lers in the
country, the Government of the Dominion must proceed by process of
treaty. By this we mean that the Government had at the same time to
conserve the rights of the Indian and secure to them both a place of
residence and means of subsistence by a system of reserves and money
payments, and also had to so extinguish the Indian title to all lands
outside their reserves as to enable incoming settlers to enter upon
these lands and possess them on fulfilling certain conditions. That the
Government of Canada, without regard to political party, has through all
the years been more successful in these undertakings than the Government
of any other country is generally conceded. This success has been due in
part to the wise leadership of governors and commissioners and native
interpreters. But we reiterate what every one knows who has studied the
real history of this country at first hand, namely that this success was
due in a very large degree to the presence of the Mounted Police who
became from the first in the eyes of the Indians the embodiment of
genuine friendship and British fair play.

The earliest Indian treaty in what is now Western Canada was made by
Lord Selkirk, whom the Salteaux Indians in the Red River Country called
"The Silver Chief," because for sterling gifts he obtained from the
Indians for his colonists a strip of land extending back as far as one
could see a white horse on the prairie in a clear day. That was a
primitive method of measurement and depended somewhat on the
individual's power of vision, but with a vast unpeopled land stretching
a thousand miles to the setting sun no one raised questions about a few
acres more or less. Later, when the country was beginning to fill up,
greater care had to be exercised. Indians, though apparently stoical and
unemotional, are in reality very sensitive and keenly susceptible to
anything that looks like oversight or slight of them and their rights.

The year 1876 witnessed the retirement of Colonel French from the
Commissionership of the Mounted Police. He had wrought hard in the
critical tasks that fall to the lot of the foundation builder, but
desired to return to his duty in the regular artillery service in
England, where his eminent contributions to the Empire have been duly
recognized. Colonel French, who retained to the end a warm interest in
the Police, was succeeded in the Commissionership by Colonel James
Farquharson MacLeod, who had already done suc