<46 DEEP FURROWS 



been officially decreed only to be unofficially annulled; 

 it was the hot anger of a slap in the face the anger 

 that makes men fight with every ounce of their 

 strength. 



The quick welling of it planted anxiety in the minds 

 of such level-headed farmers as W. R. Motherwell and 

 Peter Dayman, of Abernethy ; Williams, of Balcarres ; 

 Snow, of Wolseley ; Sibbold and Millar, of Indian Head. 

 While the two latter were riding into town with wheat 

 /one day John Sibbold suggested to John Millar that, 

 as secretary of the local Agricultural Society, it might 

 be a good thing if he called a meeting to talk things 

 over. It was the high state of feeling manifested at 

 this meeting which furnished W. R. Motherwell with 

 food for thought on the lonely Qu'Appelle trail. And 

 it was the idea that it might be advisable to hold simi- 

 lar mass meetings throughout the country that brought 

 Peter Dayman driving over to the Motherwell place, 

 not long after, to discuss it. 



These two men had been friends and neighbors since 

 1883. Each of them felt that the time had come for 

 definite action of some kind and they spent the greater 

 part of the day in talking over the situation in search 

 of the most practical plan of campaign. There was 

 little use in the farmers attempting to organize in 

 defence of their own interests unless the effort were 

 absolutely united and along broader lines than those 

 of any previous farmers' organization. Politics, they 

 both agreed, would have to be kept out of the move- 

 ment at all costs or it would land on the rocks of defeat 

 in the same way that the Farmers' Union and Patrons 

 of Industry had been wrecked. 



It was in the middle eighties when the West was 

 settled but sparsely that the farmers had attempted to 



