Meanwhile, up at Stuart Lake, was Douglas learning what was untellable--the daily discipline of strong, absolutely self-reliant living; Douglas developing what McLoughlin meant should be developed when he sent the young man to such a hard post--iron in muscle, iron in nerve, iron in will. The story is told that once at a later era in Douglas’ life at Victoria, a clerk dashed breathless into his presence gasping out that a whole tribe of unruly Indians had got possession of the fort courtyard. “Will we fire, sir? Will we man the guns?” asked the distracted young gentleman. Douglas looked the young man over very coldly, then answered in measured, deliberate tones: “Give them some bread and treacle! Give them some bread and treacle!” Sure enough! The régale pacified the discontent, and the Indians marched off without so much as the firing of a gun. People asked where Douglas had learned the untellable art of governing unruly hordes. It was in New Caledonia, and the school was a hard one. Douglas’ first lesson nearly cost him his life. This story has been told often and in many different versions. The first version is that of McLean of Kamloops. All legends are variations of this story, but the facts of the case are best set forth by the missionary to the Carrier Indians--Father Morice, who questioned all the old traders and Indians on the spot. Here is the substance of the story as told to Morice: Jimmie Yale went home from Stuart Lake to Fort George on the Fraser one night in 1823 to find his two white workmen murdered by two Fraser Lake Indians, mutilated and thrown in outhouses for dogs to eat. The Hudson’s Bay Company never let a murder pass unpunished. One of the murderers was secretly done to death by paid agents of the Company, “who buried the remains,” relates Morice, “in a way to suggest accident as the cause of death.” Five years passed. Surely the Company had forgotten about the crime. The other murderer ventured a visit to Stuart Lake. Chief Factor Connolly was away. James Douglas was the only white man at Fort St. James. As soon as he heard of the murderer’s visit, he bade the Indians arm themselves with cudgels and follow him. The criminal had hidden in terror under a pile of skins in a sick woman’s lodge. Douglas dragged him forth by the hair, demanding his name. The fellow mumbled out some assumed cognomen. “You lie,” answered Douglas to the stammered answer, firing point-blank in the fellow’s face; but in the struggle, the ball went wide. The Indians thereupon fell on the criminal and beat him to death. “The man he killed was eaten by dogs. By dogs let him be eaten,” Douglas pronounced sentence, ordering the body to be cast unburied outside the palisades. This was enforcing the savage law of a tooth for a tooth with a vengeance. The chief of the Carriers determined to give young Douglas the lesson of his life. Punish murderers? Yes; but not as if Indians were dogs.