An early 19th-century agricultural colony in the Red River (now Manitoba) area of central Canada that was granted by the Hudson’s Bay Company to Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk (1771–1820). Selkirk endeavoured to settle the dispossessed of Scotland and Northern Ireland there. His first group of settlers succumbed to North West Company pressure to abandon the area soon after their arrival in 1812. The colony was re-established in 1816, but 22 settlers were killed in a massacre at Seven Oaks, led by North West Company men and other attacks followed. Selkirk himself went bankrupt, but the publicity attracted by the affair led to the forced merger (1821) of the North West Company and Hudson’s Bay Company and cleared the way for more successful settlement in the area.