Now that we have followed the main line of the Canadian Pacific to the coast and have paid tribute to the actual builders it is fitting to devote a brief chapter to a body of men who, while not taking part directly in the work, did so much to make that work possible that they were often officially thanked by the railway heads for their extraordinary assistance. I refer now particularly to the part played on the stage of Western development by that famous corps, the North-West Mounted Police. I am giving here the original title. Since the time when they were so designated, the prefix “Royal” was given by King Edward, as a recognition of the great services of these knights of the saddle. Still later, when, shortly after the outbreak of the Great War, they were for obvious important reasons distributed all over the Dominion, they were given the present name of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Names have changed, but throughout the fifty years from their organization these riders in the scarlet and gold uniform have done their duty as law-and-order men, inflexible, untiring and incorruptible, in their guardianship of life and property on the widest frontier in the world. The fact that they became an important factor in the conception and building of the Canadian Pacific Railway was foreshadowed in the famous report made by Capt. W. F. Butler (afterwards Sir William Butler, of South Africa,) in the year 1871, when he travelled over the “great lone land” and made recommendation how to preserve law and order in that vast prairie country. The railway would not have come into a country that would not some day be populated, and no country would be populated unless immigrants and homesteaders were given assurance that their lives and property would be protected in the new country. So it was that Butler recommended the formation of a “mobile force,” because a force located at fixed points or forts “would afford no adequate protection outside the immediate circle of these points and _would hold out no inducements to the establishment of new settlements_.” And Butler says he made his recommendation because he saw “a vast country lying, as it were, silently awaiting the approach of the immense wave of human life which rolls unceasingly from Europe to the American continent.” Butler added that, though the Western plains were far from the Atlantic seaboard, “still that wave of human life is destined to reach those beautiful solitudes and to convert their now useless vegetation into all the requirements of civilized existence.” And it is historically true to say that homesteaders began to come to the great lone land with more confidence once the Mounted Police had taken control of the country in the early 70’s. The notable painting, “Any Complaints?” by Paul Wickson, is based on this idea. It represents the police patrol riding up to the homesteader at his plough and asking if he has been troubled by horse thieves, or cattle stealers or lawless Indians.