CHAPTER VThe Farthest West

WERE all those good lives wasted, then, and the scores of good ships too, lost in three centuries of wild-goose chase?

But for that wild-goose chase, carried on by brave British sailors from the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, our Dominion of Canada, stretching from sea to sea, would never have come into existence. If we had not taken a vigorous part in the exploration of the Pacific coast, the Russians coming down from the north and Spaniards coming up from the south would between them have seized and held it all, till both their shares were swallowed up by our neighbors of the United States.

It has had a very curious history, this west coast of ours. To begin with, no one dreamed that there was any “west coast of America” at all, for the first explorers all thought America was simply an extension of Asia. Even when they got into the Pacific and sailed up the western shore of Mexico, they expected any day to see land barring their way and bending round to the left, so that, by following the coast, they would presently find themselves among the people of China. They were astonished at the land persistently keeping on their right, however far north they sailed.

In the days of Queen Elizabeth, only a year after Frobisher’s attempt to discover a channel through America in the North-west, his fellow-countryman SirCaptain Cook Explores the CoastFrancis Drake sailed round Cape Horn in the hope of finding the other end of that channel, which imaginative geographers had already drawn on the maps and called the “Straits of Anian.”

How far north Sir Francis got, nobody knows. Up to Oregon, for certain. The weather was bad, with “thick stinking fogs” and “nipping cold” in midsummer; so he turned back, resolved to encircle the globe by going home round Africa and India instead of around America. First, however, he landed in California, finding a “convenient harbour” which was probably San Francisco Bay. The natives were shivering under their furs, in July, but they gave the white men a warm welcome. In fact, the “King” or chief came “with a retinue of about 12,000 men,” “humbly desiring of Drake that he would accept of the Realm,”—putting a feather crown on his head, and three big chains of bone around his neck.

The great commander accepted the gift, took formal possession of the country in the English Queen’s name, and called it New Albion, as Albion was the old name of the Mother-land.

Nearly two hundred years passed before the first settlement on the Californian coast was made by Spanish missionaries from Mexico. That was in 1770. Farther north, not a white man was to be found when Captain Cook arrived on his famous voyage in 1778. James Cook, the runaway son of an English laborer, had already earned the gratitude of his fellow-citizens. Exploring vast breadths of southern sea, he had added Australia to our Empire. The northern sea next attracted him; at that time the prize offered by the British Government for the finding of a North-west Passage was $100,000.

Sailing up the Pacific as far as Behring Straits, he didSpaniards Claim the Coastnot find what he sought; but, by peering into every river mouth and inlet, he added much to men’s knowledge of the present British Columbia.

Ten years later another inquisitive Englishman visited these coasts; in fact, Captain Meares went so far as to build a house on Nootka Sound. The Spaniards, who claimed the whole Pacific side of the continent as the French had claimed the centre, warned off the “trespassers,” seized several British ships, and in 1790 planted a little Spanish settlement on the disputed shore. The governments of the two countries then came to a makeshift agreement that neither should interfere with the settlements of the other till the ownership of the soil could be decided. The naval representatives of Spain and England met on the spot, dined in each other’s cabins, went on exploring expeditions together, and joined their names in the title of “Vancouver-Cuadra” Island. Beyond this the rival powers could not get. The Spanish settlement, however, was soon abandoned.

In 1819 Spain gave up to the United States all her claims to the Pacific coast north of Mexico; but the British claims north of California remained, and for twenty-seven years the two English-speaking governments, at Westminster and Washington, exercised joint control over what was known as the “Oregon Territory.”

In the early forties, however, so many Americans had arrived and settled in the neutral territory that it could be left neutral no longer. The United States government not only withdrew from the joint arrangement, but claimed the whole territory between California and Alaska for itself. This would have shut off the British colonies from all access to the Pacific Ocean, asUnited States Frontier Fixedabsolutely as the French claims a century before would have shut off the Americans.

To guard against emergencies, and if possible to find a peaceful way out of the difficulty, a ship of the British Navy, theAmerican, in 1845 visited Vancouver Island, and Captain Gordon is reported to have exclaimed, “I would not give one of the bleakest knolls of all the bleak hills of Scotland for twenty islands arrayed like this in barbaric glories.” The captain’s brother, Lord Aberdeen, was Foreign Minister, but happily he did not throw away the future of British America because its glories at that time were “barbaric.”

The trouble was ended in 1846 by a compromise. All the western territories north of the 49th degree of latitude (except, of course, Alaska) were to belong to Britain, and all south of that degree to the United States. It was the most charmingly simple way of creating a frontier that could be imagined: rule a straight line across the map from Lake of the Woods to the Pacific shore, a line 1,200 miles long without a break, and the thing is done.

