XL ROYAL’ SOCIETY OF CANADA 
CANADA SEEKS A NEW HOME For HER CHILDREN. 
It was a momentous year for Canada when the Wolseley Expedition 
of British and Canadian troops forced its way in 1870 through the track- 
less rockland of thirteen hundred miles to the flowery prairies of the 
west. Before the force started it was known that there would be no 
blood shed, for the Riel rising, brought on by misunderstanding and 
governmental maladministration had largely subsided, but the expedi- 
tion meant the occupation of a good land by a determined people. It 
gave confidence to a young nation on the outlook for homes for its 
children. Their land had been too strait for the growing Canadian 
families. By tens, if not hundreds, of thousands they had been drifting 
to the open lands of the Western United States. Now, many of the 
young Canadian soldiers, on receiving their discharge, remained in the 
country and laid the foundations of Winnipeg. They brought kindred 
spirits after them, they were followed by wives, sisters and daughters 
and made strong settlements of intelligent, energetic and moral people. 
Winnipeg was for many years a distributing point for the new settle- 
ments. The new communities were loyal. On their journey westward 
they had passed in thousands through the United States— a foreign 
country—had resisted all blandishments and inducements to remain 
by the way, had journeyed keeping their eye on the North Star. Thus 
grew Manitoba. The people, like the colonizing party of the old 
patriarch of Ur of the Chaldees, took with them to their western homes 
their traditions, their courage and their faith. The weak, the half- 
hearted and the extremely poor could not go, for the journey was long 
and expensive, the stories of the dangers of the new lands, its cold, its 
wolves, its plagues of locusts, and its unfriendliness were alarming. It 
was four hundred miles from a railway, and an impassable barrier of 
Laurentian rocks prevented, it was declared, its ever being connected 
directly with Canada. It is said that an eloquent Canadian orator 
spoke then of Manitoba as “A Hyperborean Land, fit neither for man 
nor beast.” But Hudson’s Bay Company vaticinations, United States 
hostility, the long and wearisome journey, the spectre of ice and snow, 
and the fear of ostracism and banishment proved insufficient to restrain 
the movement to what was a good land, a land of sunlight, a land of 
good health, a land of fertility, a land of wonderful resources, and a land 
of great opportunities, 
Enough of time has now elapsed to show it to be a land of stalwart 
young men, of comely daughters, of sturdy boys and girls—a land to 
produce the farmer, the athlete and the soldier—a land of cheerful 
homes, of churches and of schools. 
