Red River Settlement, Manitoba -- History, Manitoba 

"The Red River Settlement (1856) is the last book in Alexander Ross's great wilderness trilogy; although its subject is a more settled, established community, it shares with its predecessors the classic theme of the savage and civilization, a conflict that dominated and characterized Ross's life. W. L. Morton's introduction to the new edition points out the significance of Ross's analysis of colony life: "he saw in the Red River Colony an experiment in reconciliation of opposites as ancient as Cain and Abel, saw it with insight that moved him at once to satire and compassion."

Son of the Scottish Highlands, one of the founders of Astoria and then a fur trader on the Snake River in the Rockies for the Nor'westers, Ross had himself known the siren call of the wild and remained aware, even after he had settled in Red River, of how powerful that attraction could be. The ambivalence of the colony was reflected in his own life; married to an Indian woman and the father of half-breed children, he nevertheless believed as Selkirk had that the purpose of the settlement was a civilizing and stabilizing one. In Ross's attempts to reinforce those qualities against the nomadic element in the settlement, the Métis buffalo hunters, lie the beginnings of tensions which would, later in the century, swell into armed conflict. Evidence of those tensions in Ross's book provides a valuable and illuminating background to the Riel Rebellion.

And the modern city rising on the banks of the Red is, in a sense, a justification of his generation's belief, embodied in The Red River Settlement, in the settled ways of the good life. Ross's home, Colony Gardens, "perhaps the most civilized home in Red River," is gone but, as Professor Morton concludes, "this book is his great memorial."--Book jacket. 

xvi, 416, 16 pages, [1] leaf of plates : illustrations ; 20 cm.