ada First party took a hand in the fray.
It was composed of a few patriotic and able young men, including W. A.
Foster, a Toronto barrister; Charles Mair, the well-known poet; John
Schultz, who many years later, as Sir John Schultz, became governor of
Manitoba, and who with Mair had been imprisoned by Riel and threatened
with death; and Colonel George T. Denison, whose distinguished career
as the promoter of Imperial unity has since made him famous in Canada
and far beyond it.

The circumstances of the time, the distrust between the races and the
vacillation of a sorely pressed government, combined to make an awkward
situation. The evidence does not show that the Ontario agitators let
slip any {168} of their opportunities. The government was compelled to
send under Colonel Wolseley an expeditionary force of Imperial troops
and Canadian volunteers to nip in the bud the supposed attempt to
establish French ascendancy on the Red River. This expedition was
completely successful without the firing of a shot. Riel, at the sight
of the troops, fled to the United States, and the British flag was
raised over Fort Garry. So, in 1870, Manitoba entered the Dominion as
a new province, and the adjacent territories were organized under a
lieutenant-governor and council directly under federal jurisdiction.
Out of them, thirty-five years later, came the provinces of Alberta and
Saskatchewan.

But the fruits of the rebellion were evident for years. One result was
the defeat in Ontario of Sandfield Macdonald's ministry in 1871. 'I
find the country in a sound state,' wrote Sir John Macdonald during the
general elections of 1872, 'the only rock ahead being that infernal
Scott murder case, about which the Orangemen have quite lost their
heads.'[1]

When order was restored the clever miscreant Riel returned to the
settlement. By raising a force to aid in quelling a threatened Fenian
{169} invasion, he gulled Bishop Tache and the new governor, Adams G.
Archibald, and had himself elected to the Dominion parliament. But
Riel's crimes were too recent and too gross to be overlooked. His
effrontery in taking the oath as a member was followed by his expulsion
from the House; and once more he fled the country, only to reappear in
the role of a rebel on the Saskatchewan in 1884, and, in the following
year, to expiate his crimes on the scaffold.

Having carried the Dominion to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, the
next step for the gove