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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