But Crowfoot died none too soon. The history of the conquest of the wilderness contains no more pathetic story than that of how the kind old priest, Father Lacombe, warned the chief and his lieutenants against the coming of the pale-faces. He went to the reservation and assembled the leaders before him in council. He told them that the white men were building a great railroad, and in a month their workmen would be in that virgin country. He told the wondering red men that among these laborers would be found many bad men seeking to sell whiskey, offering money for the ruin of the squaws. Reaching the greatest eloquence possible for him, because he loved the Indians and doubted their strength, he assured them that contact with these white men would result in death, in the destruction of the Indians, and by the most horrible processes of disease and misery. He thundered and he pleaded. The Indians smoked and reflected. Then they spoke through old Crowfoot: "We have listened. We will keep upon our reservation. We will not go to see the railroad." But Father Lacombe doubted still, and yet more profoundly was he convinced of the ruin of the tribe should the "children," as he sagely calls all Indians, disobey him. So once again he went to the reserve, and gathered the chief and the headmen, and warned them of the soulless, diabolical, selfish instincts of the white men. Again the grave warriors promised to obey him. The railroad laborers came with camps and money and liquors and numbers, and the prairie thundered the echoes of their sledge-hammer strokes. And one morning the old priest looked out of the window of his bare bedroom and saw curling wisps of gray smoke ascending from a score of tepees on the hill beside Calgary.[1] Angry, amazed, he went to his doorway and opened it, and there upon the ground sat some of the headmen and the old men, with bowed heads, ashamed. Fancy the priest's wrath and his questions! Note how wisely he chose the name of children for them, when I tell you that their spokesman at last answered with the excuse that the buffaloes were gone, and food was hard to get, and the white men brought money which the squaws could get. And what is the end? There are always tepees on the hills now beside every settlement near the Blackfoot reservation. And one old missionary lifted his trembling forefinger towards the sky, when I was there, and said: "Mark me. In fifteen years there will not be a full-blooded Indian alive on the Canadian prairie--not one."