138 GKOKGE BEYCH ON THK 



fort have ialleu down the bank. It was built by John Wills, a bourgeois ol' the North- 

 West Company, with a force of twenty men : he was engaged for a year in building it. 

 The stockade of Fort Gibraltar was " made of oak trees, split in two." The wooden picket- 

 ing was from twelve to fifteen feet high. (See Plate II.) 



The following is a list of the buildings enclosed in it, with some of their dimensions. 

 There were eight houses in all : the residence of the Bourgeois, 64 feet in length ; two 

 houses for the servants, respectively 36 and 28 feet long ; one store, 32 feet long ; a black- 

 smith's shop, stable, kitchen, and an ice house. On the top of the ice house a watch 

 tower [guerifé) was built. John Wills, the builder, lived in charge of this fort until his 

 death in 1814. 



The great struggle between the Hudson's Bay and North- West Companies for supre- 

 macy in the fur trade, which had been proceeding with bitterness and determination 

 during the last qirarter of last century (17*74-1800), and had risen to fever heat in the first 

 decade of the present century, was brought to a crisis by an emigration movement of a most 

 important kind. The Earl of Selkirk, though a stockholder of the Hudson's Bay Com- 

 pany, did not, as some haA'e supposed, send his colony out as a means of securing the 

 country for the fur trade. He was enthusiastii? in emigration projects. In 1803, he sent 

 a large and successful colony to Prince Edward Island. Before that date even, in 1802, as 

 shewn by a letter sent by him to the Home Department, of which a copy is in the posses- 

 sion of the writer, he planned his colony to Red River ; and Prince Edward Island was 

 only selected before starting, because the British Grovernment regarded it as more accessi- 

 ble. It was to gain the territory on which to plant a colony that his Lordship formed the 

 great design of purchasing stock in the Hudson's Bay Company. 



Lord Selkirk succeeded in carrying out all his plans ; in 1811 he bought up a control- 

 ling interest in the company, and purchased a vast tract of what is now apart of Manitoba, 

 and portions of the northern parts of Minnesota and Dakota. This was known as the 

 District of Assiniboia. It was in 1811, as already said, that his representative, Mr. Miles 

 Macdonell, a Highlander, formerly a Captain of the Queen's Rangers, was appointed 

 Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, and was also named by Lord Selkirk in 

 charge of his colony. Mr. Macdonell arrived at Red River in the year 1812, and met the 

 colony which had just come from Britain by way of Hiidson Bay. It numbered about 

 eighty persons. The new Governor and the colonists, in the year of their arrival, imme- 

 diately began to erect houses ; indeed some of the colonists were under a three years' engage- 

 ment with Lord Selkirk to erect houses for the Company. These were situated about 

 three quarters of a mile north of the junction of the rivers, east of Main Street, and 

 between James and Logan Streets, probably on the edge of the broken plain skirting the 

 belt of wood along the river. There was a house for the Governor, where also dwelt the 

 sheriff. There were besides a farm house, a store-house, and several other buildings. 

 Here the colonists lived, tents and huts being used as well. The well-known dwelling, 

 with its fine surrounding of trees in the plot at the foot of Rupert Street, — the abode of 

 the late Sheriff Alexander Ross, the historian of Red River — in its name " Colony 

 Garden," still retained by it, commemorates the locality where the colony first took root. 



It was the custom of the dwellers at the Forks to journey soiithward in the winter 

 in order to be near the open country containing bufialo. The Governor had erected an 

 establishment on the north side of Pembina River at its mouth, to which he gave the 



