Cue the summer of 1874, when the Dominion of Canada was seven years old and the Province of Manitoba only four, when Louis Riel himself was the Member of Parliament for Provencher, and when the population of Winnipeg was almost exactly the same as Niverville’s today (5,000). Niverville was nothing but a proposed stop on the new Canadian Pacific Railway, and the only so-called development there consisted of a couple of storehouses and stables which have all been lost to the sands—or, in Niverville’s case, swamps—of time.