Between that 1,200-mile boundary and the Arctic Ocean the British power was represented by a great trading corporation. The Hudson’s Bay Company, as you will remember, had had its commercial monopoly extended to the Pacific shore as early as 1821, and it was no more anxious for the spread of settlement among the mountains and on the western islands than it had been on the prairie and in the woodland of the interior. The rising tide of white population would drive away the game and demoralize the native hunters.

A little agriculture was indulged in, so that theDogs Bred for Their WoolCompany’s forts should not go without fresh vegetables, and early in the nineteenth century a certain number of farmers were encouraged to take up land because the Company had contracted to feed the Russian fur traders up in Alaska. On Puget Sound, when the artist Kane reached the coast in 1847, a ranching company had about 6,000 sheep and 2,000 cattle. The wool found its way to England by the Company’s ships—the cattle were killed and salted for the Sandwich Islands and the Russian territory.

“A Babel of Languages” met the artist’s ears when he reached Fort Vancouver, as the inhabitants were a mixture of English, French, Iroquois from Eastern Canada, Crees from the Centre, and Chinooks of the west coast, with Sandwich Islanders from Hawaii. “The buildings,” he says, “are enclosed by strong pickets about sixteen feet high, with bastions for cannon at the corners.” The Company’s 200 voyageurs, with their Indian wives, lived in a little village of log huts near the bank of the river.

“Ninety miles without stopping,” six Indians paddling his canoe, is Kane’s record of his crossing from Nasqually on the mainland to the four-year-old Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island. Beside the harbor of the future capital stood an Indian village boasting 500 warriors, armed chiefly with bows and arrows. Some of their lodges were sixty or seventy feet long, and well built; the boards were split from the logs with bone wedges, but were very smooth and regular.

Dogs were bred for their wool,—a peculiar breed with “long hair of a brownish black and clear white.” A winter suit consisted of a blanket made of dog’s hair, or dog’s hair and goose-down mixed, or frayed cedarIndian Sports and Slaverybark, or wildgoose skin. The sea otter was then the most valuable fur animal on the coast—twelve blankets had to be paid for one skin. It has now been hunted out of existence.

Like most barbarians, and many white folk who call themselves civilized, the Indians were great gamblers. They often spent two or three days and nights on end playing such simple games as “lehallum.” Ten small round pieces of wood, one being black, were shuffled rapidly between two bundles of frayed bark, by one player, and his opponent had to guess which bundle contained the black piece when the shuffling stopped. A player would often keep this up till he had lost everything, even his wife; and some of them had much wealth in blankets, furs and slaves.

Coast Indian Mask

Any Indian caught by another tribe, even if there was no war between them, could be kept as a slave;Making Flat-headsand slaves had no rights, not even a right to live. Kane tells of a chief who “erected a colossal idol of wood and sacrificed five slaves to it, boastfully asking who else could afford to kill so many slaves.” Before going off to fish, or to fight, or even to gather camas, the tribe had a “Medicine Mask Dance.” Half a dozen men put on wooden masks “highly painted and ornamented, with the eyes and mouth ingeniously made to open and shut. In their hands they hold carved rattles, which are shaken in time to a monotonous song or humming noise (there are no words to it) sung by the whole company as they slowly dance round and round in a circle.”

The camas, by the way, was their favorite vegetable; it is a bulbous root, looking like an onion, but “more like a potato when cooked, and very good eating.” Fish, of course, was the principal food all along the coast. In fact, salmon pemmican was carried far inland. The coast canoe, very large but very light, was hollowed out of a cedar tree by fire and smoothed off with stone axes.

One of the chief amusements Paul Kane found among the Chinooks was picking and eating insects from each other’s heads. “On my asking an Indian why he ate them, he replied that they bit him, and he gratified his revenge by biting them in return.”

The Flat-head monstrosity which Kane found and depicted was cultivated by whole tribes on the mainland and around Victoria on the island. The infant, strapped to its papoose board for the mother to carry on her back, had its head pressed by a leather band passing tightly over the forehead and through holes in the board. This pressure was kept up steadily till the child was eight or twelve months old; that was enough to give its head the shape of a wedge for the rest of its life. KaneA Colony under a Companysays that he never heard an infant cry under this treatment until the fastenings were removed, when it would cry until they were replaced. Farther north on the island the head was pressed by bandaging into the shape of a cone.

About this time a proposal was made in England to organize a colony on the Pacific coast. The Hudson’s Bay Company asked to be entrusted with the task. Mr. Gladstone and other British statesmen argued that the Company had always opposed settlement and was quite unfit for such an enterprise: as well ask the wolf to guard the sheepfold.

