Early Settlement
The first significant influx of Europeans was the result of French fur trading activity in the Great Lakes region. In the mid-17th century the Métis, descendants of these Frenchmen and Cree tribes people (in addition to other First Nations peoples), settled in the valley. These people, in addition to many First Nations people in the region, were hunters and traders involved in the fur trade. Soon interest in the region for its fur production led to the establishment of the Red River Colony by Lord Selkirk in the early 19th century.
Read more about this topic: Red River Valley
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or settlement:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)