Inspector Dickens, too, another of that fearless band of Police officers, holding with his heroic little company of twenty-two constables Fort Pitt in the far North, stayed the panic consequent upon the Frog Lake massacre and furnished food for serious thought to the cunning Chief, Little Pine, and his four hundred and fifty Crees, as well as to the sullen Salteaux, Big Bear, with his three hundred braves.And to the lasting credit of Inspector Dickens it stands that he brought his little company of twenty-two safe through a hostile country overrun with excited Indians and half-breeds to the post of Battleford, ninety-eight miles away.
At Battleford, also, after the sacking of the town, Inspector Morris with two hundred constables behind his hastily-constructed barricade kept guard over four hundred women and children and held at bay a horde of savages yelling for loot and blood.
Griesbach, in like manner, with his little handful, at Fort Saskatchewan, held the trail to Edmonton, and materially helped to bar the way against Big Bear and his marauding band.
And similarly at other points the promptness, resource, wisdom and dauntless resolution of the gallant officers of the Mounted Police and of the men they commanded saved Western Canada from the complete subversion of law and order in the whole Northern part of the territories and from the unspeakable horrors of a general Indian uprising.
But while in the Northern and Eastern part of the Territories the Police officers rendered such signal service in the face of open rebellion, it was in the foothill country in the far West that perhaps even greater service was rendered to Canada and the Empire in this time of peril by the officers and men of the Mounted Police.
It was due to the influence of such men as the Superintendents and Inspectors of the Police in charge of the various posts throughout the foothill country more than to anything else that the Chiefs of the "great, warlike, intelligent and untractable tribes" of Blackfeet, Blood, Piegan, Sarcee and Stony Indians were prevented from breaking their treaties and joining with the rebel Crees, Salteaux and Assiniboines of the North and East.For fifteen years the Chiefs of these tribes had lived under the firm and just rule of the Police, had been protected from the rapacity of unscrupulous traders and saved from the ravages of whisky-runners.It was the proud boast of a Blood Chief that the Police never broke a promise to the Indian and never failed to exact justice either for his punishment or for his protection.
