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 refused, but the earl was appointed a justice of the peace, and a small personal escort was granted him. At this juncture, the war with America being over, several regiments were being disbanded. The earl thereupon engaged some hundred and twenty of these disbanded soldiers to accompany him to Red River. After restoring order the members of the force were either to accept lands in the colony or be brought back at his lordship's expense. Early in June (1816), as soon as the waterways were open, the force, with Selkirk at its head, started by the canoe route up the Great Lakes. Scarcely had it passed Sault Ste.-Marie when news was received of the second overthrow of the colony. The earl at once changed his route, and made direct for Fort William, on the north shore of Lake Superior, the chief post of the North-west Company, which he seized with all its inmates on 13 Aug. All the stores were appropriated and the chief inmates sent to Canada as prisoners, some being accidentally drowned by the way. The earl and his force spent the whole of the ensuing winter (1816–17) at the fort. In the following June the expeditionary force reached the colony; Fort Douglas was retaken, the settlers were reinstated, and order was restored. On 18 June the earl concluded a treaty with the Indians, agreeing to give them an annuity of several hundred pounds of tobacco not to molest the settlers. The settlement he called Kildonan, a name it still retains. This done, he returned to Upper Canada overland, viâ Detroit, to answer various charges that had been made against him of having conspired with others to ruin the trade of the North-west Company. Many delays and irregularities attended the trials, which did not take place until the close of 1818. In the end Selkirk was fined 2,000l., a result not surprising, as the legal luminaries of the province were nearly all closely connected by family with the partners in the North-west Company. The trials, in fact, were little more than a farce. The earl returned to England in the latter part of 1818, utterly broken in health. On 19 March following he published a lengthy letter to the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, complaining of the scandalous miscarriage of justice in the Canadian law courts, and asking for a thorough inquiry thereinto before the privy council. On 24 June Sir James Montgomery, Selkirk's brother-in-law, moved in the House of Commons for copies of any correspondence that had taken place, and a bulky blue-book was soon after issued. Sir Walter Scott, too, was asked to aid with his pen Selkirk's cause, but the state of his health prevented him so doing. Shortly after, completely worn out by his troubles and vexations, Selkirk retired to the south of France, but, in spite of the devoted attentions of his wife, he died at Pau on 8 April 1820, and was buried in the protestant cemetery at that place. Although his actions have been most unsparingly denounced, there can be no question that in all he did his motives were wholly philanthropic. Selkirk's settlement is now represented by the flourishing province of Manitoba, in which his name is highly revered and his memory perpetuated by the town and county of Selkirk, both so called after him. Sir John Wedderburn has well and truly said of him that he was ‘a remarkable man who had the misfortune to live before his time.’ Sir Walter Scott, too, writing of him, says: ‘I never knew in all my life a man of more generous and disinterested disposition.’ In the year after his death the two fur companies agreed to amalgamate. It was then to the interest of both to forget the past; hence the undeserved oblivion into which Selkirk's name has largely fallen. He also wrote (vide Gent. Mag. xc. 469) a pamphlet on the ‘Scottish Peerage,’ and Bryce, his chief biographer, attributes to him (Manitoba, p. 138) two anonymous pamphlets, published about 1807, on the ‘Civilisation of the Indians of British North America.’

[Lockhart's Life of Scott; Bryce's Manitoba, &c. (portrait and facsimile autograph), 1882; various Peerages; Hansard's Parliamentary Debates; Gent. Mag. xc. 469 (obituary notice); A Narrative of Occurrences, &c., in North America, 1817; Statement respecting the Earl of Selkirk's Settlement, 1817; numerous blue-books and other publications relating to the contest on the Red River, 1812–21.] 

DOUGLAS, THOMAS MONTEATH (1787–1868), general, was the son of Thomas Monteath and grandson of Walter Monteath, who married Jean, second daughter of James Douglas of Mains. This Jean was the sister of Margaret, who was the wife of Archibald, duke of Douglas [q. v.], and the Duchess of Douglas entailed an estate with the curious name of Douglas Support to the descendants of her sister, which was eventually inherited by Thomas Monteath. He entered the East India Company's service as an ensign in the Bengal army on 4 Dec. 1806, and was at once attached to the 35th regiment of Bengal infantry, with which he served throughout his long career. He first saw service under Sir Gabriel Martindell in the trying campaigns in Bundelkhand in 1809 and 1810, during which every one of the numerous forts of the small Bundela chieftains had to be stormed, and in these assaults Douglas, who had been promoted lieutenant on 9 Sept. 1808, was twice wounded. He next served