Two other churches were erected by the
Presbyterians, and beside each a school. For several years before the
old Colony ceased Mr. Black conducted service in the Court House near
Fort Garry, and in 1868, with the assistance of Canadian friends,
erected the small Knox Church on Portage Avenue, in Winnipeg. This
building, though used, was not completed till after the arrival of the
Canadian troops in 1870.
EARLY RED RIVER CULTURE.
Strange as it may seem, the isolated Red River Colony was far from being
an illiterate community. The presence of the officers of the Hudson's
Bay Company, the coming of the clergy of the different churches, who
established schools, and the leisure for reading books supplied by the
Red River Library produced a people whose speech was generally correct,
and whose diction was largely modeled on standard books of literature.
Mrs. Marion Bryce has made a sympathetic study of this subject, and we
quote a number of her passages:
SCIENTIFIC WORK.
The duty laid upon the Hudson's Bay Company officers and clerks of
keeping for the benefit of their employers a diary recording everything
at their posts that might make one day differ from another, or indeed
that often made every day alike, cultivated among the officers of the
fur trade the powers of observation that were frequently turned to
scientific account, and we find some of them acting as corresponding
members of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
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