March West

[1] At this point, Macdonald appears to have intended to create a force of mounted police to watch "the frontier from Manitoba to the foot of the Rocky Mountains", probably with its headquarters in Winnipeg.

[2] He was heavily influenced by the model of the Royal Irish Constabulary, which combined aspects of a traditional military unit with the judicial functions of the magistrates' courts, and believed that the new force should be able to provide a local system of government in otherwise ungoverned areas.

[3] Macdonald had originally also wanted to form units of Métis policemen, commanded by white Canadian officers in a similar manner to the British Indian Army, but he was forced to abandon this approach after the Red River Rebellion of 1870 called their loyalty into question.

[5] In response, Macdonald used a privy council Order-in-Council to implement the new legislation, formally creating the NWMP with the intention of mobilizing the force and deploying it early the next year.

[7] Macdonald was not entirely convinced by the governor's analysis, but nonetheless he agreed to recruit 150 men and send them west to Lower Fort Garry before winter weather blocked the route.

[8] Macdonald's Conservative government then fell from power over the Pacific Scandal and was replaced on November 7, 1873, by the Liberal administration of Alexander Mackenzie, who placed more credence on Morris's reports and had his own moral concerns about the whisky trade.

[13] From Fort Dufferin, one option was to trace the southern line of the frontier, following a well-established trail created two years before by the British and United States Boundary Commission.

[21] On July 29, the badly depleted A Division, including those men suffering from dysentery, was left behind as the main force turned off the southerly trail to travel across the much drier and rougher plains a bit to the north.

[30] French abandoned the plan to move further towards Whoop-Up and instead travelled 70 miles (110 kilometres) south towards the Sweet Grass Hills, close to the border, where supplies could be bought from suppliers in the United States.

The popular historian Arthur Haydon, for example, scorned the newspaper accounts which blamed the officers and men as "incapable", "inexperienced" and "careless", arguing that the march was "truly one of the most extraordinary on record", of which "all Canadians might well feel proud.

[38] Ronald Atkin concludes that the expedition was "epic in its lack of organisation, in the poor way in which it was conducted and its incredibly close brush with disaster", Daniel Francis condemns it as "a fiasco of bad planning", with R. C. Macleod observing that "the difficulties of the Long March...were largely self-inflicted".