Shaw went to Battleford, the infant capital of the North West Territories, with the party that was in charge of George Simpson. It travelled by Red River train of tireless carts. The surveyors and their camping entourage walked beside their vehicles the whole of the six hundred and fifty miles to Battleford. The route was via Portage la Prairie, Fort Ellice, where the Qu’Appelle joins the Assiniboine; the Touchwood Hills, Humboldt (where a Canadian Northern division point was established within twenty-five years), and Batoche, where the South Saskatchewan was passed at Gabriel Dumont’s Crossing.
Every white man in the country could tell of fights and murders laid to barbarian account. Sixteen years previously fifteen hundred settlers had been butchered in Minnesota by the Sioux. During the spring of 1876--two years before--Custer’s force of eleven hundred men had been wiped out by the Sioux, in Montana. Bands of Sioux had come into the Canadian territory, and had always said they had no quarrel with the children of the Great White Mother. Some had settled near Portage la Prairie, and had behaved very well, on the whole.
When exterminations were so recent, and relatively so near, travellers into the Great Lone Land didn’t feel as safe as if they were in Montreal. There had been one rebellion of Metis at Fort Garry; and Riel and Gabriel Dumont, who ferried the Simpson party across the river a few miles from the present Rosthern, were yet to head a second revolt.
A prophet would have been called a fool if, as the surveyors trailed across the site of the present Rosthern, and the land where the world’s champion wheat has been grown by Segar Wheeler, he had said the elevators there would supply the youngest member of the party with waybills representing over a million bushels of wheat exported in a single season.
During the surveying of Red Pheasant’s reserve, south of Battleford, which is now crossed by the Grand Trunk Pacific branch from Naseby to the old town of Battleford, Shaw was out alone when he saw an Indian on a hill, and flashes of sunlight proceeding from his hand. After a while the Indian was joined by thirteen others, mounted, who brought his horse with them. They were the advance guard of a remarkable company of Sioux, who were visiting as far north from their own Montana, to estimate the prospects of continued happiness in the ancient, unfrontiered hunting grounds. They were not looking for buffalo, for not many were then left on the Canadian prairies, partly because of the reckless slaughter that had gone on everywhere, and partly because Sitting Bull was herding survivors below parallel forty-nine.