Stam

Night's Dream. 'Taint so. Calgary invented the Stampede and hangs on to it for dear life, resenting meanwhile the infringements of copyright "staged" at Edmonton and places like Cheyenne across the neighboring border. pedes, Round-Ups, Rodeos-it's all the same thing: the perpetuation in spectacles for profit of the life that used to be characteristic of certain localities in the West. The most artificial of these was the mammoth "Rodeo" held in the new municipal Stadium at Chicago in August and advertised far and wide for weeks beforehand. It had nothing whatever to do with anything in Chicago, not even the stockyards, and was frankly pro

moted by the Association of Commerce to bring added thousands of tourists into the city and into the retail stores during the deadest midsummer season. It played its artificial part in the big enterprise of "selling Chicago" to the people. At Galgary the Stampede comes probably nearer to being a partial expression of the life and some of the actual interests of immediate territory than any of the other similar circuses that are now imported into localities once primarily interested in range cattle and the horsemanship that necessarily went with that occupation. The Prince of Wales is not the only ranch owner near Calgary who makes the cattle business pay. There are many other profitable ranches in southern Alberta, but Calgary, except during Stampede week, has ceased to be a cow town. And so the hundreds, or even thousands, of Calgarians in the big parade, wearing Stampede hats and other Wild Western paraphernalia, male and female after their kind, and stampeding

more or less on horseback through the line of march, were not representative of the city of 1925. Though they rode roughly, they were not even faithful to the rough-riding Calgary of the days before "Tin Lizzie" captured the Northwest. Their masquerade corresponded to the Hudson Bay suits of the discarded Minnesota gospel according to St. Paul.

But at the very head of the long Stampede column rode well and calmly a squadron of red-coated troopers, "desirable young men, horsemen riding upon horses, scenting the battle from afar.” These were the true cavalry of Calgary, a detachment of the world-famous Northwest Mounted Police, who just fifty years ago built at the confluence of the Bow and the Elbow the stockade fort which has now become a municipality of more than 70,000 inhabitants, the metropolis of Alberta and the largest city of Canada between the Great Lakes and the Pacific. The 1925 annual Stampede was, in fact, not so much a stampede as a jubilee in honor of the body of military police who have during that half-century. enabled the entire Canadian West to grow and develop to its present prosperity in law and order. Some of the very same men who rode in the first exploring column over what are now the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta to the Rockies, and on their way built Fort Calgary, rode again in this semicentennial parade through the city they had founded in 1875. Even so fast moves American history both sides of the border and in much the same way. They were a fine-looking lot of veterans, they and their brethren of later enlistments, gathered together from all parts of the Dominion, the States, and across the seas. Provincial commissioners, mayors of towns, ranchmen and mine-owners, postmasters, farmers, a judge, and a minister of the Gospel among them, they were the city's guests of honor for one week. Calgary was theirs.

American history has moved very fast across the west during the fifty years of

Calgary's life. Floats in the parade graphically told the story in posed chapters. When the "Mounties" first rode into the valley of the Bow, they found there Father Doucet, of the French. Catholic Mission, a solitary white man, teaching and converting the Blackfeet Indians. Father Doucet himself, hale and hearty at seventy-eight years of age, was on hand to smile at his understudy wobbling by on the historical float. Farther down the line came a lifelike effigy of the old "Countess of Dufferin," the Canadian Pacific locomotive-now forever asleep in the Royal Alec gardens at Winnipeg-which pulled the first train into Calgary in 1883. The identical engineer and fireman who first drove the "Countess" across Alberta sat in the cab of the black-painted effigy, ringing her old bell and tooting an irreverent fake whistle. First the Indians, then the voyageurs and adventurers from Quebec, then the fur-traders, the missionaries, the rum-runners with bad booze anachronistic bootleggers-from across the border smuggling the beginnings of lawlessness, and then the Mounted Police bringing and administering the law. Less than ten years later into this defined community came the Dominion-building railroad that ushered in a new era of rapid colonization and expanding indus

tries. Other floats in the parade, commercialized with frank advertising, told nevertheless in impressive pictures the more standardized story of the city's recent growth.

