944

SELKIRK SETTLEMENT OF PEMBINA.

1823.

sand one hundred and thirty pounds. During the next succeeding ten years, the aggregate was about seventy millions of pounds.

The average number of miners during the year 1825, was one hundred; in 1826, four hundred; and in 1827, one thousand six hundred. Many citizens of Illinois, from the counties of St. Clair, Madison, &c, went up the river with supplies of provision in the spring, to prosecute mining, and returned downward and homeward at the approach of winter. From this trifling incident, a mischievous wag from " Yankeedom," ycleped the people of Illinois, " Suckers," from these migratory miners.

In 1811, the Hudson's Bay Company, made a grant to Lord Selkirk, a Scotch nobleman, and influential member of the company, of a large tract of laud, including Bed river up to Bed Fork. This nobleman, having extinguished the Indian title, at once set to work vigorously to establish a colony, in the interests of the Hudson's Bay Company, and in 1812, settlers were procured from the highlands of Scotland, from Switzerland, England, and other parts of Europe, and two settlements were formed; one at Pembina, about two miles below the Pembina river; the other at Fort Douglass, about sixty miles below Pembina, near the confluence of the Assiniboin and Red rivers.

At this period the rivalry between the North-Yfest (Fur) Company, which was started by John Jacob Astor, of New York, in 1809, and the Hudson's Bay Company, was very great, and the new settlers had among other difficulties, many strifes with the agents of the rival company. In 1815, they were even dispersed. But in 1816, they returned, and Lord Selkirk, acted so vigorously in maintaining the commercial and territorial rights of the Hudson's Bay Company, that he succeeded in reducing the trading posts of the other, and in 1821, the two were conjoined, and thus an end put to all further strife.

The settlements wdiich he had founded continued in existence, and Pembina proving afterward to be below the 49th degree of latitude, it fell within the boundary of the United States. In 1823, Major Long was sent upon an expedition to the source of St. Peter's river, Lake "Winnepeck, Lake of the "Woods, &c, for the purpose of topographically exploring those regions; and the following account of the settlement of Pembina, is taken from Mr. Keating's account of that expedition:

"Pembina constituted the upper settlement made on the tract of land granted to the late Lord Selkirk, by the Hudson's Bay