The protest was in vain, and in 1849 Vancouver Island was organized as a colony under the Company’s rule. The experiment was an utter failure. The Company charged $5 an acre for land, while any settler could get 320 acres for nothing on the American side of the frontier. After five years the white and part-white population of Vancouver Island numbered 450 in all, and only 500 acres were under cultivation.

A poor little parliament of seven members was elected in 1856, and assembled at the miniature capital called Victoria; but they had little power and less revenue. The Company was still the master, and its chief agent held at the same time the position of royal governor. The settlers petitioned for direct imperial rule, and in 1858 an event occurred which compelled the Government in England to grant their request.

This event was the outbreak of the gold fever. Several years before, Indians canoeing down from Queen Charlotte’s Islands to trade at Victoria had brought with them specimens of gold, and now a rumor spread that quantities of the precious metal had been found alongThe Gold Rush of 1858the river bottoms of the mainland. The men who had turned California into a mining camp pulled up stakes and flocked northward to collect what they imagined would be easier and richer spoil in British territory.

Victoria, the little provincial capital on Vancouver Island, suddenly awoke to the noise and bustle of a commercial city. In a single summer 25,000 men landed there, while 8,000 more found their way to the frontier by land after a three weeks’ ride on horseback. Those who had come by water deposited their capital—sacks of raw gold—in the office of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Victoria, and set themselves to build rafts, boats, and canoes in which to reach the mainland and ascend the golden Fraser River. Many of them were drowned on the way; and of the 33,000 who reached the river, thirty thousand turned back in disgust to their deserted California.

The three thousand who remained had to be kept in order and provided for in some way. Governor Douglas, of Vancouver Island, was ready to undertake this awkward task, but on the mainland he had no authority except that of a Hudson’s Bay factor. On November 17, 1858, proclamation was made that company rule over the mountains and islands of the West was ended forever—surviving the East India Company’s rule over the plains of Hindustan by just eleven weeks. The Hudson’s Bay Company might continue to exist, but its trading monopoly on the mainland and its political supremacy on Vancouver Island were extinguished together. Douglas, giving up the attempt to serve two masters, resigned his connection with the Company. He received in exchange the Queen’s commission as Governor, not only of the island, but of the new colony,The Golden Gorges“British Columbia,” stretching four hundred miles eastward from the Pacific Ocean to where the Rocky Mountains look down upon the inland plains.

On the Cariboo Trail, Thompson River

The immigrant might well be appalled by his first experience of British Columbian gold-streams, for these do not meander along gentle valleys, but pour through gloomy gorges, walled for hundreds of miles by precipitous mountain sides. At the season when the human tide poured in, the water was at its highest too, and the sand-bars where men expected gold were hidden deepTreasure Trove in Cariboounder the torrent of the Fraser. Such ground as still lay high and dry was soon crowded with miners, each hunting for a fortune in a little patch of earth twenty-five feet square. Those adventurous spirits who pressed on to the upper reaches of the stream, and into the tributary gorge of the Thompson River, had to scramble along trails where mountain goats alone had trod before.

All provisions had to be brought up on the backs of men, and before a mule track could be cut along the precipices the men were reduced to a diet of wild berries. Yet some were not too hungry, nor too absorbed in dreams of gold, to be charmed by the wild magnificence of the canyon—the gloomy depths closed in for miles by perpendicular walls, then opening out in steep fantastic slopes, all splashed with brown and cream and orange and purple and black, and sprinkled with dark green solitary pines.

About $500,000 worth of gold was taken out in 1858, but it had cost the miners a good deal more than that in the getting. The next year’s yield was estimated at $1,500,000. This, however, was only a preface to the volume of riches quickly opened to a wondering world. In 1860, a young Nova Scotian named Macdonald, and two Americans named Dietz and Rose, left the Fraser and Thompson rivers behind them in search of virgin gold-fields farther north. In consequence of the discoveries they made, an unknown and uninhabited wilderness of forest and ravine sprang into fame as an Eldorado to which the miners of California and Australia and amateur gold-hunters from all the world were madly rushing.

In seven years this Cariboo district, about fifty miles square, yielded gold worth $25,000,000. In oneRiches and Starvationday five men washed $1,200 out of the soil; four men in the same short time got $1,850. An old river bed was found where nuggets could be picked up to the amount of $1,000 per square foot.

