Father Lacombe was one of the priests who threaded the trails of the North-western timber land and the Far Western prairie when white men were very few indeed in that country, and the only settlements were those that had grown around the frontier forts and the still earlier mission chapels. For instance, in 1849, at twenty-two years of age, he slept a night or two where St. Paul now weights the earth. It was then a village of twenty-five log-huts, and where the great building of the St. Paul _Pioneer Press_ now stands, then stood the village chapel. For two years he worked at his calling on either side of the American frontier, and then was sent to what is now Edmonton, in that magical region of long summers and great agricultural capacity known as the Peace River District, hundreds of miles north of Dakota and Idaho. There the Rockies are broken and lowered, and the warm Pacific winds have rendered the region warmer than the land far to the south of it. But Father Lacombe went farther--400 miles north to Lake Labiche. There he found what he calls a fine colony of half-breeds. These were dependants of the Hudson Bay Company--white men from England, France, and the Orkney Islands, and Indians and half-breeds and their children. The visits of priests were so infrequent that in the intervals between them the white men and Indian women married one another, not without formality and the sanction of the colony, but without waiting for the ceremony of the Church. Father Lacombe was called upon to bless and solemnize many such matches, to baptize many children, and to teach and preach what scores knew but vaguely or not at all. In time he was sent to Calgary in the province of Alberta. It is one of the most bustling towns in the Dominion, and the biggest place west of Winnipeg. Alberta is north of our Montana, and is all prairie-land; but from Father Lacombe's parsonage one sees the snow-capped Rockies, sixty miles away, lying above the horizon like a line of clouds tinged with the delicate hues of mother-of-pearl in the sunshine. Calgary was a mere post in the wilderness for years after the priest went there. The buffaloes roamed the prairie in fabulous numbers, the Indians used the bow and arrow in the chase, and the maps we studied at the time showed the whole region enclosed in a loop, and marked "Blackfoot Indians." But the other Indians were loath to accept this disposition of the territory as final, and the country thereabouts was an almost constant battle-ground between the Blackfoot nation of allied tribes and the Sioux, Crows, Flatheads, Crees, and others.