Shaw saw five thousand of these tented seekers after charity camped around the tiny capital. The barracks were on the narrow tongue of land just above where the Battle empties into the mighty Saskatchewan. The town was on the south side of the smaller river—a poor little collection of buildings which the Indians could have destroyed with no more trouble than is involved in firing dry wooden structures anywhere.
Governor Laird, the tall thin Prince Edward Islander, who had come from Charlottetown journalism into politics, was a negotiator for the entry of the island into Confederation, became the Minister of the Interior in the Mackenzie Government, and had received the first governorship of the North West Territories in the same year that Laurier was first appointed a Minister of the Crown, was very well fitted for a post requiring many diplomatic qualities.
Next to his extreme height his most memorable physical characteristic was his long hair; the fashion of which he had abbreviated long before his last special tour of the West, when he was a venerable and honoured sharer in the celebration of the creation of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan at the beginning of September, 1905.
The feeding of five thousand Indians was an imperative duty of Governor Laird as long as there was anything to feed them with. He had no authority to commandeer provisions from the Hudson’s Bay Company, on Indian account. But the Company had heavy stores of pemmican in their warehouse, and Laird drew upon them, while he was trying to secure the necessary powers from Ottawa. The Indians demanded treaty guarantees against their extinction by starvation.
Their attitude was discomforting. They knew what had been done to Custer only three years before. They had seen, and knew the source of the rich equipment of the Sioux, who had visited them the previous summer. For many years there had been an obviously increasing threat of the submergence of their own autonomy and self-respect by white men whose far-distant friends, they had been told, drove iron horses that breathed out fire and smoke. The reserves recently staked out were too suggestive of imprisonment. Now, it was mooted, the time had come to put an end to this threat. If the young braves had been uncontrolled there might easily have been a repetition of the Custer massacre, with little chance of serious resistance from the handful of whites planted upon the Battle and the Saskatchewan.
As part of the inauguration of government in the Territories a telegraph wire had been strung from Fort Garry to Prince Albert, via Qu’Appelle and Humboldt, and to Edmonton, via Battleford. Part of the line the passengers on the Canadian Northern west of Humboldt can still see from the train for many miles. The service was liable to interruption without notice. On the fringe of the wooded country a moose might rub down a slender poplar pole, and ground the wire. The wind in a naked country might do a similar disfavour to civilization. Repair gangs were neither numerous nor swift of movement. It was truly a Canadian National Telegraph, but its appropriate name was the Canadian Now and Then.
Laird wired to Ottawa for special authority to deal with the whole situation as he deemed best. For many days, no answer came to repeated requests to the Department. At last he appealed direct to Sir John Macdonald, the Prime Minister. Sir John’s conviviality was for long a feature of the political landscape. Governor Laird, it was believed, caught a glimpse of it in the telegram that eventually did arrive from Ottawa: It said. “Get your hair cut.” Not another word was received from the outside world for three weeks, thanks to one of the interruptions of transmission already mentioned.
Before the end of the 1879 season Shaw found that sleeping on the ground filled him with rheumatism; and he returned home convinced that civil engineering was not his mission in life. But he had seen the West in what has since become its most glamorous guise; and, having imbibed the waters of the Saskatchewan, he was to fulfil the saying that those who have once so tasted are fated to return to the scene of so much fortune. You would never think that the dapper foremaster who skips around his eighteen holes on the Mississauga course had been through the peril of annihilation by scalping knife and tomahawk with Governor Laird forty-five years ago; but it is the truth—and one of the truths that very often indeed, are stranger than fiction.
Once more in Montreal, Shaw studied law; but law was ever a dry-as-dust affair; and by 1880 he accepted advice to seek a railway career, via the unfailing portal of Pitman’s shorthand. The practitioner who so advised him moved to Milwaukee, and in 1881 sent word that a job was open in the offices of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway, that city. Shaw got his job and its inducement to become an American citizen.
In the following summer—1882—not liking Milwaukee too well, he saw the former general manager of the road in the office—Van Horne, who had gone to Winnipeg the previous winter to build and run the C.P.R. He asked Van Horne about prospects of a job in the Winnipeg office.