37 



Selkirk Settlement, now Manitoba in 1889 was a most inter- 

 esting event. The consul was present on two occasions, a 

 Sunday service at Kildonan church and a garden party on 

 the site of Fort Douglas, now the residence of ex-Mayor 

 Logan, and when the representatives of the colonists of 1812- 

 16, (autual colonists in the instances of Matheson, and a Ban- 

 nerman, and a Poison) were presented to her Ladyship her 

 personal knowledge of every family was most wonderful. It 

 was his privilege to be present with Mr. and Mrs. John 

 Fraser at the anniversary of their marriage fifty years before, 

 it being the first union of children born in the colony on 

 the Red River. The Historical Society owes to her Ladyship 

 the suggestion and the fact of the present memcrial of 

 Fort Douglas, and its site is the appropriate donation of 

 Miss Mary Inkster of " Seven Oaks," a descendant of the 

 sterling Norse element of the Orkne}^ Islands — that invalu- 

 able portion of the population of Central Canada which is 

 native to the soil in the names of Bannatyne, Norquay, 

 Inkster, Clouston, Poison and others equally and honorably 

 memorable. Yesterday — 18th of June — was marked by a 

 Norse demonstration — a kindred event in the ethnology of 

 Manitoba. The Icelandic element of the Province, 5,000 

 strong, assisted by influential deputations from Minnesota 

 and Dakota, including two representatives in the Leglislature 

 of North Dakota, celebrated by an imposing procession and 

 exercises the inauguration of self-government in Iceland, 1,017 

 years ago. The oldest historic Scandinavian stock has 

 found its new home in the great prairie ocean of Northwest 

 America, and so is destined to be repeated in this new world 

 the story of the bold Northmen of yore — the sons of Thor — 

 who rolled the conquests of the Teuton to the gates of Im- 

 perial Rome and gave new and wholesome life to the civiliza- 

 tion of Europe. So mote it be on the American continent. 



Judge Dubuc spoke of himself as being, not a descendant 

 of the old settlers, but one of the pioneer settlers of the new 

 generation, he having come here twenty years ago in the 

 month of June. He had been glad to find a very fine country 



