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 NEW WEST BRITISH COLUMBIA.

CHAPTER XVII.

CONCLUSION.

Before closing our record of the advance of the white man westwards, we must glance once more at British America, which we left on the eve of the great political crisis at the end of the Last century—a crisis which, after long years of absorbing struggles, resulted in the consolidation into a single colony of Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, British Columbia, and the vast territories long held by the Hudson's Bay and other North-west companies.

The banks of the Red River of the North, the shores of the Lake of the Woods, and the vast prairie lands beyond them, were by this time well dotted with French and English colonies. Lord Selkirk, a chief partner in the Hudson's Bay Company, had purchased land of the Indians far beyond