Their attitude was discomforting. They knew what had been done to Custer only three years before. They had seen, and knew the source of the rich equipment of the Sioux, who had visited them the previous summer. For many years there had been an obviously increasing threat of the submergence of their own autonomy and self-respect by white men whose far-distant friends, they had been told, drove iron horses that breathed out fire and smoke. The reserves recently staked out were too suggestive of imprisonment. Now, it was mooted, the time had come to put an end to this threat. If the young braves had been uncontrolled there might easily have been a repetition of the Custer massacre, with little chance of serious resistance from the handful of whites planted upon the Battle and the Saskatchewan. As part of the inauguration of government in the Territories a telegraph wire had been strung from Fort Garry to Prince Albert, via Qu’Appelle and Humboldt, and to Edmonton, via Battleford. Part of the line the passengers on the Canadian Northern west of Humboldt can still see from the train for many miles. The service was liable to interruption without notice. On the fringe of the wooded country a moose might rub down a slender poplar pole, and ground the wire. The wind in a naked country might do a similar disfavour to civilization. Repair gangs were neither numerous nor swift of movement. It was truly a Canadian National Telegraph, but its appropriate name was the Canadian Now and Then. Laird wired to Ottawa for special authority to deal with the whole situation as he deemed best. For many days, no answer came to repeated requests to the Department. At last he appealed direct to Sir John Macdonald, the Prime Minister. Sir John’s conviviality was for long a feature of the political landscape. Governor Laird, it was believed, caught a glimpse of it in the telegram that eventually did arrive from Ottawa: It said. “Get your hair cut.” Not another word was received from the outside world for three weeks, thanks to one of the interruptions of transmission already mentioned. Before the end of the 1879 season Shaw found that sleeping on the ground filled him with rheumatism; and he returned home convinced that civil engineering was not his mission in life. But he had seen the West in what has since become its most glamorous guise; and, having imbibed the waters of the Saskatchewan, he was to fulfil the saying that those who have once so tasted are fated to return to the scene of so much fortune. You would never think that the dapper foremaster who skips around his eighteen holes on the Mississauga course had been through the peril of annihilation by scalping knife and tomahawk with Governor Laird forty-five years ago; but it is the truth--and one of the truths that very often indeed, are stranger than fiction.