"The moose, the beaver and the bear had for years been decreasing, and
other fur-bearing animals were slowly but surely lessening with them. The
natives, aware of this, were now alive, as well, to concurrent changes
foreign to their experience. Recent events had awakened them to a place
upon their country as a great storehouse of mineral and other wealth,
enlivened otherwise by the sensible decrease of their once unfailing
resources. These events were, of course, the Government borings for
petroleum, the formation of parties to prospect, with a view to
developing, the minerals of Great Slave Lake, but above all, the inroad of
gold seekers by way of Edmonton. The latter was viewed with great mistrust
by the Indians, the outrages referred to showing, like straws in the wind,
the inevitable drift of things had the treaties been delayed. For, as a
matter of fact, those now peaceable tribes, soured by lawless aggression,
and sheltered by their vast forests, might easily have taken an Indian
revenge, and hampered, if not hindered, the safe settlement of the country
for years to come. The Government, therefore, decided to treaty with them
at once on equitable terms, and to satisfy their congeners, the
half-breeds, as well, by an issue of scrip certificates such as their
fellows had already received in Manitoba and the organized Territories. To
this end adjustments were made by the Hon. Clifford Sifton, then Minister
of the Interior and Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs, during the
winter of 1898-9, and a plan of procedure and basis of treatment adopted,
the carrying out of which was placed in the hands of a double Commission,
one to frame and effect the treaty, and secure adhesion of the various
tribes, and the other to investigate and extinguish the half-breed title.
At the head of the former was placed the Hon. David Laird, a gentleman of
wide experience in the early days in the North-West Territories, whose
successful treaty with the refractory Blackfeet and their allies is but
one of many evidences of his tact and sagacity.
The other
treaty Commissioners were the Hon. James Ross, Minister of
Public Works in the Territorial Government, and Mr. J.A. McKenna, then
private secretary to the Superintendent- General of Indian Affairs, and
who had been for some years a valued officer of the Indian Department.
With them was associated, in an advisory capacity, the Rev. Father
Lacombe, O.M.I., Vicar-General of St. Albert, Alberta, whose history had
been identified for fifty years with the Canadian North-West, and whose
career had touched the currents of primitive life at all points. Not
associated with the Commission, but traveling with it as a guest was the
Right Rev. E.
Grouard, O.M.I., the Roman Catholic Bishop of the Athabasca
and Mackenzie rivers, who was returning, after a visit to the East, to his
headquarters at Fort Chipewyan, where his influence and knowledge of the
language, it was believed, would be of great service when the treaty came
under consideration there. The secretaries of the Commission were Mr.
Harrison Young, a son-in-law of the Reverend George
McDougall, the
distinguished missionary who perished so unaccountably on the plains in
the winter of 1876, and Mr. J.W. Martin, and agreeable young gentleman
from Goderich, Ontario. Connected with the party in an advisory capacity,
like Father Lacombe, and as interpreter, was Mr. Pierre d'Eschambault,
who had been for over thirty years an officer in the Hudson's Bay
Company's service. The camp manager was Mr. Henry McKay of an old and
highly esteemed North-West family. Such was the personnel, official and
informal, of the treaty Commission, to which was also attached Mr. H.A.
Conroy, as accountant, robust and genial, and well fitted for the work."
Reprinted from Through the Mackenzie Basin: An Account of
the Signing of Treaty No. 8 and the Scrip Commission, 1899 by Charles Mair. |