Who Calls? A Qu’Appelle Quest [3]

To the splendour of that vista I can personally attest. Armed with a letter-of-access from Jim, giving very precise directions, Dan Ring, the Regina-based artist Edward Poitras, Maggie Keith, and I paid our homage to this site in late August of 1999. We found a few tipi rings and paced them across: only three steps, the length of one short warrior. (Edward, a Métis who grew up on a reserve near Lebret, on Mission Lake, opined that such small tents dated from the pre-horse era, when his aboriginal ancestors followed the migrations of the numberless bison with the aid of travois hauled by half-wild dogs.) How many people could these hide shelters have housed?

We didn’t find what Jim referred to as “the Indian effigy” in his list of what we should look for, and the summer-long drought had snuffed out most of the wildflowers and choked the babbling of the far-down brook. Our exploration of Jim’s land was cut short by a territorially protective bull from the next farm, intent on guarding his harem of grazing heifers and their calves.

As we hastily piled back into the car and drove off, I reminded myself: although only for an hour or so, we’d been here, in yet another place in which, according to the academic experts, there is supposedly no “there.” Here long enough to kneel and feel the sun’s warmth throbbing up from a glacier-sculpted tipi-ring boulder, to crunch dry grey-green sagebrush leaves underfoot and whiff their powdery perfume, to hear the shrill chirrups of locusts below and swooping swallows above. Here long enough to dangle our legs over the precipice from which, for centuries before our time, herds of buffalo had been driven into the lush, treed gulley. Standing, height-giddied, on the edge, I cupped my hands round my mouth to megaphone a shout, in hopes of receiving, in return, a who-calls? call-back from my grandfather, dead these fifty-odd years. A response came, faint and far off-sounding; despite its name, the Qu’Appelle’s reputation as an echo chamber is somewhat exaggerated.

Nagging question: who, if anyone, had painted or photographed this unforgettable view? Surely Jefferys, Henderson, or Kenderdine, had they stumbled on the scene during their rambles, would have recorded their impressions in a sketch, but nothing in the archive confirms their presence on this ancient camping-ground of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Asked whether he can identify any depictions of the prospect in his collection, Lanigan tentatively cites an untitled 1973 Illingworth Kerr oil-on-canvas, which he bought in 1978 because, as he explains, “it reminded me of the Valley vista from the edge of the top flatland of the property.” Having given up on his Toronto-era dream of building a retirement home on the brim, Jim intends to preserve this sacred ground in its unspoiled natural state, perhaps under the auspices of the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

A steeply angled side road swept us down into the broad basin of the Qu’Appelle, in the shadow of Kennel Hill, where we signed the guest-book of one of the most charming Victorian-Gothic churches I’ve ever seen, the crimson-steepled Saint Nicholas Kennell Anglican Church. A newspaper article subsequently faxed to me by Jim Lanigan, on the structure’s 100th anniversary, describes it as follows:

...with immaculate grey clapboard siding and gleaming red shingles, the 18-by-24-foot heritage church hides its age well.

Inside the building, a narrow near-vertical ladder allows access from the front porch to the bell-tower. Ten pews fill the main room which faces the eight-by-12-foot chancel.

“They say it’s the most photographed church in North America,” said Barb Cooper, an organizer of the anniversary, “But I’m not sure where that comes from.”

Cooper’s great-great-grandfather, Mark Catley, built the Anglican church in 1900 and—despite being dismantled board-by-board only 11 years later and moved to its current location—it looks no worse for the 100 years of wear.20

After signing the guest-book, I made my contribution to the perpetuation of the “most-photographed” myth, then stopped to admire and shoot the church’s neighbour, a gabled, two-storey fieldstone former farmhouse (or rectory?)-turned-bed and breakfast, bearing a painted sign: The Lauder House. Such buildings, domestic, commercial, and institutional, were erected by immigrant Scottish stone-masons; once fairly numerous in the valley and its environs—as, for example, at Qu’Appelle, Indian Head, Edenwold, Fort Qu’Appelle, Abernethy, Arcola, and the doomed remittance-man enclave of Cannington Manor, they are now as scarce in Saskatchewan and Manitoba as the wood-frame, slant-roofed grain elevators beloved of Jefferys, Kerr, Hurley, A.Y. Jackson, and William McCarger, and, latterly, David Thauberger, Don Hall, and Orest Semcishen. I was glad to find that Kerr’s silhouetted phalanx of elevators still stood, shoulder-to-shoulder, as in his Prairie Town, Early Morning, of 1927, proudly lining the Canadian National Railway tracks at Lumsden,21 to which we’d driven for lunch and a look-see. Two years later, as I was shocked to discover on a return visit, these workaday yet noble edifices were gone—replaced by ugly, cylindrical cement-and-steel silos. (A year earlier, revisiting Gleichen, Alberta, southeast of Calgary, in the middle of our Hamish Fulton hegira, I’d been similarly dismayed by the disappearance of the giant elevators featured in Jefferys’ 1925 canvas, A Prairie Town [private collection]).

