well nigh forty years. No doubt bands of Indians had threaded the
waterways, and carried their furs in one year to Pigeon River, on Lake
Superior, or to Fort Churchill, or York Factory on Hudson Bay. It was
only some ten or fifteen years before the coming of the Selkirk
Colonists that the fur traders, though they for forty years had been
ascending the Saskatchewan, had visited Red River at all. No missionary
had up to the coming of the Colonists ever appeared on the banks of the
Red River. Some ten years before the settler's advent, the fur traders
on the upper Red River had most bitter rivalries and for two or three
years the fire water--the Indian's curse--flowed like a flood. The
danger appealed to the traders, and from a policy of mere
self-protection they had decided to give out no strong drink, unless it
might be a slight allowance at Christmas and New Year's time. Red River
was now the central meeting place of four of the great Indian Nations.
The Red Pipestone Quarry down in the land of the Dakotas, and the Roches
Percées, on the upper Souris River, in the land of the wild Assiniboines
were sacred shrines. At intervals all the Indian natives met at these
spots, buried for the time being their weapons, and lived in peace. But
Red River, and the country--eastward to the Lake of the Woods--was
really the "marches" where battles and conflicts continually prevailed.
Red River, the Miskouesipi, or Blood Red River of the Chippewas and
Crees, was said to have thus received its name. Andrew McDermott knew
all the Indians as they drew near with curiosity, to see the settlers
and to speculate upon the object of their coming. The Indian despises
the man who uses the hoe, and when the Colonists sought thus to gain a
sustenance from the fertile soil of the field, they were laughed at by
the Indians who caught the French word "Jardiniers," or gardeners, and
applied it to them.

The Colonists were certainly a puzzle to the Red man. To the banks of