Calgary doesn't get much into the United States news except when the Prince of Wales side-tracks his special car there and detrains for his High River ranch, sixty miles out of town to the west, or when a "Royalite No. 4" well in the Turner Valley oil fields gushes 21,000,000 cubic feet of gas, forty-five miles out of town to the south. In Alberta these distances are suburban. When we think of Canadian provinces, we are apt to think of them in dimensions of States, so that it may be helpful to know that in Alberta, one of the smallest of the provinces of Canada, you could put all of the New England States, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and still leave plenty of room for Scotland and Ireland. All of Germany or all of France could be planted on Alberta with sufficient area remaining in either case wherein to stow Switzerland and Belgium. Of this vast territory Calgary is the commercial center; the agricultural, mining, oil, live-stock and cultural, mining, oil, live-stock and dairying, flour-milling, beet-sugar, and railroad interests of the region between Winnipeg and the Rockies converge here.

In such company the "cow" must hide his diminished head and the cowman, except in Stampede week, remove his undiminished sombrero. With a population equal to that of Shreveport, Louisiana, Calgary also means petroleum with "the most modern refinery in the world," the new $3,000,000 plant of the Imperial Oil, a Canadian subsidiary of the Standard, running full blast on crude oil supplied from Montana and the Turner Valley. Natural gas from the latter region and from Bow Island gives the city abundance of cheap fuel, and 31,000 horse-power of energy from the damming of the river Bow represents only the beginning of hydroelectric develop ment. Perhaps the biggest boost in recent Calgary prospering is the effect of the western route for grain opening another door near at hand for the profitable marketing of Alberta's chief export. The short haul to Vancouver and the all-year-round port facilities there available have meant an additional five to eight cents a bushel on Alberta wheat. Multiply that by the fifty million bushels shipped last year over the Rockies to the Pacific, and you will comprehend one very good reason why the Calgary banks, its grain pit, its farm customers, its retailers, and its real estate agents"realtor" is commonly regarded as a

men rather than questions, and men can only be handled by tactful intelligence. There would arise frequent strifes among the Socialist organizations, and M. Briand stood in every case for adjust ments rather than for excommunications. An opportunist, some people began to call him; a practical, clear-headed fellow, others said. But everybody was agreed that, with his deep 'cello voice and his gift for persuasion, he was a type of revolutionist that had not so far been met with, a man who could preach wisdom to crowds which had never heard of anything except violence, and one whose flexibility would be sure to be admired. even if it caused surprises. Nobody was much shocked when M. Briand became editor of "La Lanterne," a Radical daily in the bourgeois, not the Socialist, sense --that is to say, secured the best plank he could walk upon to pass from agitation over to decent reformism. A year later he was in the Chamber of Deputies.

The Briand we have long been familiar with dates from that election. To reproach M. Briand with having begun as a Socialist now seems as irrelevant as to reproach him with having begun as a boy. The moment he was in the Chamber, in more congenial surroundings than those he had known so far, he could indulge in his real propensities and treat himself to the half-tints of moderation. A rare chance was offered him almost immediately to do so under circumstances which to a man less gifted in tolerance would have appeared trying. He was appointed to report on the most vexed question of that period, the separation of Church and State, which had been mooted by Clemenceau twenty-five years before, but which no Government had dared tackle. To be brutal in this difficult severance might have roused a Catholic country to rebellion; to be too much on the side of the clergy would have been sure to anger the anti-clerical majority. The separation ultimately resulted in a good deal of scandalous confiscation, and it was certainly being initiated and pushed by men who hoped that the moment the State ceased to give a pittance to the clergy the Church would collapse economically; but M. Briand managed to be in turns the champion of both sides and to leave an impression that his sole object was to insure their freedom and legitimate rights to the Church as well as to the State. Many churchmen approached him during the discussion of the bill. They were surprised to find him infinitely more debonair than he had been depicted, and that was the time when he himself acquired that partiality for clerics which puzzles

gether. He was Prime Minister four times, and in 1912-13 he acted as VicePresident of the Cabinet under the Premiership of M. Poincaré. No Frenchman has had more political experience, none is so naturally thought of as a possible Premier by members of the Chambers used to the politicians' point of view.