The mountain lion and grizzly bear looked on in wonder as mushroom towns sprang up in the silent hunting grounds and the rocks re-echoed with the white man’s oath and pistol. Provisions still had to be carried up from the coast on mule-back, and were often intercepted and devoured by miners travelling the same road. In the winter of 1861, flour in Cariboo cost $72 a barrel, and bacon 75 cents a pound. Next year men came in so much faster than meal that the population was brought to the verge of famine.

The miners were a rough set for the most part, given to furious gambling on the gold-fields and to excesses of every sort when they returned to the comparative civilization of Victoria or San Francisco. Still, the mining towns had their well-filled reading-rooms, their concerts and debates, and the authority of law was uncommonly well respected. “Gold commissioners” were appointed to deal out justice promptly in every camp, and over this whole system presided a judicial genius whose name was a terror to evildoers.

“Old Judge Begbie soon made them understand who was master,” says an old miner. “I saw a fellow named Gilchrist, who had killed two men in California, on trial. He killed a man on Beaver Lake, in the Cariboo country, who was gambling with him. Whilst sitting at the table, a miner came in, threw down his bag of gold, bet an ounce, and won. Gilchrist paid. The man bet again, and won again, flippantly inquiring of the gambler if there was any other game he could play better, as heBritish Justicedrew in the stake. Gilchrist took offence at the remark, and, lifting his pistol, shot him dead.

“Gilchrist was tried, and the jury brought in a verdict of ‘manslaughter.’ Turning to the prisoner, the judge said: ‘It is not a pleasant duty for me to have to sentence you only to prison for life. Your crime was unmitigated murder. You deserve to be hanged. Had the jury performed their duty, I might now have the painful satisfaction of condemning you to death. And you, gentlemen of the jury, permit me to say that it would give me great pleasure to see you hanged, each and every one of you, for bringing in a murderer guilty only of manslaughter.’ ”

Thirty thousand rough whites could hardly invade an Indian province without some little trouble from the natives, and one or two fights took place; but as a rule the two races got on very well together. The newcomers washing sand along the river beds did not destroy the game on which the old inhabitants depended for their living; true British justice was measured out to red man and to white with equal hand; and the Indians took readily to such work as white employers wanted done. An American historian, Hubert Howe Bancroft, has left on record his opinion that “never in the pacification and settlement of any section of America have there been so few disturbances, so few crimes against life and property” as in this British land.

Fifteen years after the first rush Cariboo was utterly deserted by the white miners, though the frugal Chinese continued to sift out the golden dregs left in the district. In those fifteen years many other districts in the “sea of mountains” had been invaded by detachments of gold hunters. Some of these acquired fortunes to“Black Stone” on Vancouver Islandsquander, while many came out poorer than they went in, and some never came out at all. Of the three lucky Cariboo pioneers mentioned a little while ago, Dietz died a pauper in 1877, and the body of Rose was found in the woods, starved to death while searching for new gold-fields to conquer.

Even coal-mining has had its romantic episodes in the history of British Columbia. In 1835, some Indians visiting a Hudson’s Bay outpost on Vancouver Island happened into the smithy. They were astonished to find the blacksmith burning coal, and when told it had been brought a six months’ journey from over the sea they burst out laughing. There was any quantity of the same “black stone,” they said, at the north end of that very island. Other deposits were found from time to time, and the Pacific slope farther south has been glad to draw largely on the British territory for its coal supply.

In 1864, British Columbia—the mainland territory, that is—was endowed with a separate Governor and an infant legislature of which only three members out of thirteen were elected by the people. Two years afterwards Vancouver Island and British Columbia were united under the latter name; and in 1871, when the whole colony entered the Canadian Federation, the political swaddling bands were removed, and the Provincial Legislature became an elected body, with full control over the Government.

One other striking episode in the history of our Pacific Province must still be mentioned—an episode that nearly caused a war with the United States.

When the frontier question was settled, or supposed to be settled, in 1846, a serious omission was made. OnA Hog Makes Troublethe mainland the British and United States territories were divided, clearly enough, by the 49th parallel of latitude; but when the sea was reached the line was simply ordered to follow “the middle of the channel” between Vancouver Island and the United States part of the mainland. Now there are a number of islands between Vancouver and the mainland of the United States, and therefore several channels through which the frontier might be imagined to run.

The island of San Juan, which belonged to our country or to the United States according as one channel or another might be considered the frontier, had been used by the Hudson’s Bay Company as a cattle pasture since 1843. In 1852, the “Americans” landed a sheriff and a customs officer on the island and tried to collect taxes from the British herdsmen, who refused to pay and hoisted the Union Jack.

Here were the makings of a pretty quarrel; and in 1859, when an “American” settler killed a Hudson’s Bay hog for rooting in his garden, the naval and military forces of Queen and President came within an ace of opening fire on each other.

