With remarkable courage and hope the Settlers returned after what was to
some of them, their fourth Hegira, and immediately planted potatoes and
small quantities of wheat and barley. This grew well and supplied food
for them, and in the next two or three years no less than two hundred
and four houses were built. The Settlement, now freed from dissension,
had not gone through its fiery ordeal in vain. The news of a home for
themselves and their dusky wives and half-breed children, had spread
over the whole of Rupert's Land, and now began, what Lieutenant-Governor
Archibald, the first Governor of Manitoba, afterward spoke of as the
floating down the rivers with their wives and children of the Hudson's
Bay Company officers and men to the paradise of Red River. The great
majority of the employees of the Company were Orkneymen. They gradually
took up the most of the Red River lots surveyed, lying below Kildonan,
and forming the Parishes of St. Paul's and St. Andrew's on Red River,
down to St. Peter's Indian Reserve and St. James' and Headingly up the
Assiniboine. The French half-breeds who removed from Pembina and
different parts of Rupert's Land, made the great French parishes of St.
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