While Lord Selkirk's
agents on the banks of the Red River may have been aggressive in pushing
their rights, yet to the Canadians was chargeable the greater part of
the bloodshed. This was but natural. To the hunter, the trapper, and the
frontiersman the use of firearms is familiar. The fur trader protects
himself thus from the bear and the panther. The hot blood of the Metis
as he careered over the prairie on his steed boiled up at the least
provocation.
But the disheartening law suits through which Lord Selkirk passed in
Sandwich, Toronto, and Montreal, reflected more dishonor on the
Canadians than did even the bloody violence of the Bois-Brules. The
chicanery employed by the Canadian courts, the procuring of special
legislation to adapt the law to Lord Selkirk's case, and the invocation
of the highest social and even clerical influence in Upper Canada for
the purpose of injuring his Lordship will ever remain a blot on earlier
Canadian jurisprudence. Fortunately the rights of man, whether native or
foreigner, are now better understood and more fully protected in Canada
than they were in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Col.
Coltman's report, as already stated, was a model of truthfulness, fair
play and freedom from prejudice, and Coltman was a Canadian appointee.
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