Before this calamity could occur, however, the British Government proposed arbitration. The dispute dropped out of sight when the energies of the United States Government were distracted by the Civil War. For twelve years the settlers and hogs of San Juan were kept at peace by British and United States detachments of equal strength, and the two forces got on famously together. At last, in 1871, the German Emperor was called in as arbitrator, and traced the frontier through a channel which gave San Juan to the United States.

CHAPTER VIThe Windows Opened

FOR HUNDREDS of years the West had now been explored—inland, to find new routes for the fur trade, and up in the north to find a new sea route from Europe to Asia—but no explorer had come in to find new homes for his fellow-men.

In the middle of last century, however, the Government of Canada sent up a scientific expedition to find out the real facts about this country—for one thing, whether it was fit for agriculture. The fur traders said it was not. People overseas, and most people even in the Province of Canada, actually believed this, just as a great French writer a hundred years before had comforted his fellow-countrymen on the loss of “New France” by asserting that Canada itself was only “a few acres of snow.”

Some of the more enlightened Canadians, however, were pretty sure that the common belief was a monstrous delusion; though even they, if any one had told them the West would yield 900,000,000 bushels of grain in a single harvest, would have smiled as at a fairy tale.

Even without going very far west, the explorers of 1857 and 1858 saw enough to convince them that many million acres of the prairie were arable land of first quality. One of the chief men of the expedition, S. J. Dawson, wrote:

“Of the valley of Red River I find it impossible to speak in any other terms than those which may expressA Paradise of Fertilityastonishment and admiration. I entirely concur in the brief but expressive description given to me by an English settler on the Assiniboine, that the valley of Red River, including a large portion belonging to its great affluent, is a ‘Paradise of fertility’ . . . Indian corn, if properly cultivated, and an early variety selected, may always be relied on. The melon grows with the utmost luxuriance without any artificial aid, and ripens perfectly before the end of August. Potatoes, cauliflowers, and onions, I have not seen surpassed at any of our provincial fairs. The character of the soil in Assiniboia [now Manitoba], within the limits of the ancient lake ridges [a great lake covered that region, long ago] cannot be surpassed. As an agricultural country, I have no hesitation in expressing the strongest conviction that it will one day rank among the most distinguished.”

The windows had been opened, though the door was still shut. It was only a glimpse that the world then got by looking in, but that was enough. “A Paradise of Fertility.”

The Mother country sent out an expedition on its own account. One of its objects was to see if a railway could be built through the Rocky Mountains, as part of a great line on British soil from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That expedition discovered a pass through which the railway was finally built, as we shall see. Its discoverer, James Hector, got a kick from a horse up there, and “Kicking Horse Pass” it has been ever since. At that time, however, Captain Palliser, at the head of the expedition, reported after four years’ work that the railway would cost too much. In 1863 the Red River settlers sent an envoy to England, begging the Imperial Government to connect them with Canada by rail; but even that was too expensive.

The door stayed shut, accordingly. Settlers of theIndian Humanity and Savagerymore adventurous sort dribbled in, by the roundabout route through the States, or coming up by the Lakes. But fur traders and Indians had the prairie and woodlands almost to themselves for another quarter of a century. The Company went on bartering, the braves went on hunting—and for some years fighting, too.

As far back as 1750, Captain Coats had blamed his employers, the Hudson’s Bay Company, for not trying to convert the natives—“leaving such swarms of God’s people in the hands of the divill, unattempted, as well as the other Indians in generall, a docile, inoffensive, good-natured, humane people,”—“as if gorging ourselves with superfluitys was the ultimate condition of this life.”

The Indians may not have been so “humane” as the benevolent captain thought, but, with all their barbarous customs, on the whole they deserved his good opinion. Fighting to kill for revenge, and to prove their own courage, they considered the height of virtue. If food ran short on a journey, they would abandon the aged and sick who could not travel as fast as the rest, for delay would risk the lives of all the band. Yet Paul Kane, after visiting many tribes, declared that their affection for their relatives was very remarkable, particularly for their children. “I may mention,” he says, “the universal custom of Indian mothers eagerly seeking another child, although it may be of an enemy, to replace one of her own whom she may have lost, no matter how many other children she may have. This child is always treated with as great, if not greater, kindness than the rest.”

