FOREWORD AND POSTSCRIPT lxxv 



semblance whatsoever to reality. As a "working hypothesis" 

 it fails to work. There is not an essential line or word of 

 truth in it, not one ! It cannot be true in any particular, since 

 in the period in question, of 1796 to 1800, which Mrs. Tyler 

 is endeavoring to fill, there were no Selkirk's Settlements any- 

 where in existence, and none indeed before 1803, when young 

 Audubon, at eighteen, was leaving France and heading for his 

 father's "Mill Grove" farm in Pennsylvania. 



The Scottish nobleman Thomas Douglas (1771-1820), the 

 fifth Earl of Selkirk and the seventh and youngest son of the 

 fourth Earl, did not come into his title and fortune until the 

 death of his father in 1799. He was a patriot who gave his 

 fortune and himself for the development of the British Empire 

 by laudable means, his great aim being to turn the flow of 

 Scottish colonists from the Carolinas and New England to 

 Canada. He sponsored three settlements in North America, 

 the first in 1803 on Prince Edward Island, which was eventu- 

 ally fairly successful. The second, named "Baldoon" after a 

 village on his ancestral acres, was situated in the western 

 peninsula of upper Canada, between Lakes Huron and Erie, 

 and never became more than a straggling pioneer village before 

 it was finally plundered by Americans in the War of 1812. 



The Selkirk Settlement of the Red River, in the Winnipeg 

 region of what is now Manitoba, and over five hundred miles 

 from Hudson Bay, was undoubtedly the one to which Audubon 

 referred, and about it every reader of newspapers in England 

 must have heard in the second decade of the last century. Its 

 notoriety was due to its vast land area, the money at stake, 

 and to the numbers of people involved. The legal battles 

 fought over it in the courts, which lasted for upwards of ten 

 years, with their strain and worry, caused, as many believed, 

 the premature death of Lord Selkirk at forty-nine. The Earl 

 died on April 8, 1820, at Pau, France, whither he had gone in 

 the vain hope of recovering his health, and was buried in the 

 Protestant cemetery there. 



The directors of the Hudson's Bay Company had granted 