On our way back to Regina we paused in Fort Qu’Appelle to inspect the white limestone obelisk raised to commemorate the signing, on 15 September 1874, of Treaty Number Four, negotiated between the federal government and the nations of the Saulteaux, the Assiniboine, and the Cree by Alexander Morris, who in 1872 was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba and the North-West Territories.22 Morris’s artist son Edmund, who as a child at Government House in Winnipeg had been exposed to Plains Indian culture, in 1908 won a commission to travel through Saskatchewan and Alberta to paint the remaining chiefs and headmen who had participated in the treaties negotiated by his late father. As Jean McGill recorded in 1982,

One of the first agents Morris wrote to was William Graham of the Qu’Appelle agencies at Balcarres who suggested that he go to Lebret where the Reverend Huggonard who ran the Industrial School and who had been present at the signing of the Qu’Appelle Treaty could assist him....

By July 1909 he had painted sixty portraits for the Ontario government representing the tribes of Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta. He offered to do a series for the Saskatchewan government. Writing to the Honourable Walter Scott, then premier, he suggested a series of portraits for the new parliament buildings to be build in Regina.

“No time should be lost,” he wrote, “as the Indians who went on the warpath and hunted the buffalo are fast disappearing from the scene, and the younger generation are losing their identity.” He proposed to visit Saskatchewan tribes again that summer and said that he had “become deeply interested and would like to continue this important work, the value of which from a historical, ethnology as well as artistic standpoint is very important.” The Saskatchewan government accepted the proposal and ordered fifteen portraits for the new legislative building which was opened in Regina in 1910.

Camping by the lake at Fort Qu’Appelle, Morris met the Chief of the Muscowpetung Reserve and a group of his Saulteaux kinsmen. The chief told him that their treaty had been broken by the government and most of his band had been persuaded to sell a portion of their reserve, a tale Morris heard many times while painting among the Indians.

“As he traveled among the Indians,” McGill continues,

and saw the extreme poverty under which many of them lived and listened to their unhappy stories of what had happened to them since the signing of the treaties of the previous century, his sympathy for their cause grew…. He … had developed a plan for a memorial to commemorate the signing of the treaties at Fort Qu’Appelle, Fort Carlton and Fort Pitt. He intended the memorial to be in recognition of the Plains Indians as well as the work of his late father . . ..23

Having organized a committee to raise money through the Saskatchewan branch of the Winnipeg-based Western Art Association, Morris approached Walter Allward, the leading Canadian sculptor of the day, and the Toronto architect John Pearson, to collaborate with him on the creation of the monument. His vision was of a “slab of native rock with Signatories to the Treaty carved upon a Bronze Tablet,” flanked by twin pillars representing the two races, to be joined at the top by a slab of granite symbolizing brotherhood. Central to the design was a sacred carved stone used for rituals by the Cree. As McGill notes, “Regarding the Qu’Appelle Memorial a curious anomaly exists. Although, as a report in the Regina Daily Province for 17 October 1912 indicates, the “sacred stone” was unveiled in the new park which Morris had persuaded the town of Fort Qu’Appelle to establish, on the site of the original treaty signing, his more elaborate design was rejected by the committee following his death by drowning in 1913. In its stead, the much simpler obelisk, composed of Tyndall stone from Manitoba, with four granite panels from the province of Quebec, was substituted —the first of its kind to be erected in Canada. The souvenir brochure published by the Western Art Association to celebrate the dedication of the memorial in 1915 makes no mention of Morris or the stone that was to have been his design’s centrepiece.24 Equally ironic, in retrospect, was the fact that, of the fifteen portrait subjects Morris painted for the Saskatchewan government, only one was a living signatory of Treaty Four: that feisty gadfly and malcontent, Piapot, chief of the impoverished and disenfranchised Piapot Band—the self-declared “Lord of Heaven and Earth.” Would that the long-buried Morris-Allward-Pearson scheme could have been dug up and revived for the nearby monument erected to commemorate the signing, in September 1995, of the Settlement Agreement finally ratifying the Treaty Four First Nations’ “Ex Gratia” claim to the Treaty Four Reserve Lands, which had been revoked and disbursed pursuant to the 1874 signing.25 The bronze bust of a feather-bonneted chief—sculptor unknown to me—does scant justice to the overdue righting of this historic wrong....

