to him, and which, under the
skillful training of the mighty hunter, he learned to ride fearlessly
and most gracefully.

The story of this, my first and last wolf hunt, has entertained
children and grandchildren, not only mine, but many others, and has
been repeated so often that it has been learned by heart, so that if,
in telling it, I have sometimes varied the phraseology, I have been
promptly corrected and set right. If any of those, once my little
hearers, should read this written history, it may carry them back to
the days when life was new and fresh, and when adventures of any kind
seemed greater and more important than they do now. "God bless them,
every one."

_CHAPTER IX._

RED RIVER OR SELKIRK SETTLEMENT.

The story of the early days of Minnesota would be incomplete without a
more detailed account of the Red River or Selkirk settlement than the
allusions made to it in the history of the Tully boys, and turning to
"Harpers Monthly" of December 1878, I find a most satisfactory and
interesting history of the enterprise, by General Chetlain of Chicago,
who is a descendant of one of the settlers and is so well and
favorably known in the Northwest as to need no introduction from me.

After speaking of the disastrous effect of the Napoleonic wars on the
social relations of Europe he alludes to the extreme suffering in
Central Europe, and in Switzerland particularly, owing to a failure of
crops from excessive rains in 1816, and says: "the people wearied of
struggles which resulted in their impoverishment, listened eagerly to
the story of a peaceful and more prosperous country beyond the sea." A
few years earlier Thomas Dundas, Earl of Selkirk, a distinguished
nobleman of great wealth had purchased from the Hudson Bay Company a
large tract of land in British America, extending from the Lake of the
Woods and the Winnipeg River eastward for nearly two hundred miles,
and from Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba to the United States boundary,
part of which is now embraced in the province of Manitoba and in which
are the fertile lands bordering on the Red and Assinniboine Rivers. It
formed a part of "Rupert Land," named in honor of Prince Rupert or
Robert of Bavaria, a cousin of King Charles II of England and one of
the founders and chief managers of the "Hudson Bay Company." In the
year 1811 he had succeeded in planting a large colony of Presbyterians
from the North of Scotland on the Red River, near its junction w