This was nothing less than a tempting offer to transfer the whole of them to the fertile townships of Upper Canada.

He provided all the means of transport, he promised them free lands in the neighborhood of market towns--two hundred acres to each family.

Any wages due to them by Lord Selkirk he would pay and should three-quarters of the Colony accept his offer they would have provisions provided for a year free of cost.

When the poor Colonists thought of the bleak, uncultivated country in which they were, of the inevitable hardships which lay before them, and saw the dangerous, unsettled state of the Selkirk settlement, they could not well resist the offer.

Furthermore, the schemer did not stop here.