al silence and evinced no surprise, but they missed nothing and
when they got back home their tongues were loosed and for many a day
they recited their experiences and told the story of the white man's
great cities and manifest power.

Mistawasis, on his way home, met John McKay on the plains, and they sat
around the camp fire late that night as the chief poured out his
recollections of what he had seen. One thing had puzzled the Indian,
though he had thought much over it. "The strangest thing that happened,"
said Mistawasis, "was in Ottawa, where some good people had a missionary
meeting at a house, and they were singing songs, and a lady played on
the singing machine (piano). At last they asked me and Star Blanket to
sing. We both were ashamed, because we could not sing much. But I told
Star Blanket I would sing what the missionary taught us out on the
plains and I began, and all of a sudden the lady ran to the singing
machine and began to play and then they all joined in and I was leading
the whole band." "Now," continued the Chief, "how did they know in
Ottawa the same thing you taught us out at the reserve in Saskatchewan?"
And then John McKay told him the tune was "Old Hundred," which all good
people knew, and that the company sang it in English words while he sang
in Cree, but that they were singing the same thing. This delighted
Mistawasis, who felt that he and the white people there were really one
in the deep experiences of life. And that meant brotherhood to him.

But all the Indians were not like "Big Child," as this chief's name
meant, and so the Mounted Police had strenuous work for some years after
the rebellion, when scarcely a thousand of them had to patrol and guard
a territory twenty times as large as some European kingdoms.

From the ably written and graphic Police reports for the years following
the rebellion, one can visualize the changing conditions of the country.
The outbreak had undesignedly advertised the wide West. The thousands of
men who had come out on military duty, having spied out the wondrous
fatness of the land, had gone back to the east to become unofficial
immigration agents by telling what they had beheld. And so the tide of
humanity began to flow over the plains towards the setting sun. This
means that the buffalo were gone for all time and that game generally
would become a precarious means of existence, that the ranch and the
farm would supersede the open plain, that settlers w