A Clerk, After Serving The Company Ten Years, With A Salary Of About $500 Per Annum, Is Considered Qualified For Membership, With The Right To Vote In The Deliberations Of The Company, And One Share In The Profits.

The profits of a share last year amounted to $10,000! A factor of the company, after serving ten years, is entitled to membership with the profits of two shares.

The aristocracy of the settlement consists principally of retired factors and other members of the company, who possess large fortunes, dine on juicy roast beef, with old port, ride in their carriages, and enjoy life in a very comfortable manner. Two of the company's ships sail up into Hudson's Bay every year to bring merchandise to the settlement and take away furs. [1] But the greatest portion of the trade is done with Minnesota. Farming is carried on in the neighborhood of the settlement with cheerful ease and grand success. I was as much surprised to hear of the nature of their agriculture as of anything else concerning the settlement. The same kind of crops are raised as in Pennsylvania or Maine; and this in a country, be it remembered, five hundred miles and upwards north of St. Paul. Stock must be easily raised, as it would appear from the fact that it is driven down here into the territory and sold at a great profit. Since I have been here, a drove of fine-looking cattle from that settlement passed to be sold in the towns below, and a drove of horses is expected this fall. The stock which comes from there is more hardy than can be got anywhere else, and therefore is preferred by the Minnesotians.

[1 "The Hudson's Bay Company allows its servants, while making a voyage, eight pounds of meat a day, and I am told the allowance is none too much." (Lieutenant Howison's Report on Oregon, p. 7.)]

The following extract from Ex-Governor Ramsey's address, recently delivered before the annual fair at Minneapolis, wherein he gives some results of his observations of the Red River settlement during his trip there in 1851, will be read with much interest:

"Re-embarking in our canoes, we continued descending the river for some fifteen miles further, through the French portion of the settlement, lining mainly the west or left bank of the river, until we arrived about the centre of the colony, at the mouth of the Assinniboin tributary of Red River, where we landed and remained a few days, viewing the colony and its improvements. I was at that time, and am even now, when I look back upon it, lost in wonder at the phenomena which that settlement exhibits to the world, considering its location in an almost polar region of the North. Imagine a river flowing sluggishly northward through a flat alluvial plain, and the west side of it lined continuously for over thirty miles with cultivated farms, each presenting those appearances of thrift around them which I mentioned as surrounding the first farms seen by us; but each farm with a narrow frontage on the river of only twenty-four rods in width, but extending back for one or two miles, and each of these narrow farms having their dwellings and the farm out-buildings spread only along the river front, with lawns sloping to the water's edge, and shrubbery and vines liberally trained around them, and trees intermingled the whole presenting the appearance of a long suburban village such as you might see near our eastern sea-board, or such as you find exhibited in pictures of English country villages, with the resemblance rendered more striking by the spires of several large churches peeping above the foliage of the trees in the distance, whitewashed school-houses glistening here and there amidst sunlight and green; gentlemen's houses of pretentious dimensions and grassy lawns and elaborate fencing, the seats of retired officers of the Hudson's Bay Company occasionally interspersed; here an English bishop's parsonage, with a boarding or high school near by; and over there a Catholic bishop's massive cathedral, with a convent of Sisters of Charity attached; whilst the two large stone forts, at which reside the officers of the Hudson's Bay Company, or of the colony once called Upper Fort Garry, and situated at the mouth of the Assinniboin, and the other termini the Lower Fort Garry, which is twenty miles farther down the river, helped to give additional picturesqueness to the scene.

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