But the De Meurons were not only bachelors, but they came from the
peasantry of Austria and Italy, they had not fought for home and
country, and their life of mercenary soldiering had made them selfish
and deceitful. A writer of the time speaks, and evidently with much
prejudice, against the De Meurons. "They were," he says, "a medley of
almost all nations--Germans, French, Italians, Swiss and others. They
were bad farmers and withal very bad subjects; quarrelsome, slothful,
famous bottle companions and ready for any enterprise however lawless
and tyrannical." A few years later we find it stated that they made free
with the cattle of their neighbors, and the chronicler does not hesitate
to say that the herds of the De Meurons grew in number in exactly the
same ratio as those of the Scottish settlers decreased.
Some four years after the settlement of the De Meurons a sunburst came
upon them quite unexpectedly.
Lord Selkirk in the very last years of his life planned to bring a band
of Protestant settlers from Switzerland. A Colonel May, late of another
of the mercenary regiments, accepted the duty of going to Switzerland,
issuing a very attractive invitation to settlers, and succeeded in
shipping a considerable number of Swiss families to his so-called Red
River paradise.
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