Not but that it _might_ export, if it only had an outlet or a market;
but being eight hundred miles removed from the sea, and five hundred
miles from the nearest market, with a series of rivers, lakes,
rapids, and cataracts separating from the one, and a wide sweep of
treeless prairie dividing from the other, the settlers have long
since come to the conclusion that they were born to consume their own
produce, and so regulate the extent of their farming operations by
the strength of their appetites. Of course, there are many of the
necessaries, or at least the luxuries, of life which the colonists
cannot grow--such as tea, coffee, sugar, coats, trousers, and shirts--
and which, consequently, they procure from England, by means of the
Hudson's Bay Fur Company's ships, which sail once a year from
Gravesend, laden with supplies for the trade carried on with the
Indians. And the bales containing these articles are conveyed in
boats up the rivers, carried past the waterfalls and rapids overland
on the shoulders of stalwart voyageurs, and finally landed at Red
River, after a rough trip of many weeks' duration. The colony was
founded in 1811, by the Earl of Selkirk, previously to which it had
been a trading-post of the Fur Company. At the time of which we
write, it contained about five thousand souls, and extended upwards
of fifty miles along the Red and Assiniboine rivers, which streams
supplied the settlers with a variety of excellent fish.
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