nadian troops in 1870.

EARLY RED RIVER CULTURE.

Strange as it may seem, the isolated Red River Colony was far from being
an illiterate community. The presence of the officers of the Hudson's
Bay Company, the coming of the clergy of the different churches, who
established schools, and the leisure for reading books supplied by the
Red River Library produced a people whose speech was generally correct,
and whose diction was largely modeled on standard books of literature.
Mrs. Marion Bryce has made a sympathetic study of this subject, and we
quote a number of her passages:

SCIENTIFIC WORK.

The duty laid upon the Hudson's Bay Company officers and clerks of
keeping for the benefit of their employers a diary recording everything
at their posts that might make one day differ from another, or indeed
that often made every day alike, cultivated among the officers of the
fur trade the powers of observation that were frequently turned to
scientific account, and we find some of them acting as corresponding
members of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Valuable
collections in natural history have been forwarded to the institution by
such observers as the late Hon. Donald Gunn, the late Mr. Joseph
Fortescue, and Mr. Roderick Ross Macfarlane.

Mr. William Barnston, a son of the Mr. Barnston, already mentioned, and
a chief factor at Norway House, about 1854, was very fond of the
cultivation of flowers and the study of botany, and some very valuable
specimens of natural history in the British museum are said to have been
of his procuring.

LIBRARIES.

Collections of books were a great means of providing knowledge and
contributing to amusement in the isolated northern trading posts.

The Red River library had its headquarters in St. Andrew's parish, and
was for circulation in the Red River Settlement. It seems to have been
chiefly maintained by donations of books by retired Hudson's Bay Company
officers and other settlers. The Council of Assiniboia once gave a
donation of L50 sterling for the purchase of books to be added to the
library. There was one characteristic of this library that it contained
in its catalogue very few works of fiction.

LITERARY CLUBS.

In addition to libraries we find that at a later date in the history of
the Settlement, literary clubs were formed. Bishop Anderson and his
sister, who arrived in Red River in 1849, were instrumental in forming a
reading club for mutual improvement,