s the willingness of the Police, even at great risk to themselves,
to allow the alleged wrong-doer to get the benefit of a fair British
trial after his arrest, that gradually gave the Indians a new sense of
obligation to the men of the scarlet tunic. This splendid part of the
Police tradition won its way steadily till great war camps came to
realize that the Police stood for the square deal, and that if men the
Police wished to arrest were innocent, they would not be punished. And
with that lesson came also into the heart of the Indian the conviction
that if any of their number did wrong they should, as westerners used to
say, take their medicine and reap the due reward of their deeds. In
either case the Police approved themselves to the Indians as their
friends, not their enemies, and thus the famous corps became a very
great asset to Canada in the interests of law and order.

CHAPTER VII

THE IRON HORSES

For some ten stirring and formative years the Mounted Police had been
riding their gallant steeds over the virgin sod of the untracked prairie
before the iron horses, crossing the Red River, hit the steel trail for
the mountains and the Western Sea. It is quite certain that the presence
of the men in scarlet and gold on western plains was an element in the
situation which encouraged the promoters of the Canadian Pacific
Railway, our first transcontinental, to undertake their tremendous
project with more assured confidence. For these shrewd students of human
nature knew quite well that people would look in various ways upon the
coming of the railway.

There would be some who, like Thoreau, the hermit sage of Walden, would
resent, though perhaps for a less aesthetic reason, the intrusion of this
noisy and energetic sign of a new era. It was he who cried, "We do not
ride on the railway, it rides on us." For, while there were some in our
West who actually did feel regret at the passing of the quiet day of
their pioneer life, most of those who had the aggressive spirit of the
white race in them, were glad to see the vision of the earliest
colonists being fulfilled by the opening up of the country. But there
were others who had lived on the frontiers, and had been a law unto
themselves, who said, like a trader who saw three wooden shacks built
where Calgary now stands, "I am going to move back--this is getting too
civilized for me," and the man who said that represented a class that
had to be made to realize th