18 .INTKODUCTION 



The policy of exclusion was to cease, immigration was to be 

 encouraged, and a telegraph line built through the Territories 

 to the Pacific coast. The wire for this was actually shipped, 

 and lay in Rupert's Land for years, until made use of by the 

 Mackenzie Administration in the building of the Govern- 

 ment telegraph line, which followed the railway route defiiied 

 by Sir Sandford Fleming. The old Hudson's Bay Com- 

 pany's shares, of a par value of half a million pounds sterling, 

 were increased to a million and a half under the new adjust- 

 ment, and were throvra. upon the market in shares of twenty 

 pounds sterling each. Sir Edmund Head, an old ex-Governor 

 of Canada, was made Governor of the new company. The 

 Stock Exchange was not altogether favourable, and the 

 remaining shares were only sold in the Winnipeg land boom 

 of 1881. 



The alien element in the new company seemed to inspire 

 the politicians of the United States with surpassing hopes 

 and ideas. An offer to purchase its territorial interests was 

 made in January, 1866, by American capitalists, which was 

 not unfavourably glanced at by the directorate. It was capped 

 later on. The corollary of the proposal was a bill, actually 

 introduced into the United States Congress in July following, 

 and read twice, " providing for the admission of the States 

 of Nova Scotia, ISTew Brunswick, Canada East and Canada 

 West, and for the organization of the Territories of Selkirk, 

 Saskatchewan and Columbia." The bill provided that " The 

 United States would pay ten millions of dollars to the Hud- 

 son's Bay Company in full of all claims to territory or juris- 

 diction in ISTorth America, whether founded on the Charter 

 of the Company, or any treaty, law, or usage." The grandi- 

 osity, to use a mild phrase, of such a measure needs no com- 

 ment. But though it seems amusing to the Canadian of 

 to-day, it was by no means a joke forty years ago. As a 

 matter of fact, the then almost uninhabited Territories, cut 

 off from the centres of Canadian activity by a wilderness of 

 over a thousand miles, would have been invaded by Fenians 

 and filibusters but for the fact that they were a part of the 



