Thomas Douglas, fifth Earl of Selkirk, a noble humanitarian Scot concerned with the plight of the crofters of his native Highlands, conceived a plan to settle them in the valley of the Red River of the North. Since the land he desired lay within the great northern empire of the Hudson's Bay Company, he purchased great blocks of the Company's stock with the view to controlling its policies. Having achieved this end, he was able to buy 116000 square miles in the valleys of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. The grant, which stretched southward to Lake Traverse -- the headwaters of the Red -- was made in May, 1811, and by October of that year a small group of Scots was settling for the winter at York Factory on Hudson Bay. Thus at the same time that William Henry Harrison was preparing to pacify the aborigines of Indiana Territory and winning fame at the battle of Tippecanoe, Anglo-Saxon settlement made a great leap into the center of the North American continent to the west of the American agricultural frontier.

Seven hundred miles south of York Factory, at ``the Forks'' of the Red and the Assiniboine, twenty-three men located a settlement in August 1812. By October the little colony about Fort Douglas (present-day Winnipeg) numbered 100. Within a few years the Scots, engaged in breaking the thick sod and stirring the rich soil of the valley, were joined by a group called Meurons. The latter, members of two regiments of Swiss mercenaries transported by Great Britain to Canada to fight the Americans in the War of 1812, had settled in Montreal and Kingston at the close of the war in 1815. Selkirk persuaded eighty men and four officers to go to Red River where they were to serve as a military force to protect his settlers from the hostile Northwest Company which resented the intrusion of farmers into the fur traders' empire. The mercenaries were little interested in farming and added nothing to the output of the farm plots on which all work was still done with hoes as late as 1818.