Next day, Dan Ring and I headed north on highway 10 to Fort Qu’Appelle, our object the studio of James Henderson, who settled in this former Hudson’s Bay Company trading-post town around 1910, when the population stood at around 285. (Henderson emigrated to Winnipeg from his native London in 1909, working there and then in Regina as a commercial artist, engraver, and lithographer, before launching himself as a landscape and portrait painter specializing in Saskatchewan subjects, with the Qu’Appelle his primary locus and focus—not to say obsession). We eventually tracked down our quarry on a suburban street paralleling the south shore of the river. Behind a high hedge stood a typical two-storey prairie frame house, adjacent to which was a squat, stucco-clad building we took to be the place where Henderson painted his Qu’Appelle canvases. A knock on the front door of the house brought out the daughter of the owner, who, after our explanations, agreed to try to unlock the studio door. No luck, the key didn’t fit, so we had to content ourselves with a peek through the windows and a quick tour of the backyard riverbank garden, with its rustic Henderson-designed chairs and hexagonal gazebo, which had served as his summer studio.

On our way back to Regina, we drove along highway 56, which hugs the northern shore of Katepwa, Mission, and Echo lakes, in order to make a sentimental journey to the cluster of neo-Tudor half-timbered buildings still called Fort San, although both tuberculosis sanatorium—the locus and subject of Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak’s haunting 1999 video, The Blood Records—and the summer art-school campus that later occupied the site—are no more, the complex now serving as a conference centre. (“Sentimental” because Dan suspects that he may have been conceived on the grounds of Fort San, his father having been a resident doctor and his mother a nurse at the time of his birth.)

Research at the headquarters of the Saskatchewan Arts Board in Regina would later disclose that the now-defunct Saskatchewan School of Arts dated back to 1950, when the Saskatchewan Arts Board’s annual report listed, for the first time, a workshop “dealing with the problems of production” in theatre, running concurrent with the Western Canada Theatre Conference. The following year, three workshops were arranged by the Arts Board, one of them a short handicrafts course taught by Martin and Florence Joyce—teachers released pro tem from the Banff School of Fine Arts. From its inception, the School of Arts regularly scheduled courses and sessions at Emma Lake, the summer arts-workshop established by the Regina College art instructor Augustus Kenderdine (discussed below). An undated document titled “Saskatchewan School of the Arts: Echo Valley Centre, Saskatchewan Arts Board” lays out the objectives of the Visual Arts Programmes as follows:

1. to fulfill the needs of visual artists at different stages of their development;
2. to stimulate and encourage interaction among artists;
3. to set the highest artistic standards for all programmes;
4. to sustain a residential and professional environment appropriate to these objectives;
5. to make a valuable and demonstrable contribution to the cultural life of the province.

From its inception, heavy emphasis was placed on “highly individualized instruction,” on the development of “personal expression,” on “one-on-one” instruction, and on the engagement of visiting artists. As at the Banff Centre for the Arts, on which the school was modelled, the visual arts were part of a community continuum, with enrolees and faculty expected to engage in a wide range of activities, programs, and events, rather than narrowly focusing on medium- and discipline-based specialties.

According to the chronology compiled by the Arts Board in 1987, the art program at the school really got underway in 1955 when, in co-operation with the Arts School of Regina College and the University of Saskatchewan Summer School, an artists’ seminar was held under the leadership of Jack Shadbolt, of the Vancouver School of Art. In 1957 the Regina College Art School organized an advanced painters’ workshop at Murray Point, Emma Lake. After this, the Arts Board’s focus would be on the Emma Lake facility, rather than the more southerly Echo Lake complex, with consequences to be discussed in due course.

