Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/533

Rh Nations in Ontario, numbering three thousand four hundred and thirty. Sir John A. Macdonald, Minister of the Interior of the Dominion, in his last report to the Marquis of Lome, the Governor-General, sounds the note of warning intimated on a former page, when the Canadians, by the progress of their Pacific Railway, will be brought into relations with the savages more like those which our own Government and people have encountered. He writes: —

We suppose these “Northwest mounted police” are armed; but they are not called soldiers. The “Census Return of Resident and Nomadic Indians in the Dominion of Canada” presents a total of 107,722. The number of acres of “Indian lands” sold in the year ending June, 1881, to new settlers, was 33,293, at the price of $52,787. The area of such lands unsold is estimated at 539,433 acres. The number of Indians on the reserves, when counted in the Northwest Territories, was 11,459; the number of “absentees” from reserves was 11,577.