So far as the Indians were savage, that was all the more reason why they should be taught better. But thePrinting from Bullets on Birch BarkCompany was afraid of losing their friendship by interfering with their customs; and we remember how Samuel Hearne was pushed roughly aside when he tried to stop a massacre of the Eskimo. Paul Kane tells of a Saulteaux Indian being hung for shooting a Sioux, in 1845, but that was in the Red River Settlement, which had a judge and a court-house. The fur traders generally turned a blind eye to the savagery of their customers. Alexander Henry, who established a trading post on the Red River at the mouth of the Pembina in 1801, for the North West Company, and made a little garden there, gives this calm account of one day’s incidents: “LeBoeuf stabbed his young wife in the arm. Little Shell almost beat his old mother’s brains out with a club, and there was terrible fighting among them. I sowed garden seed.”

The Christian folk down east and over in Britain, though they knew little of what was going on out here, heard enough to make their consciences uneasy. The churches, one after another, sent missionaries to convert the Indian. The story of their devotion and sacrifice, without hope of earthly reward, would fill many books. Most of the Indians’ education has been carried on by the churches, and still is. Some of these men were as ingenious as they were devoted. There was James Evans, for example. In 1836 he not only invented a phonetic written language for the Crees, but printed it for them, at first melting down bullets to make the type, mixing soot and water for ink, and using birch bark for paper. It was hard work. “Christianity to them seems a Chimera, Religion a design to draw them from the libidinous Pleasures of a lazy life.” So it appeared to an English writer when the Hudson’s Bay Company hadHow Lacombe Stopped the Fightjust started; and far on in the nineteenth century, though many tribes had been persuaded to exchange their pagan belief for the white man’s creeds, it was difficult—as it still is—to wean them from their haphazard ways to the white man’s standard of persistent industry.

To uproot the Indian’s cherished belief in the virtue of war against a “hereditary foe” and “traditional enemy” was equally difficult—and not at all strange, considering how recent is our own awakening to the folly of that belief.

As I look out on my farm beside the old Edmonton trail, and see the motors whizzing by, I see in imagination hordes of painted Blackfeet riding over this very land to slay the Crees, and hordes of Crees again to scalp the Blackfeet—in my own lifetime, too, though I was too far off to see it.

The little town over yonder, with its churches and banks and stores, preserves the memory of those bloody times in its very name—Lacombe.

One winter night in 1865 the missionary Albert Lacombe was the guest of the chief in a Blackfoot camp. Suddenly the crackle of guns awoke the sleeping Indians. “Assinaw! Assinaw! The Crees! The Crees!” shouted the braves, as they rushed out to defend the camp. Bullets whizzed through the tent; you could smell the powder—the Crees were as close as that. Now both tribes liked the missionary, as much as they hated each other. He ran out and shouted to the Crees, but his voice was drowned in the din. He found a Blackfoot woman, dying of wounds, and baptized her. A Cree came on her body, scalped her, and killed her child. The fight went on all night, and half the campRupert’s Land Enters the Dominionwas captured. At dawn the missionary told the Blackfeet to stop firing, and went out again alone to parley with the raiders. A spent bullet struck his head, nearly stunning him, and he fell. “You have killed your friend,” a Blackfoot shouted. Then the Crees heard, and were horrified. The fight was at an end; the raiders turned right-about and made off.

Three years later, in 1868, the same Lacombe was in camp with the Crees. In the middle of the night, their scouts brought word that Blackfoot raiders were hiding in the brush across the valley. The missionary went out, and, standing unarmed in the moonlight, shouted—“Hey! Hey! Are you there and wanting to fight? Then my Crees are ready for you. Come on, and you will see how they can fight. They are brave, my Crees, if you come to kill their people!” The voice “sounded big over the great prairie”—but there was no reply. Not a shot was fired; the raiders slunk off to their homes.

Though the Indians did not know it, their country was then on the eve of a great change. The year before, in 1867, the old Province of Canada—Ontario and Quebec—had united with the Atlantic Provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to form a federation, a “Dominion of Canada.” To complete the Dominion, to unite all these British lands from sea to sea for ever in one strong federation, it was necessary first of all to bring in the vast territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company. This was done in 1869. The Company gave up all its exclusive privileges for a payment of $1,500,000 and 45,000 acres of land. The Company also kept all its forts, with full liberty to go on trading in free competition with others. This it continues to do, on the largest scale, and the white settlers whom it used to shut out areThe Red River Risingnow its best customers. As the furs obtained in two centuries of trading had sold for about $100,000,000, the shareholders had no cause to complain of their bargain.

The French Métis on the Red River, however, were uneasy when they heard of this transference of the country to new rulers, and even some of the white settlers at first objected to the change, for which their opinion had not been asked.