The Arts Board’s minutes for 1962 note with regret “the termination of services of David Ross … , since Mr. Ross is now establishing himself as a commercial potter in the province. At the same time the board wishes to take this opportunity to wish him and his partner, Mr. Fulmer Hansen, every success in this venture.”26 (About which, more later.) In 1967 permanent facilities for a four-week program were established at Fort San, with a dedicated staff of forty-two instructors. Two years later more than 900 students attended courses from two to six weeks in length, ranging from band, pipes and drums and Highland dancing, orchestra, and choral technique, to painting, pottery, dyeing, and spinning and weaving. Two of the major visual-arts workshops conducted during 1969 were arranged in co-operation with the Hone-James studio in Regina. By 1971 a thousand enrolees were receiving instruction at the school, some 250 of whom were accommodated in the renovated facility’s residences. In 1972—the sixth year of the school’s operation in a permanent location at the Echo Valley Centre, under the directorship of Frank Connell — “a successful attempt was made a[t] developing classes which cut across disciplinary lines, and involving potters, weavers, painters and other artists.”27.

That same year, the centre became the responsibility of the Saskatchewan Department of Government Services. In 1976, of the total faculty of 122 teachers, sixty-six were from Canada, with the rest hailing from the United States and the Ukraine SSR. During the latter 1980s, Sherron Harmon of the Saskatchewan branch of CARFAC (Canadian Artists’ Representation/ Le Front des artists canadiens) served as the program’s visual-arts co-ordinator, her mandate to collaborate with CARFAC, the Organization of Saskatchewan Artists (OSAC), and the Arts Board to lure to the Echo Lake campus and its satellites not only “resource artist/facilitators” to work on-site for the duration of the program, but established and “emerging” visiting artists (emphasis on Saskatchewanians).

Despite the ultimately fatal afflictions of inadequate facilities, chronic underfunding, and a transient staff, the SSA nevertheless offered access to such artistic talents as David Alexander, Gisele Amantea, Greg Hardy, Joe Fafard, and Wilf Perreault, all of whom were on hand as visiting artists in 1987, when this innovative program was introduced, a few years before the school was shut down as a money-loser.

*

Unwilling to admit defeat after that first failed encounter with Henderson, I resolved to return for another, closer survey of the studio. I established phone contact with the owner, Dianne Morris, a Regina-based childhood-court judge who, as I was to discover, reveres the artist, as does her mother, herself a painter, who lives across the street from the Henderson house. So, a few days later, it was back up highway 10, this time with Maggie at the wheel. Our progress north was slowed by a miles-long, horn-tooting procession of mud-caked tractors, pick-up trucks, combines, and manure-spreaders bound for a rally in Regina, in protest against low grain prices, inadequate federal subsidies, crushing debt burdens, and the impending death of the family farm.28 Would that at least one of the hand-scrawled window- and bumper-signs had read: “PALLISER WAS RIGHT!”

Handshakes and introductions at the front gate. After a tour of the pleasingly modest Henderson’s house and a lengthier exploration of the Wind in the Willows-esque riverbank garden, we went to the studio, which had been preserved much as it had been left by Henderson’s faithful housekeeper, Rosie. There was his easel, palettes, crusty brushes, and paint-stand, from the drawer of which unfurled curly, squared-up snapshots of some of his most familiar Qu’Appelle-scapes. So, he, too, worked from photos, as well as from field sketches! But then, so did such contemporaries as C.W. Jefferys and Edmund Morris, in the latter’s case to assist in the depiction of Native chiefs and elders during his Saskatchewan journey of 1910. (And as did, for that matter, most if not all members of the Group of Seven and their innumerable acolytes.) Pinned to the walls were yellowed newspaper clippings, certificates and testimonials, and, hanging from a hook by a bookcase crammed with the artist’s favourite books, a superb Sioux (or Cree? or Assiniboine?) bone breastplate and ceremonial eagle-feather head-dress. Valued regional artefacts? Or had the artist placed these souvenirs on various aboriginal sitters, regardless, perhaps, of their tribal affiliation? (For the purposes of this publication, the Mendel in the summer of 2001 commissioned the Regina photographer Don Hall to record the Henderson studio for posterity.)

