l
or political alliance with them. We shall live apart,
rather than in ignominy and union with them." Louis Riel
was not ready the next morning to rise and lead the people
to revolt, for this occurred some years before his bloody
star reached the zenith; but the same hatred was there
years later, when he turned the governor sent to the
colony by the Dominion out of the territories, and set
up an authority of his own. Well might the French historian,
cognisant of the fate of the luckless suitor, and the
consequences of the rejection, cry out with the poet:

"_Amour tu perdis Troie._"
[Footnote: Love thou hast conquered even Troy.]

As for poor Jennie, heroic Jennie, who would follow her
lover to death itself, she submitted, after a few sleepless
nights, and days that for her were without a breakfast,
to the mandate of the guardian, and to the philosophy of
her sister. A little later, a tall, ungainly young
Highlander came, offered himself, and took to his home
the poetic and tragic daughter of the Company's officer.

Despite the blizards that sometimes come sweeping across
the prairie, smothering belated travellers, and un-roofing
dwellings, notwithstanding the frequent incursions from
regions in the far west of myriad-hosts of locusts and
grasshoppers, Red River settlement throve in wealth and
population, till, when the period with which I shall now
deal arrived, it numbered no fewer than 15,000 souls.
Upon the completion of the great Act of the Confederation
of the British North American Provinces in 1867, the
attention of Canadian statesmen was turned to this distant
colony, and negotiations were opened for the transfer of
the Territory to the Dominion. The back of great monopolies
had now been broken. In 1858, England had resumed its
great Indian empire and extinguished John Company; and
this act had paved the way for a similar resumption of
the vast prairie domain granted by King Charles to "the
Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading
into Hudson Bay." The transfer was to be effected, as
one writer puts it, by a triangular sort of arrangement.
All territorial rights claimed by the Hudson Bay Company
--and Red River lay within the Company's dominions--were
to be annulled on payment of 300,000 pounds by Canada,
and the country would then be handed over by Royal
proclamation to the Dominion Government, the Company
being allowed to retain only certain parcels of land in
the vicinity of it