Within a month, 3,000 men had been transported to the West, some as far as 2,500 miles and the rest about 1,800. With over 1,500 Westerners under arms, a force of 4,500 was collected; though, as it happened, the later arrivals had no chance to share in the fighting. The prairie section of the railway was already built, but it only ran within about two hundred miles of the rebel centres in the north. From Qu’Appelle one force under General Middleton had to march against the Métis at Batoche, near Duck Lake. Another column, under Colonel Otter, had to go on to Swift Current and thence across the prairie to fight the Indians besieging Battleford. A third force, under General Strange, including the 91st Battalion from Winnipeg and a French-Canadian battalion, the 65th from Montreal, had to march north from Calgary to Edmonton, and thence reach Fort Pitt by trail and river. Some of them marched the soles off their boots, but when I came up with them towards the end of the campaign, doing sentry-go in bare feet near Beaver River, they were cheery as larks and singing the old folk-songs their forefathers had sung in the France of the seventeenth century. Embarking at Qu’Appelle in a caboose with an advance party of Otter’s Indian-fighters, I landed, one fine April morning, at Swift Current, then consisting of half a dozen shacks. When the rest of the column arrived, we found ourselves 500 strong: the Queen’s Own Rifles of Toronto, in their dark green uniforms; a company of red-coated sharpshooters, picked from the Governor-General’s Foot Guards of Ottawa; a company from the Toronto School of Infantry; a bunch of blue-coated artillery-men from Quebec, with a gatling and two field guns; and forty Mounted Police. To reach the beleaguered town we knew we should have to cross 180 miles of uninhabited wilderness. We had, therefore, to accumulate a train of farm wagons to carry food for the troops, hay and oats for the horses, and even wood for our camp fires. Many pioneer farmers of Manitoba and the territories let their land lie fallow that year and spent the summer teaming at $10 a day for the Government. Hour after hour, day after day, the thin line of wagons and horsemen, four miles long from van to rear, rolled northwards up the trail. Not a man did we see, nor sign of life, except for the meadow larks and gophers. At last we stood on the bank of the Battle River,—and over there we were thankful to see the old Battleford stockade still sheltering the refugees we had come to save. The Indians vanished on our approach, and pitched their camp on Poundmaker’s reserve, nearly forty miles away in the west. So in the afternoon of the first of May, leaving half our little force to guard the town, but taking with us a company of the beleaguered white men who had organized themselves as a “Battleford Home Guard,” we set out on the enemy’s track, carrying five days’ rations and little else.