d-right. Fortunately these
qualities were pre-eminent in Mr. Laird, who had administered the
government of the organized Territories, at a primitive stage in
their history, in the wisest manner, and, at the close of his
official career, returned to his home in Prince Edward Island
leaving not an enemy behind him.

The other Treaty Commissioners were the Hon. James Ross, Minister
of Public Works in the Territorial Government, and Mr. J. A.
McKenna, then private secretary to the Superintendent-General
of Indian Affairs, and who had been for some years a valued
officer of the Indian Department. With them was associated, in
an advisory capacity, the Rev. Father Lacombe, O.M.I., Vicar-General
of St. Albert, Alta., whose history had been identified for fifty
years with the Canadian North-West, and whose career had touched
the currents of primitive life at all points.

[Father Lacombe is by birth a French Canadian, his native parish
being St. Sulpice, in the Island of Montreal, where he was born in
the year 1827. On the mother's side he is said to draw his descent
from the daughter of a habitant on the St. Lawrence River called
Duhamel, who was stolen in girlhood by the Ojibway Indians, and
subsequently taken to wife by their chief, to whom she bore two
sons. By mere accident, her uncle, who was one of a North-West
Company trading party on Lake Huron, met her at an Indian camp on
one of the Manitoulin islands, and having identified her as his
niece, restored her and her children to her family. Father Lacombe
was ordained a priest by Bishop Bourget, of Montreal, and in 1849
set out for Red River, where he became intimately associated with
the French half-breeds, accompanying them on their great buffalo
hunts, and ministering not only to the spiritual but to the temporal
welfare of them and their descendants down to the present day. In
1851 he took charge of the Lake Ste. Anne Mission, and subsequently
of St. Albert, the first house in which he helped to build; and from
these Missions he visited numbers of outlying regions, including
Lesser Slave Lake. His principal missionary work, however, for
twenty years was pursued amongst the Blackfeet Indians on the Great
Plains, during which he witnessed many a perilous onslaught in the
constant warfare between them and their traditional enemies, the
Crees. Being now over eighty years of age, he has retired from
active duty, and is spending the remainder of his days at Pincher
Creek,