“The confirmation of Louis Riel as President of the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land by the Convention was announced mid salvos of artillery from the Fort and cheers from the delegates. The town welcomed the announcement by a grand display of fireworks, and the general and continued discharge of small arms. The firing and cheering were prolonged into the night, every one joining in the general enthusiasm, as the result of the amicable union of all parties on one common platform. A general amnesty to political prisoners will shortly be proclaimed, and the soldiers remanded to their homes to await orders, and everything will be placed on a peace footing. Vive la Republique!” This phase of the second republic set up in Manitoba within two years was not as remote in men’s memories when Shaw reached Winnipeg as the opening of the Great War is in ours. It was part of a situation in which the Indian was still an uncertain, indeed a threatening ingredient. The surveying of the Indian reserves, hundreds of miles northwest of the Red River, where the posts of a few fur traders had afforded the only semblance of modern law and government, until the arrival of Governor Laird at Battleford, in 1876 to inhabit the quarters built by Hugh Sutherland, was the first long step toward the agriculture which has made Saskatchewan the greatest wheat growing province of the British empire. One of the Saskatchewan farmer organizations owns and operates about three hundred and fifty elevators at as many shipping points, and has increased the capacity of its own elevator at Port Arthur--eight hundred miles from the centre of the province--to seven and a half million bushels, and has acquired the old Canadian Northern elevator, with a capacity of seven million bushels more. Shaw went to Battleford, the infant capital of the North West Territories, with the party that was in charge of George Simpson. It travelled by Red River train of tireless carts. The surveyors and their camping entourage walked beside their vehicles the whole of the six hundred and fifty miles to Battleford. The route was via Portage la Prairie, Fort Ellice, where the Qu’Appelle joins the Assiniboine; the Touchwood Hills, Humboldt (where a Canadian Northern division point was established within twenty-five years), and Batoche, where the South Saskatchewan was passed at Gabriel Dumont’s Crossing. Every white man in the country could tell of fights and murders laid to barbarian account. Sixteen years previously fifteen hundred settlers had been butchered in Minnesota by the Sioux. During the spring of 1876--two years before--Custer’s force of eleven hundred men had been wiped out by the Sioux, in Montana. Bands of Sioux had come into the Canadian territory, and had always said they had no quarrel with the children of the Great White Mother. Some had settled near Portage la Prairie, and had behaved very well, on the whole.