bution clauses of the Act did not obtrude as brazenly as it
did the year following. But when grain began to pour in to the
shipping points in 1901 and the farmers found the railway unheeding
their requests for cars their disgust and disappointment were as
complete as their anger was swift. It was the rankling disappointment
of men whose rights have been officially decreed only to be
unofficially annulled; it was the hot anger of a slap in the face--the
anger that makes men fight with every ounce of their strength.

The quick welling of it planted anxiety in the minds of such
level-headed farmers as W. R. Motherwell and Peter Dayman, of
Abernethy; Williams, of Balcarres; Snow, of Wolseley; Sibbold and
Millar, of Indian Head. While the two latter were riding into town
with wheat one day John Sibbold suggested to John Millar that, as
secretary of the local Agricultural Society, it might be a good thing
if he called a meeting to talk things over. It was the high state of
feeling manifested at this meeting which furnished W. R. Motherwell
with food for thought on the lonely Qu'Appelle trail. And it was the
idea that it might be advisable to hold similar mass meetings
throughout the country that brought Peter Dayman driving over to the
Motherwell place, not long after, to discuss it.

These two men had been friends and neighbors since 1883. Each of them
felt that the time had come for definite action of some kind and they
spent the greater part of the day in talking over the situation in
search of the most practical plan of campaign. There was little use in
the farmers attempting to organize in defence of their own interests
unless the effort were absolutely united and along broader lines than
those of any previous farmers' organization. Politics, they both
agreed, would have to be kept out of the movement at all costs or it
would land on the rocks of defeat in the same way that the Farmers'
Union and Patrons of Industry had been wrecked.

It was in the middle eighties when the West was settled but sparsely
that the farmers had attempted to improve their lot by the formation of
"Farmers' Unions." The movement had had a brief and not very brilliant
career and as the offspring of this attempt at organization some
progressives with headquarters at Brandon, Manitoba, had tried to enter
the grain trade as an open company. When one of the chief officers of
this concern defected in an attempt to get rich the failure drag