Chief Red Crow, too, returned to his band with a
chastened mind, it having been made clear to him that a chief who could
not control his young braves was not the kind of a chief the Great White
Mother desired to have in command of her Indian subjects. White Horse,
also, after three months sojourn in the cooling solitude of the Police
guard room, went back to his people a humbler and a wiser brave.
The horse-stealing, however, went merrily on and the summer of 1884
stands in the records of the Police as the most trying period of their
history in the Northwest up to that date. The booming upon the eastern
and southern boundaries of Western Canada of the incoming tide of
humanity, hungry for land, awakened ominous echoes in the little
primitive settlements of half-breed people and throughout the
reservations of the wild Indian tribes as well. Everywhere, without
warning and without explanation, the surveyors' flags and posts made
appearance. Wild rumours ran through the land, till every fluttering
flag became the symbol of dispossession and every gleaming post
an emblem of tyrannous disregard of a people's rights. The ancient
aboriginal inhabitants of the western plains and woods, too, had their
grievances and their fears. With phenomenal rapidity the buffalo had
vanished from the plains once black with their hundreds of thousands.
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