As he extracted this treasured heirloom he felt the “power,” that men of magic possess, creep up his sinewy arms.  It entered his heart, his blood, his brain.  For a long time he sat and chanted songs that only great medicine-men may sing, and, as the hours drifted by, the heat of the forest fires subsided, the flames diminished into smouldering blackness.  At daybreak the forest fire was dead, but its beckoning fingers had served their purpose.  The magic elk-bone spear had come back to its own.

Until the day of his death the first Capilano searched for the unknown river up which the seal travelled from False Creek to Deer Lake; but its channel is a secret that even Indian eyes have not seen.

But although those of the Squamish tribe tell and believe that the river still sings through its hidden trail that leads from Deer Lake to the sea, its course is as unknown, its channel is as hopelessly lost as the brave little army of beavers that a century ago marshalled their forces and travelled up into the great lone north.

A ROYAL MOHAWK CHIEF

How many Canadians are aware that in Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, and only surviving son of Queen Victoria, who has been appointed to represent King George V. in Canada, they undoubtedly have what many wish for—­one bearing an ancient Canadian title as Governor-General of all the Dominion?  It would be difficult to find a man more Canadian than any one of the fifty chiefs who compose the parliament of the ancient Iroquois nation, that loyal race of Redskins that has fought for the British crown against all of the enemies thereof, adhering to the British flag through the wars against both the French and the colonists.

Arthur, Duke of Connaught, is the only living white man who to-day has an undisputed right to the title of “Chief of the Six Nations Indians” (known collectively as the Iroquois).  He possesses the privilege of sitting in their councils, of casting his vote on all matters relative to the governing of the tribes, the disposal of reservation lands, the appropriation of both the principal and interest of the more than half a million dollars these tribes hold in Government bonds at Ottawa, accumulated from the sales of their lands.  In short, were every drop of blood in his royal veins red, instead of blue, he could not be more fully qualified as an Indian chief than he now is, not even were his title one of the fifty hereditary ones whose illustrious names composed the Iroquois confederacy before the Paleface ever set foot in America.

It was on the occasion of his first visit to Canada in 1869, when he was little more than a boy, that Prince Arthur received, upon his arrival at Quebec, an address of welcome from his royal mother’s “Indian Children” on the Grand River Reserve, in Brant county, Ontario.  In addition to this welcome they had a request to make of him:  would he accept the title of Chief and visit their reserve to give them the opportunity of conferring?