ench and English alike. This was immediately after the terrible
visitation of a plague, which had cut down one-sixteenth of the whole
population. It was the arrival of a party of the Sixth Royal Regiment of
Foot, along with artillery and engineers, amounting in all to five
hundred souls. The breath of the people was taken away by this
demonstration of force, and a chronicler of the time says: "From the
moment they arrived the high tone of lawless defiance and internal
disaffection raised by our people against the laws and the authorities
of the place were reduced to silence." Colonel Crofton, in command of
the troops, was appointed Governor of the Settlement, and he proved a
wise and honorable administrator. The regiment gained golden opinions
from the people, and as they spent during their short stay of two years,
a sum of L15,000 in supplies, it was, indeed, a golden age for the
hard-working Colonists. The leaving of the regiment was regretted by the
Colony.

Having now entered on a career of government by force, it would not do
to let it drop. Hence the authorities enlisted in Britain a number of
old pensioners, and under command of Major Caldwell, who was also to act
as Governor of the Settlement, sent out, in each of two successive
years, some seventy of these discharged soldiers to act as guardians of
the peace. It was pretty well agreed that these men, to whom were given
holdings of small pieces of land to the west of Fort Garry, now in the
St. James District of Winnipeg, were simply imitators in conduct and
disposition of the De Meurons, who had so vexed the Colonists. Major
Caldwell, too, by his lack of business habits and his selfishness,
alienated all the leading men of the Colony, so that they refused to sit
with him in Council. It was the common opinion that the turbulence and
violence of the pensioners was so great that, as one of the Company
said, "We have more trouble with the pensioners than with all the rest
of the Settlement put together." The pensioners were certainly
absolutely useless for the purpose for which they had been sent, that is
to preserve order in the country. The Metis, at any rate, spoke of them
with derision.

[Illustration: PLAN OF FORT GARRY]

In the year following the removal of the troops the policy of preventing
the French half-breeds from buying and selling furs with the Indians was
being carried out by Judge Thom, the relentless ogre of the law. Four
men of the Metis had bee