After our tour of the Henderson studio (where an annual New Year’s séance is conducted), the Morrises led us to the old hilltop cemetery above Fort Qu’Appelle, site of the artist’s grave, positioned so as to allow his shade to gaze across the shining waters of Echo Lake to the left and Mission Lake to the right—an astonishing view understandably favoured by painters and photographers before and since.

Back in Regina, I had time before my flight home to meet with MacKenzie Art Gallery curator Tim Long, who conducted me on a tour of their current summer exhibition, a survey of historical and contemporary western Canadian art. Particularly striking to me (madly scribbling notes as we roamed from gallery to gallery) was a large, almost blindingly sun-radiant acrylic by the Saskatoon-based Dorothy Knowles, dated 1974 and titled, tellingly, Et in Arcadia Ego. Tim assured me that, although not specifically identified as a Qu’Appelle subject, this was indeed an ode to one of the valley’s lakes—possibly Katepwa, which she and her artist daughter Catherine Perehudoff, I later learned, had sketched together several times in the 1980s and ’90s. That a painter better known for her lyrical panoramas of the North Saskatchewan River should have turned, on occasion, to this no-less-picturesque valley was understandable.

More mystifying to me was the yawning absence, on these walls, of Qu’Appelle-inspired paintings by the school widely credited with introducing New York School modernist abstraction to the Saskatchewan art scene, the Regina Five (so called after a nationally touring exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Canada in 1961).29 Of this ground-breaking collective, only two members in this showing were represented by interpretations of the most paintable landscape within a half-day’s driving distance of Regina: Douglas Morton (b. 1926), with a cheerful, medium-sized abstract from 1967 titled Long Lake, and Arthur F. McKay (1926–2000), with an untitled pen-and-ink drawing from 1963. A much less optimistic, more sombre take on the landscape than that of Knowles and Morton was evident in the side-bar exhibition of a series of dark photo-prints by Tracy Templeton, a gifted young print artist from Regina whose work, the accompanying brochure informed me, “has its roots in Saskatchewan heritage and rural history.” Her enormous photo-etchings, documenting abandoned prairie farmhouses around her home town of Lumsden, “explore the acts of remembering, observing, and creating.”30

Later, in the curatorial department, I flipped through the file-cards documenting the collection (not yet accessible on-line), making notes of Qu’Appelle landscapes. A return visit to examine the actual artworks was clearly mandated—an objective I was able to realize in June of 2001—a trip that also took me to the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and, in Regina, to the Dunlop Art Gallery, the Regina Public Library and its Prairie History Room, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board, as well as private galleries and collections in both cities.)

Also in Regina, I was privileged to spend a morning in the capacious warehouse— incongruously situated in a cinder-block strip mall northeast of the city’s main railway station-turned-casino—of the dean of Saskatchewan antiquarian book-dealers, Richard Spafford.

Guided by the search-engine on his trusty computer, Dick pointed me to shelves of books (including popular fiction, dating mostly from the 1910s to 1920s), pamphlets, tourism brochures, sheet music, maps, and other types of printed ephemera from and about southern Saskatchewan and the Qu’Appelle; a selection of these materials is included in Tales of Two Valleys. (The Special Collections division of the University of Saskatchewan Archives would be a no-less-generous lender of rarities—thanks to the good offices of a librarian named Neil Richards, whom I met on a later research trip to Saskatoon.)32 Among the texts to which Dick alerted me was a recent paperback reprint of Isaac Cowie’s Company of Adventurers (originally published in Toronto in 1913), an account of this resourceful fur-trader’s long years in harness on behalf of the HBC from 1867 to 1874. Cowie spent two years at Fort Qu’Appelle, where he arrived on horseback, following the old Carlton Trail from Fort Ellice at the junction of the Assiniboine and Qu’Appelle rivers, in October 1867. He prefaces a vivid description of the fort (then not yet a town)33 with a celebration of “La Belle Qu’Appelle”:

The valley of the Qu’Appelle is of ideal beauty throughout. When the earth was ages of years younger a mighty river, the continuation then of the South Saskatchewan, swept down through it to join the Assiniboine. A great geologic dislocation at the elbow of the South Saskatchewan diverted its waters at a right angle to its old course and set it to unite with the North Saskatchewan at the Forks. The drift of the great sand dunes in the vicinity also partially filled up the head of the old river valley of the Qu’Appelle, which then became the beautiful stream which winds about and in and out of the broad flat bottom land of its mile wide and magnificent valley, which the ancient river had scooped out for its course and deepened from two hundred to three hundred feet below the level of the great plains on its borders.

