The liquor was murderous enough, without such massacres. The smugglers plied their devilish trade unceasingly; who was there to hinder? The Indians, poisoned and demoralized, fought each other worse than ever. If this thing had gone on, white settlement would have been impossible. The story of the swift restoration of peace and order is one of the finest in Canadian history. It is the story of the North West Mounted Police. Rudely awakened by the Red River outbreak, and warned by the Imperial authorities—who had persuaded the Company to surrender the West to Canada, and were therefore peculiarly responsible for the welfare of its inhabitants—the Federal Government took action. A little force of three hundred red-coats was organized in 1873 and told to keep order in a territory of two and a half million square miles. Impossible, it sounds. Yet the thing was done. The frontier campaign against the whiskey runners in the south-west was undertaken by half the force, 150 men. In 1874 prohibition was established for the whole territory, with severe penalties for selling or giving liquor to Indians. At the end of one year Colonel MacLeod, the commander, was able to report a “complete stoppage of the whiskey trade throughout the whole of this section”—which was the worst in the country. The drunken riots, which had been almost a daily occurrence, were entirely at an end. In fact, “a more peaceable community than this, with a very large number of Indians camped along the river, could not be found anywhere. Everyone united in saying how wonderful the change is. People never lock their doors at night, and have no fear of anything being stolen which is left outside; whereas, just before our arrival, gates and doors were all fastened at night, and nothing could be left out of one’s sight.” “It is like a miracle wrought before our eyes,” said the veteran missionary John McDougall, whom I met years afterwards riding as a volunteer scout in the Saskatchewan campaign. It was chiefly owing to MacLeod that the Blackfoot tribes in 1877 signed a treaty by which certain lands were set apart for ever as their Reserves, the Government agreeing to pay them a yearly subsidy of $5 a head. Such treaties had already been made with Indians farther east. At a great gathering of the Blackfoot and kindred tribes, the Governor of the Territory, David Laird, told them that the Queen was much pleased by the way they had helped the Police and obeyed the law. “The Great Spirit,” he said, “has made the white man and the red man brothers, and we should take each other by the hand. The Great Mother loves all her children, white men and red men alike. You will always find the Mounted Police on your side if you keep the Queen’s laws.”