The flora of the province includes tamarac, spruce (white and black or °bog"), jack pine, trembling poplar and balsam fir over vast areas of the Precambrian district, with less plentiful growths of oak, elm, cottonwood and °Manitoba in southern districts of the province. Small fruits such as strawberry, raspberry, blue berry, cranberry (9righ-bush" and tlow-bush°), saskatoon berries, the wild plum, cherry and black currant are indigenous. Wild flowering plants (more than 750 species of Phanerogamia) are remarkable during the summer months for their profusion of variety and color.
History and Political Development— Manitoba was admitted as a province to the Canadian Confederation only in 1870, but there is a sense in which the Hudson Bay district ff the oldest continuously British territory upx the continent. The charter granted to the Hu4 son's Bay Company in 1670 formed the basis of the British claims which came to embrace prac tically the whole watershed into Hudson Bay. French counterclaims on behalf of Canada, however, were advanced and in many cases vindicated by force until 1713 when the district became British by the Treaty of Utrecht. Pro vision was made for a commission to determine the boundanies between Canada and the Hud son's Bay territories, but no settlement was ever reached. After Canada also became Brit ish in 1763, traders from Montreal under the name of the North-West Company sought to revive the validity of the old French claims in order to vindicate their refusal to recognize the Hudson's Bay charter. This conflict in trade was accentuated rather than assuaged when the fifth Earl of Selkirk obtained control of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1811 in order to carry out his third project of colonization from the Scottish highlands. The company granted him for the purpose the district of Assiniboia, comprising 116,000 square miles and controlling the most important strategic waterways of the west. The first band of settlers reached °the Forks" of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, the site of the city of Winnipeg, on 30 Aug. 1812. From the first, however, the North-West Com pany had determined to disperse or destroy the settlement, and faulty management on the part of the officials of the colony facilitated their purpose. In 1815, 134 of the settlers were in duced to leave the Red River Settlement for Upper Canada. The rest were driven off to ward Hudson Bay. Reinforcements re-estab lished the colony in the autumn, but in the fol lowing spring Governor Semple and 20 of his men were killed at Seven Oaks, near the settle ment, by an armed band of "half-breeds' or Metis in the employ of the North-West Com pany. This act of violence at last aroused the British government from its policy of "salutary neglect," but Selkirk, who was on his way from Canada to the settlement when he received the news of Seven Oaks, made the fatal mistake of turning aside to retaliate upon the North-West partners at Fort William. The rest of his life
was filled with bootless litigation; for though he visited the settlement in 1817 and spent both health and fortune upon it, he died in 1820 without vindicating his cause. Meanwhile the British government had brought pressure to bear in order to bury the blunders of the past by a coalition between the rival companies. This was effected in 1821 under the name of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the old "North westers" became the stunchest exponents of all the rights of the charter.
The Red River Settlement, meanwhile, had suffered a series of natural as well as deliberate calamities. A plague of grasshoppers in 1818 and finally the great flood of 1826 threatened, as Governor Simpson wrote, to prove "an ex tinguisher to the hope of Red River ever re taining the name of a settlement." The colony was firmly re-established, however, by a suc cession of prolific harvests and the profusion of natural resources for primitive settlement. (Sheriff Ross records the slaughter of 2,500 buffalo in a single "hunt," and no fewer than 16,000 whitefish were taken by the settlers on their retreat after Seven Oaks). By 1830 the Red River Settlement bore every appearance of "peace and plenty." In 1834 it reverted by pur chase from the Selkirk family, in whose posses sion it had remained after the fifth Earl of Sel kirk's death, to the direct control of the Hud son's Bay Company.
After the coalition in 1821 the company's trade in Rupert's Land, as the "chartered" ter ritory came to be called, had responded rapidly to the enterprising management of Gov. George Simpson. By license issued successively in 1821 and 1838, for periods of 21 years, the company was granted a monopoly of the fur trade for the whole district westward to the Pacific. A new Fort Garry with walls and bastions of stone was built at "the Forks" (1836-38) but the Red River Settlement re mained for more than a generation a primitive and secluded community. The primitive "coun cil" at the settlement gave place after 1834 to the regularly constituted "Council of Assini ',cilia." After 1841 the "Municipal District of Assiniboia° came to include only the area within a radius of 50 miles from "the Forks" of the Red River and the Assiniboine. Colonization was overshadowed by the opulence and mystery of the fur-trade, and though the company can scarcely be charged with neglect, Selkirk's orig inal plan of affording a stable and ready market for agricultural produce in the expanding trade of the company was only partially realized. With the advent of the American trader from the south and the enterprise of the "free-trad ers" within the settlement itself, even the com pany's cherished monopoly of the fur-trade was subject to challenge.