ded testing, the "pull out" in this case was highly desirable,
but every care had been taken, and after a 2-mile test, camp was pitched
for a day or so till the real trip, across the 1,000-mile plain, was
commenced on July 10, 1874, a red-letter day in Western history.

The prairie had witnessed many a remarkable outfit striking out over the
plains with dog-trains in winter and carts and buffalo-runners in
summer, but it had never seen anything so business-like and highly
picturesque as this Police marching-out state. The six divisions or
troops of the mounted men, with the convenient alphabetical designation
from "A" to "F," had been given horses of distinctive colour, so that in
order there came for the start, dark bays, dark browns, light chestnuts
with the guns, greys, blacks and light bays. After these came wagons,
carts, cows and calves, beef cattle, and a general assortment of farming
implements. Meat would be necessary when the buffalo were not available,
and it would keep better "on the hoof." Posts would have to be supplied
with food, and haying, ploughing and reaping would be necessary if men
and horses were to live at some of the remote points. So they took the
necessaries along as far as they could. Of course, the impressive order
of march at the beginning could not be maintained throughout the
gruelling expedition. A thousand miles across swamp and _coulees_ and
rivers, over areas of waste and desolate prairie, where fires had swept
every vestige of grass away, through sections where flies and drought
and excessive heat, turning into cold as the autumn approached, played
the inevitable havoc. All these elements combined to throw that ordered
line into confusion at times. Here and there cattle died, oxen gave out
and quit, horses broke down through lack of food and water, men, hardy
as they were, took ill sometimes, but none succumbed, and as Colonel
French observed in concluding his first report to Ottawa: "The broad
fact is apparent that a Canadian force, hastily raised, armed and
equipped, and not under martial law, in a few months marched vast
distances through a country for the most part as unknown as it proved
bare of pasture and scanty in the supply of water. Of such a march,
under such adverse circumstances, all true Canadians may well be proud."
And so say we all.

[Illustration: COMMISSIONER A. G. IRVINE.]

[Illustration: COMMISSIONER GEORGE A. FRENCH.]

[Illustration: COMMISSIONER JAMES F. MAC