The Red River Settlement: The View from the Outside

As the Red River Settlement approached its formal transfer from the Hudson's Bay Company to Canada in 1869, it appeared to the outside world to be a small, isolated, frontier community teetering precariously on the edge between civilization and savagery. Certainly this was the view of the settlement held by the Canadians, who intended to take it over and run it as a colony in tutelage to civilization. In some ways the perception was accurate.... But at the same time, appearances were in some senses deceiving.

--J.M. Bumsted, "Reporting the Resistance of 1869-1870," in Thomas Scott's Body: And Other Essays on Early Manitoba History (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2000), 179.