The Government, to get the country ready for settlers, sent land surveyors up from the East. The Métis took fright. Seeing those strangers running straight lines across the land, the ignorant people thought their farms were going to be taken away from them—the long narrow strips of land running back from the river front.

A Governor was appointed by the Dominion authorities, and came round through the United States, for there was no other railway communication between Eastern and Western Canada. When he came to the frontier, at Pembina, he found a barricade across the trail, and was ordered by a “Comité National des Métis de la Rivière Rouge,” or “National Committee of Red River Métis,” to turn back and go home again. A “provisional government” was set up; Louis Riel, a halfbreed of some education but little sense, the leader of the insurrection, seized the Hudson’s Bay post of Fort Garry, and imprisoned a number of loyal settlers. One of them, a young man from Ontario named Scott, was tried by a rebel court-martial and shot; his body was pushed through a hole in the ice of Red River.

A storm of helpless indignation swept over Canada—helpless because the rebels were separated from the seat of power and population in the East by more than a thousand miles of lake and river. An officer thenBirth of First Prairie Provinceknown only as Colonel Wolseley, later on Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, was put at the head of a boat expedition, which arrived after a three months’ journey—to find that the mere news of an army’s approach had put down the rebellion. The government made it clear to the Métis that none of their rights would be interfered with: the Red River district was organized as the Province of Manitoba and gave no more trouble.

CHAPTER VIIThe Mounted Police

NO; BUT out in the vast beyond were the makings of trouble enough. From little Manitoba to the mountains, the thousand miles of plain, then vaguely known as “The Saskatchewan,” lay unguarded and unwatched. The old ruling company had given up its power, and no new ruler had appeared. The throne was empty.

The Company’s authority over most of the tribes had been extraordinary. By treating the Indians as its children, with a wise mixture of patience and firmness, by avoiding interference as a rule and acting swiftly and sharply when action was both necessary and possible, the Hudson’s Bay men had won both affection and respect. More than once a young clerk had walked alone into an Indian camp after a murderer, shot the fellow where he stood, and walked out untouched without a word.

What was to happen now?

It was the dangerous age of the West. Along the frontier in the south the risk was great. Over the Blackfeet, in their pride and power, even the Company had never gained as much influence as it had with the rest. And now a new danger appeared in that quarter. The neighboring territory of the United States had been allowed to become the happy hunting ground of rascals. They snapped their fingers at the law of their own land; they thought nothing of killing their fellow-whites,Ruffians on the Borderand less than nothing of killing an Indian. What was a frontier to them? Laughing at the weakness of their own government, they thought they could defy the British Government too. They did not know our way.

One day a band of these ruffians crossed the line from Montana with a cargo of smuggled whiskey. Coming to a camp of Assiniboines, they first got possession of everything the Indians could be persuaded to barter for the fiery spirit. At night, when most of the unsuspicious red men were indulging in a drunken dance, the “traders” suddenly poured volleys of lead into the defenceless crowd. Forty Indians were shot dead and many others wounded; only a remnant escaped to the neighboring Cypress Hills.

The liquor was murderous enough, without such massacres. The smugglers plied their devilish trade unceasingly; who was there to hinder? The Indians, poisoned and demoralized, fought each other worse than ever. If this thing had gone on, white settlement would have been impossible.

The story of the swift restoration of peace and order is one of the finest in Canadian history. It is the story of the North West Mounted Police.

Rudely awakened by the Red River outbreak, and warned by the Imperial authorities—who had persuaded the Company to surrender the West to Canada, and were therefore peculiarly responsible for the welfare of its inhabitants—the Federal Government took action. A little force of three hundred red-coats was organized in 1873 and told to keep order in a territory of two and a half million square miles. Impossible, it sounds. Yet the thing was done.“It is Like a Miracle”

The frontier campaign against the whiskey runners in the south-west was undertaken by half the force, 150 men. In 1874 prohibition was established for the whole territory, with severe penalties for selling or giving liquor to Indians. At the end of one year Colonel MacLeod, the commander, was able to report a “complete stoppage of the whiskey trade throughout the whole of this section”—which was the worst in the country. The drunken riots, which had been almost a daily occurrence, were entirely at an end. In fact, “a more peaceable community than this, with a very large number of Indians camped along the river, could not be found anywhere. Everyone united in saying how wonderful the change is. People never lock their doors at night, and have no fear of anything being stolen which is left outside; whereas, just before our arrival, gates and doors were all fastened at night, and nothing could be left out of one’s sight.” “It is like a miracle wrought before our eyes,” said the veteran missionary John McDougall, whom I met years afterwards riding as a volunteer scout in the Saskatchewan campaign. It was chiefly owing to MacLeod that the Blackfoot tribes in 1877 signed a treaty by which certain lands were set apart for ever as their Reserves, the Government agreeing to pay them a yearly subsidy of $5 a head. Such treaties had already been made with Indians farther east. At a great gathering of the Blackfoot and kindred tribes, the Governor of the Territory, David Laird, told them that the Queen was much pleased by the way they had helped the Police and obeyed the law. “The Great Spirit,” he said, “has made the white man and the red man brothers, and we should take each other by the hand. The Great Mother loves all her children, white men and red menBlackfoot and Blood Make Treatyalike. You will always find the Mounted Police on your side if you keep the Queen’s laws.”

