The Frog Lake Memorial.

I stood on the site of the gray drama of 1885, envisioning all its harrowing details. Again it was a beautiful day. Overhead the sun shone brightly; a soft air faintly stirred the green leaves of the poplars. Indians, some who like me had witnessed the incarnadined saturnalia, stood about; half-breeds also, and many whites - men, women and children. But the awful suspense and foreboding that had weighed upon us, early sojourners in the land, on that distant day, were absent. We now here were met together in peace, although it was that unforgettable day and event that had drawn us to this common centre, for we came to attend a significant ceremony - the unveiling of a monument erected by the Government of Canada as a lasting reminder of that sombre and historical occurrence.

The date was the 9th of June, 1925. Judge Howay, of New Westminster, B. C., a member of the Board of Historic Sites and Monuments, represented the government. Accompanying him were Howard Angus Kennedy, who had come to Frog Lake in 1885 as a correspondent for a Montreal newspaper, and Arthur S. Morton, professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. Judge Howay asked me, as the sole white survivor of the massacre, to unveil the memorial.

While he addressed the gathering I stood before the cairn and looked about me. Close beside it were eight graves, marked by simple iron crosses bearing names familiar to me since youth: Quinn, Delaney, Gowanlock, Gilchrist, Dill, Gouin, Williscraft, Cowan - the names of men nearly all of whose hands, long cold and still, had once met mine in the warm clasp of friendship.

The memory brought back vividly the faces of these pioneers, once so full of life, of plans, of ambitions. I recalled their ready laughter, their boisterous pranks, their pleasant voices. And I reflected that for forty years they had rested there; that the snows of forty winters and the showers of forty summers had fallen like a benediction upon them, the caressing, flower-scented airs blown over them, as they slept their dreamless and unbroken sleep.

Across the short intervening span of a wooded hill and gentle, grassy slope, I saw the spot that had marked for these adventurous souls the end of the trail. I heard again all those frightful sounds - exploding guns, the startled shrieks and outcries, the galloping horses, the strangely terrifying cadence of the mauchawahawmnigamawn - the war song - and the appalling whoops of the frenzied savages; the ineffectual "Stop! Stop!" of Big Bear as he rushed toward the carnage, the sputtered admonition of shaking old Osowask, old Yellow Bear, willing, yet fearful too openly, in that hour of dreadful deeds, to befriend me: "Go with the women - don't leave them!" And I remembered, too, the hopelessness that possessed me, the impossibility at the moment of the thought that I should by any miracle escape the doom that with such stupefying and ghastly suddenness was sweeping over the others.

Yes, for forty years these gallant fellows had rested quietly there, while I walked and wrought and played in God's glorious sunlight and had known all the joy of living and now had sons grown to the age that I was then.

An Indian, a pure-blood Cree, mounting a knoll, read in rounded English periods from a manuscript in his hand an eloquent address. It was not an apology - it was not meant to be - for the massacre, but it was a plea for charity, for consideration, for understanding of the red man and of the feelings which culminated in the commission of that dark and bloody crime.

He cast what must have been to most of the listening white men, a new light on that ruthless and deadly act of vengeance. The land of the Indian, a proud people, was being wrested from his grasp by pale-skinned strangers who looked with scarcely disguised contempt upon him as an inferior and derided his pretensions of ownership.

Well! The Indian was not to be trampled upon - he would show them! He would destroy the invader; the land should know him no more; he would take back his country! Poor, simple children of nature!

The provocation, while it did not excuse, was some mitigation of the ferocious wrong. Let the white man put himself in the Indian's place! Even so, the majority were against it; Big Bear's men only, and a few others, were implicated.

The speaker was the Rev. Edward Ahenakew, an ordained clergyman of the Church of England.

I drew the cord; the flag fluttered down. The cairn, its bronze inscription glowing in the warm sunlight, stood uncovered. The government of the country had paid its tribute to these stalwart pioneers of 1885.

It was a solemn moment.