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Seven hundred miles south of York Factory, at `` the Forks '' of the Red and the Assiniboine, twenty-three men located a settlement in August 1812.

By October the little colony about Fort Douglas ( present-day Winnipeg ) numbered 100.

Within a few years the Scots, engaged in breaking the thick sod and stirring the rich soil of the valley, were joined by a group called Meurons.

The latter, members of two regiments of Swiss mercenaries transported by Great Britain to Canada to fight the Americans in the War of 1812, had settled in Montreal and Kingston at the close of the war in 1815.

Selkirk persuaded eighty men and four officers to go to Red River where they were to serve as a military force to protect his settlers from the hostile Northwest Company which resented the intrusion of farmers into the fur traders' empire.

The mercenaries were little interested in farming and added nothing to the output of the farm plots on which all work was still done with hoes as late as 1818.