tle
settlement on the Red River remained a solitary outpost of colonization.

Once arrived in Canada, the settler soon found that he had no primrose
path before him. Canada remained for many years a land of struggling
pioneers, who had little truck or trade with the world out of sight
of their log shacks. The habitant on the seigneuries of Lower Canada
continued to farm as his grandfather had farmed, finding his holding
sufficient for his modest needs, even though divided into ever narrower
ribbons as le bon Dieu sent more and yet more sons to share the
heritage. The English-speaking settler, equipped with ax and sickle and
flail, with spinning wheel and iron kettle, lived a life almost equally
primitive and self-contained. He and his good wife grew the wheat, the
corn, and the potatoes, made the soap and the candles, the maple sugar
and the "yarbs," the deerskin shoes and the homespun-cloth that met
their needs. They had little to buy and little to sell. In spite of the
preference which Great Britain gave Canadian grain, in return for the
preference exacted on British manufactured goods, practically no wheat
was exported until the close of this period. The barrels of potash and
pearl-ash leached out from the ashes of the splendid hardwood trees
which he burned as enemies were the chief source of ready money for the
backwoods settler. The one substantial export of the colonies came, not
from the farmer's clearing, but from the forest. Great rafts of square
pine timber were floated down the Ottawa or the St. John every spring
to be loaded for England. The lumberjack lent picturesqueness to
the landscape and the vocabulary and circulated ready money, but his
industry did little directly to advance permanent settlement or the wise
use of Canadian resources.

The self-contained life of each community and each farm pointed to the
lack of good means of transport. New Brunswick and the Canadas were
fortunate in the possession of great lake and river systems, but these
were available only in summer and were often impeded by falls and
rapids. On these waters the Indian bark canoe had given way to the
French bateau, a square-rigged flat-bottomed boat, and after the war
the bateau shared the honors with the larger Durham boat brought in from
"the States."

Canadians took their full share in developing steamship transportation.
In 1809, two years after Fulton's success on the Hudson, John Molson
built and ran a steamer between