postponed indefinitely and traffic allowed to go through the States according to Hill’s suggestion. Even the contractors and the men on the North Shore began to lose heart, as men will who are being made to feel that they are engaged in a work that is not only dangerous and unnecessary, but likely to prove unprofitable should the Company become insolvent through the terrific expenditure. And these men began to lose even the incentive to endeavour when they were also told that they were engaged in a task which resembled the mythological case of Sisyphus, who was condemned to roll a great stone up a hill only to have it always slip at the top and roll down again. No man likes that endless and fruitless prospect in his work. Nor does he like working on a tower which will have to be left uncompleted for lack of means. But amid all this discouragement Van Horne remained doggedly determined to make an all-Canadian line and to build the railway on the North Shore. He doubtless used some strong language in regard to the hostile and the faint-hearted, but he pushed ahead with the stolidly unemotional will-power of his Dutch ancestry. As his ancestors in Holland had successfully dyked against the inroads of the ocean, Van Horne defied the seas of pessimistic and hostile criticism to inundate his life and put out the fire of his purpose. Then in the midst of this struggle an opportunity came his way. And his keen brain seized upon it with the swift precision of a steel-trap in action. One Louis Riel, who had stirred up a rebellion against Canadian authority in 1869, and had been hybernating in Montana for the intermediate years, began stirring up another revolt in the Saskatchewan country in 1884. Those guardians of the North-West, the Mounted Police, scattered over the vast area in small detachments, had notified the Canadian authorities ten months or so before the actual outbreak came in March, 1885. It seems now as if much of the information they gave was tied up in a bundle with red tape and pigeonholed by civil service officialdom in Regina. However, that is not part of our present story, beyond our saying that it looked at one time, to those of us who were on the ground, as if the whole Middle West, with its thousands of war-like Indians, would in a short time be swept by a prairie fire of rebellion which would leave ruin and desolation in its wake. It was vitally necessary that in such an event there should be, without delay, an overwhelming demonstration of force made by the Canadian authorities. Riel was sending his runners through the half-breed settlements and Indian camps, telling these primitive and uninformed people that if they all rose they could drive the Canadians off the plains and have these vast spaces for themselves and the wild game again.