In office M. Briand has often seemed to be the French counterpart of Mr. Lloyd George-that is to say, he has united willfulness with his natural flexibility.

But where Mr. Lloyd George dazzles by the promptitude, and often by the apparent contradiction of his decisions, M. Briand uses his indolent and ostensibly detached fascination while insisting all the time on being followed. Both men are equally ignorant, equally indifferent to books, equally skillful at getting information first hand, and equally clever at concealing their resolve to be obeyed. M. Briand, the former M. Briand, the former Socialist, was more insistent than anybody else to reinforce the French army when, in 1912, it appeared certain that a war was in the air, and he passed the Three Years' Service Law, in spite of the opposition of his friends. He was equally assertive in 1913 in his convic

tion that vote by constituencies-"in stagnant pools," as he termed it-ought to be replaced by vote extended to regions. Finally, M. Poincaré was right in reminding him, on March 8 [1924], that in 1921 he and Mr. Lloyd George "sent the sheriff to Germany" and occupied Düsseldorf on much slighter provocation than the long course of evasion which led to the occupation of the Ruhr. Yet nobody seems to be so indifferent to the exercise of power as M. Briand. He seldom appears to mind what is said about him, and he has always enjoyed his releases from responsibilities. Extraordinary to say, this great politician is the leader of no party, so when he leaves office he feels no burden of any kind on his shoulders and can indulge his indolence as the younger Pitt used to do.

He has a handsome farm in Normandy, a good bed in Paris, and, when he is so minded, he can command a luxurious cabin in a rich friend's yacht. These recreations, varied by occasional appearances at the Chamber, where he never gives himself any unnecessary exertion, make him fresh for another term in office.

But is this philosophicalness only a veneer? Of late years M. Briand has experienced a few failures more bitter than mere political misadventures. His war policies at Salonika, at Athens, in Rumania-were what war policies generally turned out to be prior to the summer months of 1918, viz., praiseworthy attempts followed by no particular success. This is not all. The Cannes Conference resulted in something ominously like a humiliation, and the memories of the other Conference at Washington cannot be pleasant. The warm welcome which Americans gave M. Briand and the admiration they showed for his talent and personal fascination may have blinded him at the time to the real state of affairs; but he must have found out later how ridiculously he had let himself be misguided by the prophecy in the "Matin" that "England at the Conference would stand in the dock while France sat on the bench beside America." Hence an irritability which used to be entirely foreign to M. Briand's na

ture.

Is this strange conversion, at such a crisis, mere ambition? A futile question for whoever knows a politician's psychology. M. Briand always thought that it was better for France, as it is better for himself, that the governing party should be the Radical anti-clerical party, which, being radical, can afford to be moderate in office-sometimes, when M. Briand is Prime Minister.

A

N educated Indian, recently deceased, was wont to lament eloquently the wrongs of his people, and in particular to portray the Bureau of Indian Affairs as having reduced the Indian to a condition of slavery likened to that of the Children of Israel in the land of bondage. The fiery spirit of the indomitable savage combined with the address and diction learned in the school of the white man made memorable to every hearer his fervid denunciation, ending on the high note of impassioned appeal, “Let my people go!"

More practical in nature was the friend who made this rejoinder:

"Yes, my dear Doctor, let them gobut where?"

It is always easier to denounce a wrong than to remedy it; so the answer was not ready to this simple inquiry.

The episode illustrates the deep wells of sentiment over the Indian that lie near the surface of our National consciousness. How many gushers were brought in over the Bursum Bill! But the oil produced was crude indeed, needing much refinement before it could serve any useful purpose. Back of the great rush of feeling was but a surprisingly meager store of the intelligence that alone can keep such a movement from degenerating into unavailing sentimentality.

