AMATEUR SURGEON

Evening Post, Volume 105, Issue 4, 6 January 1928, Page 9

AMATEUR SURGEON

STORY OF NQRTH-WEST A CREE'S FORTITUDE (From "Th» Post's" Representative.) VANCOUVER, 12th December. An amazing story of how a clergyman acted as surgeon has just filtered through from Northern Saskatchewan. Peter Bird, a treaty Indian of the Lac La Ronge band of Crees, met with a serious accident while hunting on the Bear Mountain, on the north-east side of tho lake. He was stalking a moose, and his gun went off, the whole charge entering one of his arms, which was almost severed. Owing to ice conditions on the lake he was unable to be moved to any centre where his wound could be attended to before a fortnight had passed, when he was conveyed, not without considerable risk of ico jams, to the Anglican Indian school' 'on . the' oppo.ite' shpre, thirty miles distant. • \-i•-.-'... The field secretary of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, the Rev. A. H. Westgate, happened to bo at the. school on a visit of inspection, and, after a consultation with an officer of the North-west. Mounted Police, who sledded the patient a.cross the l&ke, he amputated the arm, and arranged,to have the Indian, transported to the'nearest;hospital at Prince Albert, 250 miles away. The first stage of tho journey was 180 miles by canoe, across five!lakes and up two rivers, against strong currents and numerous rapids and in continuous heavy rain. It took six days. Tour Crees took their wounded tribes? man in one canoe, Mr. Westgate and Miss Kelly, the school teacher, bound for Ireland oh furlough, travelling in another. Relays of Indians were obtained' tip Red River, and, when seventy miles from Prince Albert, the parry fell in with a motor-truck^ driven"' by a Forestry Department employee, who undertook at oncb to carry the wounded man tho remaining part of the journey. "Throughout a long and trying period," said Mr. Westgate, "tho Cree was never heard to complain. He carried with him the remains of a tattered New Testament, giveh him many years before by a missionary, and appeared to prize it more than anything else. His patience and fortitude under, acute suffering, the devotion'of the canoe men, and the chivalry of members, of the Forest Patrol, and others along the way were in keeping with the highest traditions of the backwoodsman."