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Thomas Douglas, fifth Earl of Selkirk, a noble humanitarian Scot concerned with the plight of the crofters of his native Highlands, conceived a plan to settle them in the valley of the Red River of the North.

Since the land he desired lay within the great northern empire of the Hudson's Bay Company, he purchased great blocks of the Comany's stock with the view to controlling its policies.

Having achieved this end, he was able to buy 116,000 square miles in the valleys of the Red and Assiniboine rivers.

The grant, which stretched southward to Lake Traverse -- the headwaters of the Red -- was made in May, 1811, and by October of that year a small group of Scots was settling for the winter at York Factory on Hudson Bay.

Thus at the same time that William Henry Harrison was preparing to pacify the aborigines of Indiana Territory and winning fame at the battle of Tippecanoe, Anglo-Saxon settlement made a great leap into the center of the North American continent to the west of the American agricultural frontier.