[coynE] THE TALBOT PAPERS 27 
of young Englishmen of his class. He was an enthusiast of the most 
generous description, in love with liberty, and ardent for progress; the 
political as well as the social and intellectual systems of Europe 
appeared to him, in his youthful zeal for the improvement of his fellow- 
beings, belated if not benighted on the road to it, and he had embraced 
with the most ardent hopes the scheme of emigration of Colonel Talbot 
for forming in the New World a colony where all the errors of the old 
were to be avoided. But his mother died, and the young emigrant 
withdrew his foot from the deck of the Canadian ship, to take his place 
in the British peerage—to bear an ancient English title, and become 
master of an old English estate—to marry a brilliant woman of English 
fashionable society—and to be thenceforth the ideal of an English 
country gentleman.” 
Doubtless Talbot was influenced by more motives than one. The 
spacious free life of the woods and lakes had captivated him, as it has 
captivated many others before and since. His choice of one of the most 
picturesque spots on Lake Erie for his own demesne is a sufficient proof 
of his esthetic taste and discrimination. 
He was surfeited with a society, which, unconcerned about daily 
bread, prayed only for its daily scandal. He was yet at an age, when 
young men dream dreams, and like other idealists he hoped to realize 
his Utopia in the New World. The calling of the West was continually 
in his ears, and he could resist no longer. But there were practical 
reasons urging him to take the tide at its flood, which leads on to 
fortune. 
VII. Tue CHosEN REGION. 
As a member of Simcoe’s staff, Talbot had followed the trail of 
the winter express from Niagara to Detroit in February, 1793. He 
had attended a Council of the Confederated Indians on the River Miami 
in August of the same year. In the following April he had accom- 
panied Simcoe to the foot of the Miami Rapids, when the latter estab- 
lished an outpost there to check the aggressive movements of Wayne. 
He had had favourable opportunities for spying out the land, and had 
become impressed with the possibilities of the region between Lake 
Erie and the River Thames. 
Tradition relates that on one of these western expeditions Talbot 
had shown himself particularly helpful and strenuous, collecting wood 
for fuel, helping to pitch the tent, drawing the boat and canoe across 
the Long Point portage; and, in short, to borrow the language of 
Fleming, one of Simcoe’s boatmen, “ The Colonel was the prettiest, the 
neatest and most active of the whole party.” Simcoe jocularly sug- 
gested to Talbot, when they rested at the mouths of Catfish and Kettle 