The head Chief, Crowfoot, coming forward to sign the treaty, declared that the advice given to his people had proved to be good. “If the Police had not come,” said he, “where would we all be now? Bad men and whiskey were killing us so fast that very few of us indeed would have been left to-day. The Mounted Police have protected us as the feathers of the bird protect it from the frosts of winter.” And Red Crow, Chief of the Bloods, who signed with Crowfoot, added that MacLeod had made many promises to him and kept them all; not one of them was broken. The town that grew up beside MacLeod’s old fort preserves his memory in its name; and Calgary, where he built a fort in 1875, was called after his birthplace on the west coast of Scotland. A French trading post had been established near the same spot on the Bow River as far back as 1752, by Niverville, a kinsman of the great explorer Vérendrye.

The most romantic tales are told of the Mounted Police and their unbeatable pluck. Too romantic to be true, perhaps you think. No; I might have thought so once. But after seeing these men at work, in peace and war, I can imagine no duty so hard, so long or so dangerous that they would shrink from shouldering it or fail to carry it through at any cost. A single trooper would think no more of walking into the strongest camp, arresting an Indian and bringing him out, than I would think of riding into a herd of cattle and cutting out a steer. Next day, with an equally light heart, he would start off on a six months’ hunt for some desperate criminal in the ends of the earth, travelling summer and winter,Achievements of the Mounted Policeover land and water and snow and ice, and bringing back his man or perishing in the attempt.

The Indians quickly learnt that the man in the red coat was “he who must be obeyed.” They were impressed by the fact that the Police, whether one or many, had the authority of the “Great White Mother,” the Queen. That by itself, however, might have forced only a grudging obedience. It was the character of the police themselves that won for them an authority over the tribes as remarkable as the Hudson’s Bay factor ever possessed.

With rare exceptions, which were swiftly thrown out on discovery, the Mounted Police were not only brave but considerate, scrupulously fair, and neither to be bribed nor wheedled. That is, they upheld the true British standard of honor. The Indian learnt to trust them because they proved themselves worthy of trust. I have known tribesmen come to a police corporal, rather than any one else, for advice in all sorts of social and domestic difficulties.

Unfortunately, the Indians south of the line had had a very different experience. There was no great company interested in protecting them, and no one did protect them, from irresponsible and rascally white men. Even the Indian Agents appointed by the Government at Washington to “father” the tribes often proved the worst of step-fathers. The Indians, swindled and outraged, took vengeance in their primitive way on any one of the same race as their oppressors. The innocent settler suffered for the deeds of his guilty fellow-countrymen. Then the army was sent to punish, not the white criminal, but the red avenger. Long and desperate “Indian Wars” were the result.“Where’s Your Troop?”

The Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, after wiping out a force sent against him in one of these wars, fled to Canada. That was in 1877. Already, the year before, 3,000 Indians had come in from the States, saying they had not been able to lie down in safety for years, and their grandfathers had told them they would find peace in the land of the British.

The new incursion was decidedly embarrassing. Even if they behaved themselves in Canada—as they did, under the watchful eye of the Mounted Police—the name of Sioux had a terrifying sound, and their presence wandering over the prairie would hardly encourage farmers to settle there. Besides, the buffalo were being swept off the prairie, and it would soon be hard enough to provide for our own buffalo-hunting tribes. The newcomers, therefore, were not given a Canadian reserve to settle on, and to our great relief they went back to their own country in 1881, accepting an offer of peace from the Washington Government.

A few years later, a band of our own Indians fled across the line to avoid punishment for the unprovoked rebellion which I shall soon have to narrate. When the trouble had blown over, they decided to come back. A whole troop of United States cavalry escorted them to the frontier at a point where they were to be handed over to the Canadian Mounted Police. There they found a corporal and one constable, with an interpreter. The United States officer was puzzled. “Who is in command?” he asked. “Myself,” said the Canadian corporal. “But where’s your troop?” said the officer. “Here they are,” replied the corporal, pointing to his solitary constable.

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