and the Indian hunter, with their priceless bales of furs to be
bartered for blankets and beads, for pemmican and bacon, for powder
and ball, and for the thousand and one articles of commerce that
piled the store shelves from cellar to roof.

Fifty years ago, about the lonely post a little settlement had
gathered--a band of sturdy Scots. Those dour and doughty pioneers
of peoples had planted on the Red River their homes upon their
little "strip" farms--a rampart of civilization against the wide,
wild prairie, the home of the buffalo, and camp ground of the
hunters of the plain.

Twenty-five years ago, in the early eighties, a little city had
fairly dug its roots into the black soil, refusing to be swept away
by that cyclone of financial frenzy known over the Continent as the
"boom of '81," and holding on with abundant courage and invincible
hope, had gathered to itself what of strength it could, until by 1884
it had come to assume an appearance of enduring solidity. Hitherto
accessible from the world by the river and the railroad from the south,
in this year the city began to cast eager eyes eastward, and to listen
for the rumble of the first trans-continental train, which was to bind
the Provinces of Canada into a Dominion, and make Winnipeg into one of
the cities of the world. Trade by the river died, but meantime the
railway from the south kept pouring in a steady stream of immigration,
which distributed itself according to its character and in obedience
to the laws of affinity, the French Canadian finding a congenial home
across the Red River in old St. Boniface, while his English-speaking
fellow-citizen, careless of the limits of nationality, ranged whither
his fancy called him. With these, at first in small and then in larger
groups, from Central and South Eastern Europe, came people strange in