The economic difficulties of making the
needed readjustment, of settling down to quiet farm activities, were
heightened by the political difficulties due to the setting up of the
new Dominion authority. Then it was on the banks of the Red River that
these half-breeds, known as Metis, had risen under the firebrand Riel
in armed revolt against the incoming regime. Now, in 1885, {74} it was
on the North and South Saskatchewan. There numerous groups of the
Metis had made their settlements. And when the Canadian authorities
came in to survey the land, to build railways, and to organize
government, these people sought to have their rights and privileges
accorded them. In Manitoba, after the insurrection of 1870, the dual
claims of the old half-breed settlers had been recognized. As part
Indian, they had been given scrip for 160 acres each, to extinguish the
Indian title to the land, and as part white men, they were each allowed
to homestead 160 acres like any other settler. The Metis in the
North-West Territories now asked for the same privileges. They wanted
also to have their holdings left as they were, long narrow strips of
land facing the river front, like the settlements on the St Lawrence,
with the houses sociably near in one long village street, rather than
to have their land cut up into rectangular, isolated farms under the
survey system which the Canadian Government had borrowed from the
United States.

The requests were reasonable. Perhaps a narrow logic could have shown
inconsistency in the demand to be considered both white and Indian at
once, but the Manitoba Act had {75} set a precedent. Only a few
thousand acres were at stake, in a boundless land where the Government
stood ready to set aside a hundred million acres for a railway. The
expediency of winning the goodwill of the half-breeds was apparent to
Canadians on the spot, especially now that the Indians, over whom the
Metis had great influence, were also becoming restless because of the
disappearance of the buffalo and the swarming in of settlers.

Yet the situation was never adequately faced. The Mackenzie
Government, in 1877, on the petition of a hundred and fifty Scottish
half-breeds at Prince Albert, agreed, where settlement had been
effected on the narrow frontage system, to conform the surveys in
harmony with this plan, and the Scottish holdings were so confirmed.
Two years later the Macdonald Government passed an act authorizing the
giv