Settling For Scrip
"The mission of the…Half-breed Commission has been entirely successful," boasted commissioners James Walker and Arthur Côté in their final report to the federal government’s minister of the interior. Writing from Calgary in the fall of 1899, Walker and Côté had every reason to be pleased with themselves. Their four-month expedition to the Athabasca country north of Edmonton had just "quieted" the land claims of some 1,200 Métis by handing out land grants or scrip worth an incredible $300,000. At the time, this was easily the single largest expenditure in the region by any government.
The Walker and Côté scrip commission was part of the much larger Treaty 8 negotiations that the federal government had initiated over the same four-month period with Athaba...