sold to the Diocese of St. Boniface. One of the St.-Hubert colonists wrote to the colony's patron; "Everlasting curse for your deceit and treason against me. Bloody revenge will be sure." 'The Counts' generally are viewed as not succeeding in their various endeavours because their lifestyles were too extravagant, and because they lacked business acumen. Their expensively run households, their livery coaches, their hunts and races at Moosomin and Cannington Manor, and their gay social life indeed were extravagant, according to the standards of the pioneers who settled alongside them. One meal's menu served by a Count dished up a pig stuffed with a whole goose which was itself filled with epicurean dressing along with a complement of oysters. Annually the Counts booked the Whitewood Commercial Hotel for the Frenchman's Ball. "Many pretty dresses of the style of the late eighties were in evidence, souvenirs perhaps of better days across the sea. The vivacious Frenchwomen of gentle birth and breeding in fashionable décolleté gowns and jeweled neck and arms lent an air of distinction in spite of the incongruity of the crude setting" But we have no way of knowing whether these activities were extravagant by their standards, since we do not have access to their account ledgers. As for the claim that they lacked "business knowledge this does them an injustice. The only outstanding business failures were the Gruyere cheese enterprise, the Kalenterin term ranch sheep-raising project, and perhaps de Roffignac-Farquet de Langle horse-raising venture. The chicory enterprise under de Beaudrap a 'success story', even if it did take two fires and two moves before the enterprise started yielding a small profit. Another 'success story' might well have been the beet-root project, had de Roffignac and van Brabant been more politically adept. Undoubtedly, 'the Counts' did sink a large amount of money into the St. Hubert colony. The fact that some had to borrow money to return to France indicates that they reaped far from a high return on their investment. Possibly, though, some of them left because they were conquered by the prairie. Life in the Canadian West did not meet their expectations, and they refused to compromise. Westerners, both in Canada and in the United States, were wrestling through the 1880s and 1890s with the thorny problem of developing farming techniques suited to the dry climate and short growing-season of the central plains. The agricultural field was