The closing paragraph of this fine message indicates the traditional British Empire position, that though grievances will be heard and remedied, there will be no quarter given to any nonsense on the part of rebels. And it was in keeping with this position that Colonel (later Field Marshal Sir Garnet) Wolseley was dispatched to the Red River country with regular troops, who arrived at their destination only to find that Riel and his forces had decamped before their arrival. Two regiments from Eastern Canada came later and remained on duty at Fort Garry for some time after the regulars under Wolseley had returned home. The Red River country was ushered into Confederation as the Province of Manitoba, and the Hon. Adams George Archibald, of Nova Scotia, was sent out from Ottawa in 1870 as Lieutenant-Governor. He took a rough census of the country and with the resultant crude voters' list the first regular Western Legislature was soon elected and at work. But west and north of this little Province of Manitoba, itself sparsely settled, lay an immense hinterland stretching nearly a thousand miles to the Rocky mountains and northward to the pole itself. This enormous area, then commonly called "The Saskatchewan," was unpeopled except for thousands of Indians, many groups of nomadic buffalo-hunters mostly half-breeds, a few scattered missions of various churches, and a large number of Hudson's Bay Company trading posts. Manitoba was under the oversight of a regularly constituted Government and Legislature. But out in the vast north-west hinterland it was a sort of interregnum time, in view of the fact that the Hudson's Bay Company, which had controlled the country for two centuries, had given up its charter and authority to the Dominion of Canada which had legally but not yet visibly taken possession. Or, to change the figure, the period was, governmentally speaking, a sort of "No man's land" with one party technically out of possession and the other not yet recognized by the traders or Indians as being in control. Such a situation gave a great deal of opportunity for lawlessness by warring tribes, horse-thieves, whisky peddlers, boot-leggers and all the rest of that ilk. And the proximity to the American boundary line making escape easy was an additional temptation to the lawlessly inclined. That this class did not allow the opportunity to go by unused soon became apparent to men who were upon the ground. Mr. Lawrence Clark, a noted Hudson's Bay officer, whom I remember in his later years, handsome, eager, alert and well-informed, said that both traders and Indians were learning the dangerous lesson that the Queen's orders could be disregarded with impunity.