 192 CANADA and this was thoroughly understood. The Canadian provincial governments and land companies placarded the English railway stations, offering free grants or cheap lands, in vain. They were not worth touching. The British public, with so many other outlets, was quite right. The" Backwoods of Canada" for fifty years had been almost synonymous with the word emigration, and the departing emigrant was, as a matter of course, going to be a "backwoodsman." The expression lasted among stay-at-home people in England long after it had ceased to have any meaning. For years after the movement to the prairies had set in the friends of the settlers there still spoke of the absent ones as "backwoodsmen." Parliamentary orators still occasionally do so. In 1870 Canada seemed as if she had stopped and would grow within the limits nature had set here merely as an old country grows; as Nova Scotia has done, for instance. Rebellions and wars seem always to have marked im- portant changes in Canada's history. The Canadian Government took over at this moment the "Great Lone Land," as a much read work of the day called it, in 1869, from the Hudsons Bay Company. The latter had clouds of half-breed French-Indian and Scotch- Indian employees who had homesteads around Fort Garry, which had become a little town. The change caused fear and discontent |  THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 193 among them, and they now rose in rebellion, deposed the Government, and judicially mur- dered a prominent Ontario man. This brought up a military expedition under Sir Garnet., afterwards Lord Wolseley, who laboured for weeks through the old wilderness trail of the fur-traders. The usurping Government, so-called, collapsed at the approach of force, and Riel, a visionary, partly-educated French half-breed, who was the head of the insurrection, fled to the States. This was the first peep the outer world had into the great North-West. Manitoba was now made a province, Fort Garry,on the Red River, was named Winni- peg, and the present writer saw the old wooden fort still standing in the embryo city a few years later. Manitoba became a subject of both interest and mystery in Old Canada. A few people went up there to farm with the vague hope that some day a railroad might reach them, for there was no market then for produce. They grew heavy crops of everything, the flat rich prairie land being of extraordinary fertility. Grasshoppers sometimes, and at others early autumn frosts, or destructive hail-storms, did serious damage. It was to the interest of the fur-traders to make out that farming was too risky from all these causes to make the country a desirable one for settlement. In the seventies, however, the present Canadian |
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