en aggressive in pushing
their rights, yet to the Canadians was chargeable the greater part of
the bloodshed. This was but natural. To the hunter, the trapper, and the
frontiersman the use of firearms is familiar. The fur trader protects
himself thus from the bear and the panther. The hot blood of the Metis
as he careered over the prairie on his steed boiled up at the least
provocation.

But the disheartening law suits through which Lord Selkirk passed in
Sandwich, Toronto, and Montreal, reflected more dishonor on the
Canadians than did even the bloody violence of the Bois-Brules. The
chicanery employed by the Canadian courts, the procuring of special
legislation to adapt the law to Lord Selkirk's case, and the invocation
of the highest social and even clerical influence in Upper Canada for
the purpose of injuring his Lordship will ever remain a blot on earlier
Canadian jurisprudence. Fortunately the rights of man, whether native or
foreigner, are now better understood and more fully protected in Canada
than they were in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Col.
Coltman's report, as already stated, was a model of truthfulness, fair
play and freedom from prejudice, and Coltman was a Canadian appointee.

So grave, however, were the rumours of these events happening on the
plains of Rupert's Land, as they reached Britain that the House of
Commons named a committee to enquire into the troubles. This committee
sat in 1819, and the result is a blue-book of considerable size which
exposes the injustice most fully. The violence and bloodshed which the
fur traders now heard of far and near paralyzed the fur trade carried on
by both fur companies, and brought the financial affairs of both
companies to the verge of destruction. Two startling events of the next
year produced a great shock. These were sudden and untimely deaths of
the two great opponents--Lord Selkirk at an early age in France, and Sir
Alexander Mackenzie, at his estate in Scotland, he having been seized
with sudden illness on his way from London. The two men died within a
month of one another in the spring of 1820. Their passing away was
surely impressive. It seemed like an offering to the god of peace in
order that the vast region with its scattered and thunderstruck
inhabitants from Lake Superior to the Pacific Ocean might be saved from
the horrors of a cruel war of brother against brother, and a war which
might involve even the cautious but hot-blooded