The building of the Canadian Pacific transcontinental road brought in its trail a class of very undesirable men. All rules have exceptions. I must therefore be just and not condemn all, but the majority of them were toughs and whiskey peddlers. They were the forerunners of the Free Traders of the present day, from Mattawa in the east to the shores of the Pacific on the west. They would start from some town back east with a keg of the strong alcohol, a few cheap gilt watches, some fancy ribbons, colored shawls and imitation meerschaum pipes, and if they found their bundles would bear a little more weight, they generally put in a little more "whiskey." They could almost always "dead-head" their way up the line on a construction train. Any place where they saw a few camps of Indians or half-breeds they dropped off with their stock in trade. Such Indians as they found along the line were not hunters but they could act as guides to the Free Trader, and for a gaudy shawl or a few bottles of whiskey he could generally enlist one of them in his service. With an old canoe (furnished by the Indian) some flour, pork, tea and sugar, they could push their way up some river to a favorable point known by the Indian, and wait the canoes of trappers coming down on their way to one of the Hudson Bay posts at the mouth of the rivers. The route of the railway cutting the large navigable rivers at right angles, at some parts of the line, as much as a couple of hundred miles inland of our posts gave the Free Traders a great advantage as they could intercept the Indians coming down from the height of land. Even to those Indians who had never tasted liquor the very word "fire-water" had a charm and an allurement not to be resisted. Probably the whiskey trader could keep the Indians camped at the place they first met for two or three days. Once he had got them to take the second glass he could name his own price for the vile liquor and put his own valuation on their furs. I have heard of an Indian giving an otter skin for a bottle of whiskey. The skin was worth $15 and the whiskey possibly thirty cents. I knew positively of a trapper who gave a new overcoat worth $6 for a second glass of whiskey and when this took effect on his brain, for a third glass he gave a heavy Hudson Bay blanket that had cost him $8. The trader seeing he had nothing else worth depriving him of turned him out of doors on a bitter February morning. Since these men have overrun the country the Hudson Bay Company has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to protect the Indians against themselves. The laws of the Dominion are stringent enough as they are set down in the blue book of the Indian Department, but they are very seldom enforced. The difficulty is to get sufficient evidence to secure judgment or committal of the offender.