than a quarter of a century, this
section of the country has been elevated from the profound obscurity
of a lawless wilderness to one of the most thriving provinces of a
great dominion. The old Fort Garry, one of the oldest factories of the
Hudson's Bay Company, has given place to the magnificent city of
Winnipeg, with its own University, its own governing assembly, its own
clubs, hotels, its own world-wide commercial interests, besides being
the great centre of railway traffic in the country. All these things,
and many other indications of splendid prosperity too numerous to
mention, have grown up in a little over twenty-five years. And with
this growth the buffalo has gone, the red-man has been herded on to a
limited reservation, and the "Bad-man" is almost an unknown quantity.
Such is the Manitoba of to-day.

But during the stages of Manitoba's transition its history is
interesting. The fight between law and lawlessness was long and
arduous, the pitched battles many and frequent. Buffalo could be
killed off quickly, the red-man was but a poor thing after the
collapse of the Riel rebellion, but the "Bad-man" died hard.

This is the period in the history of Manitoba which at present
interests us. When Winnipeg was building with a rapidity almost
rivalling that of the second Chicago, and the army of older farmers in
the land was being hastily augmented by recruits from the mother
country. When the military police had withdrawn their forces to the
North-West Territories, leaving only detachments to hold the American
border against the desperadoes which both countries were equally
anxious to be rid of.

In the remote south-eastern corner of the province, forty-five
miles from the nearest town--which happened to be the village of
Ainsley--dumped down on the crest of a far-reaching ocean-like swell
of rolling prairie, bare to the blast of the four winds except for
the insignificant shelter of a small bluff on its northeastern side,
stood a large farm-house surrounded by a small village of barns and
outbuildings. It was a typical Canadian farm of the older, western
type. One of those places which had grown by degrees from the one
central hut of logs, clay and thatch to the more pretentious
proportions of the modern frame building of red pine weather-boarding,
with shingled roofing to match, and the whole coloured with paint
of a deep, port-wine hue, the points and angles being picked out
with a dazzling white. It was a