water-stretches and on the whole was more suited to
amphibious animals than human beings. Some of the men now coming over it
with the police had travelled it with Wolseley a few years previously
and would have vivid recollections of the flies and mud and portages and
the need of manufacturing skidways over the bogs, but they would also
recall the irrepressible and uproarious spirit in which they used to
sing of their additional accomplishments in the rollicking "Jolly Boys"
chorus:

"'Twas only as a volunteer that I left my abode,
I never thought of coming here to work upon the road."

The Police, however, were coming in the fall of the year and escaped
some of the plagues of the earlier seasons. They duly landed at Lower
Fort Garry, the old Hudson's Bay post still romantically standing on the
banks of the Red River some 20 miles north of the present city of
Winnipeg. They came in three troops or divisions, "A," "B," and "C," of
fifty men each, which was the number of the Force which the law-makers
at Ottawa thought would be sufficient to patrol 300,000 square miles of
territory where lawlessness was beginning to be rampant. In the meantime
it was not very pleasant for the Police to land at the Fort near the
beginning of winter and to learn a few days afterwards that their winter
clothing had been commandeered by the weather and frozen in somewhere on
the Dawson Route. But this too was accepted with good grace by the men
who had declined to be sifted out of the Force by the warnings given
them as to hardships ahead.

These men at Lower Fort Garry had been on the pay-roll since their
enlistment in September, but they were not actually on service till the
3rd of November, 1873, when they were sworn in by Lieut.-Colonel Osborne
Smith, who was then in command of the Western Military District with
headquarters at Winnipeg. It is not generally known that Colonel Osborne
Smith, who had seen service in the Crimea and the Fenian Raid in 1866,
was really appointed Commissioner of the Police so as to give him full
authority until a successor was invested with the command. But I have
before me as I write the elaborate parchment which so appointed Colonel
Smith. It is dated September 25, 1873, and bears the signature of J. C.
Aikins (afterwards Governor of Manitoba) as Secretary of State as well
as that of Sir John A. Macdonald. Colonel Osborne Smith, whom I knew
well in later days and under whom I served in the Winnipeg L