and made an effort to raise a crop; but it was a failure, and they again passed the winter at Pembina. This was the winter of 1813–14. They again returned to the colony, in a very distressed and dilapidated condition, in the spring.

By September, 1815, the colony, which then numbered about two hundred, was getting along quite prosperously, and its future seemed auspicious. It was called "Kildonan," after a parish in Scotland in which the colonists were born.

The employes of the Northwest Fur Company were, however, very restive under anything that looked like improvement, and regarded it as a ruse of their rival, the Hudson Bay Company, to break up the lucrative business they were enjoying in the Indian trade. They resorted to all kinds of measures to get rid of the colonists, even to attempting to incite the Indians against them, and on one occasion, by a trick, disarmed them of their brass field pieces and other small artillery. Many of the disaffected Selkirkers deserted to the quarters of the Northwest Company. These annoyances were carried to the extent of an attack on the house of the governor, where four of the inmates were wounded, one of whom died. They finally agreed to leave, and were escorted to Lake Winnipeg, where they embarked in boats. Their improvements were all destroyed by the Northwest people.

They were again induced to return to their colony lands by the Hudson Bay people, and did so in 1816, when they were reinforced by new colonists. Part of them wintered at Pembina in 1816, but returned to the Kildonan settlement in the spring.

Lord Selkirk, hearing of the distressed condition of his colonists, sailed for New York, where he arrived in the fall of 1815, and learned they had been compelled to leave the settlement. He proceeded to Montreal, where he found some of the settlers in the greatest poverty; but learning that some of them still remained in the colony, he sent an express to announce his arrival, and say that he would be with them in the spring. The news was sent by a colonist named Laquimonier, but he was waylaid, near Fond du Lac, and brutally beaten and robbed of his dispatches. Subsequent investigation proved that this was the work of the Northwest Company.

Selkirk tried to obtain military aid from the British authorities, but failed. He then engaged four officers and over one hundred privates who had served in the late War with the United States to accompany him to the Red river. He was to pay them, give them lands, and send them home if they wished to return.

When he reached Sault Ste. Marie he heard that his colony had again been destroyed.

War was raging between the Hudson Bay people and the Northwest Company, in which Governor Semple, chief governor of the factories and territories of the Hudson Bay Company was killed. Selkirk proceeded to Fort William, on Lake Superior, and finally reached his settlement on the Red river.

The colonists were compelled to pass the winter of 1817 in hunting in Minnesota, and had a hard time of it, but in the spring they once more found their way home, and planted crops, but they were destroyed by grasshoppers, which remained during the next year and ate up every growing thing, rendering it necessary that the colonists should again resort to the buffalo for subsistence.

During the winter of 1819–20 a deputation of these Scotchmen came all the way to Prairie du Chien on snowshoes for seed wheat, a distance of a thousand miles, and on the fifteenth day of April, 1820, left for the colony in three Mackinaw boats, carrying three hundred bushels of wheat, one hundred bushels of oats, and thirty bushels of peas. Being stopped by ice in Lake Pepin, they planted a May pole and celebrated May day on the ice. They reached home by way of the Minnesota river, with a short portage to Lake Traverse, the boats being moved on rollers, and thence down the Red River to Pembina, where they arrived in safety on the third day of June. This trip cost Lord Selkirk about six thousand dollars.

Nothing daunted by the terrible sufferings of his colonists, and the immense expense attendant upon his enterprise, in 1820 he engaged Capt. R. May, who was a citizen of Berne, in Switzerland, but in the British service, to visit Switzerland and get recruits for his colony. The captain made the most exaggerated representations of the advantages to be gained by emigrating to the colony, and induced many Swiss to leave their happy and peaceful homes to try their fortunes in the distant, dangerous and inhospitable regions of Lake Winnipeg. They knew nothing of the hardships in store for them, and were the least adapted to encounter them of any people in the world, as they were mechanics, whose business had been the delicate work of making watches and clocks. They arrived in 1821, and from year to year, after undergoing hardships that might have appalled the hardiest pioneer, their spirits drooped, they pined for home, and left for the south. At one time a party of two hundred and forty-three of them departed for the United States, and found homes at different points on the banks of the Mississippi.

Before the eastern wave of immigration had ascended above Prairie du Chien, many Swiss had opened farms at and near St. Paul, and became the first actual settlers of the country. Mr. Stevens, in an address on the early history of Hennepin county, says that they were driven from their homes in 1836 and 1837 by the military at Fort Snelling, and is very severe on the autocratic conduct of the officers of the fort, saying that the commanding officers were lords of the North, and the subordinates were princes. I have no doubt they did not underrate their authority, but I think Mr. Stevens must refer to the removals that were made of settlers on the military reservation of which I have before spoken.

The subject of the Selkirk colony cannot fail to interest the reader, as it was the first attempt to introduce into the great Northwest settlers for the purposes of peaceful agriculture, everybody else who had preceded them having been connected with the half-savage business of the Indian trade; and the reason I have dwelt so long upon the subject is, because these people, on their second emigration, furnished Minnesota with her first settlers, and curiously enough, they came from the north.

Abraham Perry was one of these Swiss refugees from the Selkirk settlement. With his wife and two children, he first settled at Fort Snelling, then at St. Paul, and finally at Lake Johanna. His son Charles, who came with him, has, while I am writing, on the twenty-ninth day of July, 1899, just celebrated his golden wedding at the old homestead, at Lake Johanna, where they have ever since lived. They were married by the Right Reverend A. Ravoux, who is still living in St. Paul. Charles Perry is the only survivor of that ill-fated band of Selkirkers.

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