Rills and brooks, bearing the draining of the upland prairies, have fretted the banks of the valley into gentle dales and deep ravines, which, fringed with flower and shrub and aspen, hurry down to the verdant lowlands, through which they bend their still fringed courses to mingled with the willow-bordered river. The bold spurs and ridges of the southern slopes of the valley are also adorned by the white stems and trembling leaves of the aspen, with here and there the beautiful bark and lovely foliage of the birch, mingled lower down with scattered maple, ash and elm. But across the valley the ridges, though covered with short grass, are bald of brush or bush, and only in the intervening hollows and coulees, sheltered from the scorching sun and succeeding frosts of spring, is tree or shrub to be seen.33

Cowie follows this somewhat florid tribute with a paean to “The Lovely Lakes”:

Framed between the graceful, curving slopes of the long reaches of the deep and wide valley, the Qu’Appelle River sweeps through the prairie lowlands in endless bends from slope to slope, glinting in silvern sheen through the greenery of its borders. Lovely as is this shining river in the valley while alone in its beauty, it is when the stream expands into its rosary of lakes and links them together that the full glory of the scenery is revealed. Each lake, a limpid gem of azure, fills the valley from bank to bank, which, embowered in verdure, sweep in the stately curves whereby they and the lakes in their embrace are finally concealed in the distance.

Upon the prairies between the second and third lakes stood Fort Qu’Appelle, in the middle of the valley, and within a hundred feet of right bank of the river, some few hundred yards east of the upper lake. There were no fixed habitations of man on British territory, between the fort and the Rocky Mountains to the west, while on the east the cabins of Favel, Parisien and Denomie, between the two lakes, and those of Alick and John Fisher, were the only buildings between Fort Qu’Appelle and Fort Ellice.34

Finally, Cowie, while denying his ability to convey “the exceeding beauty of the scene,” attempts to state, as an painter might, “the components of the picture”:

part of the valley in deep shade and part brightly illuminated … the blue smoke from the wigwams rising up high and straight from the bottom of the valley. The river, with its complicated coils, gliding among the willow bushes to the south. The great prairie ocean-like with its many islands of poplar and single trees looking in the distance and by twilight, like becalmed ships.35

Cowie’s proto-impressionist word-picture of the valley—at once fulsome and factual—would set the tone for much of the subsequent Qu’Appelle literature, including that of the nascent Saskatchewan tourism industry. Coincidentally, his narrative was published two years after the completion of the Qu’Appelle, Long Lake, and Saskatoon (QLLS) railway, the first line to be constructed in the western end of the valley.36

By the early 1930s—the ongoing Depression notwithstanding—the family car had become the preferred means of conveyance to Regina’s favourite recreational playground (besides the city centre’s Wascana Park, in whose landscaped waters the majestic neo-classical Saskatchewan legislature is reflected). Witness a brochure promoting Saskatchewan’s resorts, sports, and cities, published by the Saskatchewan Motor Club, which I found in a used bookstore in Saskatoon. “Excellent roads,” begins the text accompanying a quartet of postcard-like photographic views, “furnish easy access from Regina to the historic Qu’Appelle Valley. Fort Qu’Appelle, which was long the Hudson’s Bay Company Headquarters for a vast district, is some sixty miles to the North East on a well-travelled highway. It is situated in a verdured valley between two large lakes, members of a lovely chain of waters. There is boating, bathing and fishing to be had, and good accommodation for the wayfarer.”37 Somehow, from the tenor of Cowie’s elegy to the “old” Qu’Appelle of fur-trading, pre-government days, the reader knows that this old-style Bay-man would have approved both the populating and the popularizing of the once remote and isolated valley, even while lamenting the decline and fall of the fur trade, which was well underway (with the depletion of beaver stocks) before the sale of Rupert’s Land by the HBC to the Canadian government in 1869.

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