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To prospective readers I should like to say that I have in various places, preparing David Baxter’s narrative for the press, permitted him, without any commenting footnote, to put into the mouths of historic characters words which were actually written by them in letters or in diaries; and that, I think, is not culpable of me. Sometimes he appears as taking part in actions of which the records I have consulted tell without mention of his presence. For example: on the attack by the métis at Red River, when John McLeod a second time manned the small gun at the smithy, he had, according to his diary and to all other reports that I have seen, only three to aid him—Hugh MacLean, Archie Currie, James McIntosh. David Baxter, by his account, makes a seemingly forgotten fourth. But such differences from the archives that I have consulted are, I feel, trivial, when I consider the accuracy of his narrative as a whole.

Not much more than a century has passed since the last days of Baxter’s epical story. The “little Christina” of it, living on into 1902, would then be aged eighty-five, and we may well imagine that often, walking in the city of Winnipeg amazingly risen on the site of scenes of which account is given in this book, she must have been aware of some passer-by nudging another to observe her and that she may even have caught the whisper of: “That old lady, mere, was born on the day of the Semple Massacre.”

The bibliography at the end will indicate the extent of my researches for evidence regarding the lives of the historic characters in Baxter’s narrative. These researches make me able to vouch for its essential truth.

F. N.