We all share more or less the dim feeling that our very presence on this continent wrongs the Indian. An irresistible movement of world population has domiciled a hundred and ten million people where a few hundred thousand were wont to roam and glean the precarious living of the savage from wood and stream and prairie. The stone age is over. H. G Wells has not perfected the reverse technique of his Time Machine, so we cannot expect to see the white Americans vanish like wraiths, while the buffalo returns to the unbroken plains and the deer to the virgin forest. Only the poet's fancy can accomplish the miracle.

We come to the real gist of the problem. We love to look with the poet or artist at the beautiful vanished past, wreathed in romance; we shrink from confronting actual facts and from doing the hard, every-day, and practical work of setting things right and keeping them

so. We may echo the cry, "Let the Indian go!" but not one in a thousand of us will trouble to find out for himself where the Indian stands now, where he is destined to go, or what are the forces that are leading or pushing him in that direction.

FIR

IRST of all, there are hundreds of Indian problems rather than one-literally hundreds of tribes, hundreds of languages. The Pueblo Indians, for example, have kept up some fifteen different tongues, each spoken by a few hundred people, through all these centuries that they have lived side by side. A sign language grew up to serve the needs of communication among the tribes that met on the plains in hunting the buffalo; but these were, after all, only a part of the red race. Differences in occupation are even more notable. The farmer, the fisherman, the shepherd, the trapper, the weaver all have their representation in different parts of the country. The simple Pima farmer has little in common with the marauding Apache whose raids used to threaten his crops. And among individual Indians there are as great divergences as may well be imagined, ranging from the Senator from Kansas, say, to some discontented Mexican Kickapoo lying on the dirt floor of his smoky wickiup in a foggy dream induced by peyote.

These vast differences of origin, habits, and history have their reflection in a tortuous complexity of legal status. Whether created by evil necessity or by paternalistic emotion, treaties have succeeded treaties and laws have been heaped upon laws. A fair summing up would, I believe, tip the scale somewhat on the side of good rather than evil intent. Of the judgment that has informed the actions rather less can be adduced. Some of the best intentions have had least happy results.

The popular belief that citizenship was the remedy for all Indian ills took shape in the General Allotment Act of 1887, known as the Dawes Act, which authorized the parceling out of the reservations into individual allotments for individual Indians. For twenty-five years the land was to be held in trust for the Indian owner, untaxable and inalienable without the consent of the United States; in a

quarter of a century, grown accustomed to the new idea of private ownership of land, he would assume the responsibility of ownership in fee. But the fact of allotment made him a citizen, a sharer in managing the affairs of the Nation, while yet unprepared to manage his own real

estate.

Here indeed was an endeavor, and undeniably a well-meant one, to let these people go. But as allotment went on during the succeeding decade it was discovered that citizenship freed the Indian from the restrictions that had been made to keep intoxicating liquors away from him. After varying decisions in lesser courts, the Supreme Court of the United States, in 1905, decided that the law could not forbid the sale of liquor to a citizen Indian.

B

UT Indians and white men had long since agreed that whisky was bad for the Indian; and in the granting of citizenship Congress had by no means meant to abrogate the long series of laws and treaties which had forbidden the sale of liquor to an Indian or its introduction into his country. The Burke Act, passed in 1906, and bearing the name of the present Commissioner of Indian Affairs, then Chairman of the House Committee on Indian Affairs, was designed to remedy this situation. It provided that citizenship should be withheld from the Indian until the trust period on his land was at an end.

Of course, a large body of Indians had already become citizens by virtue of having received their allotments. They remained citizens, and their children were born to citizenship. Other acts granted citizenship to the Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes and the Osage Nation. Provision was made by the Burke Act for the granting of patents in fee and citizenship to Indians who proved competent to manage their own affairs. Various special acts operated to increase the large number of citizen Indians, and in 1924 Congress laid the matter forever at rest by granting citizenship to all Indians born in this country. This it did over the protest of a number of tribes that desired to preserve their independent nationality, and incidentally their exemption from taxation.

As a matter of fact, just as the white