A-WO-ZAN-ZAN-TONGA

His work abroad and the backwash from Princeton had not diminished Buchman's activities in his own country. In the first three months of 1929 he held half a dozen house-parties in the United States, the last being in Briarcliff, thirty miles up the Hudson from New York. Indeed, Briarcliff became so well known as a centre of his activities during the next years that when he called on the Governor of New York State, Franklin D. Roosevelt, at Hyde Park in May 1932, Roosevelt's first remark was, 'Hello, Buchman. What's happening at Briarcliff?' Shortly afterwards Buchman was received by President Hoover, who was preoccupied by the Depression, now reaching its deepest point. The realisation that the prosperity of the twenties had gone, perhaps for good, brought with it despair and the threat of violence. Harper's magazine carried an article headed 'Are We Going to Have a Revolution?'1 There were thirty-eight suicides in Detroit in a single weekend.

Buchman had brought a group of twenty to North America on a reconnaissance that year. He held large meetings in the East and Middle West of the United States, arriving in Detroit in June. Here a couple whose marriage had been saved through meeting the Oxford Group introduced him to Mr and Mrs Henry Ford. Ford, noticing that Buchman's watch was not working, offered him the duplicate of his own - a dollar watch on a neat leather cord attached to his coat lapel. Buchman was celebrating his fifty-fourth birthday, and had asked his Penn State friend, Bill Pickle, now eighty-four years old, to join him for the occasion. He introduced Bill Pickle to the Fords. 'Henry Ford showed himself to me as simply a common man,' was Bill's verdict. 'If he was a neighbour of mine, we could just be good friends.'

Buchman had kept in touch with Bill through the years, and had sent him financial help when times were hard. Hearing that his 'benefactor', as he always called Buchman, planned to visit Europe again, Bill had written, 'Hear you are sailing for Oxford, England, on 15 June, which would be my soul's delight in my last days. Now, Frank, you know I have never asked for anything and have no reason to ask, but you don't know how I would like to go with you to Oxford. We are all quite well and spiritually on the mountain top. Yours in fellowship, love and truth, Your brother, W. I. Gilliland.'2

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On the day the Berengaria sailed for England, Buchman wrote to Mrs Ford, 'You may be surprised to hear that I am taking Bill Pickle to England with me tonight. Bill says the last boat he was on was a ferry boat from Philadelphia to Camden, and before that his biggest boat had been a dog raft on a mill pond!'3

On his first journey by air, from London to Geneva for a luncheon for League of Nations delegates, Bill Pickle gave one look at the small plane and asked to see the pilot. 'You're going to fly in that contraption?' asked Bill.

'Yes,' replied the veteran pilot.

'If you don't mind,' said Bill, 'I'd feel much easier if we could kneel down and pray before we start.'

The pilot got down on his knees beside the plane, while Bill entrusted their safety to his 'Heavenly Parent' as he, an illegitimate son who never knew his father, always addressed God.

Henry Ford had in the meantime run across Harvey Firestone's son in the course of business, had noticed the change in him and kept him talking in his office for two hours. During this period he invited Bill Pickle, returned from Europe, to meet some of his hard-drinking executives. Bill was asked how he prayed. 'Well,' he said, blowing out his moustaches, 'the first thing is to get down on your knees, as in crap-shooting.' Laughter drowned the rest of the instruction. In Geneva likewise, his directness made a stronger impression than many more polished utterances. Buchman used to say, 'He's genuine. So you can introduce him anywhere.'

In Europe Buchman had now gathered what the Princeton affair had scattered in America - the mobile force of convinced people for which he had worked ever since returning from China. After his preliminary reconnaissance in Canada, he returned there with thirty-two people in October 1932. On the voyage the ship's barber, while shaving Buchman, asked in rather thick tones what his work was. 'My work', Buchman replied with spirit, 'is to help a bull-necked barber, who has been out on the binge the night before, find out how he can get cleaned up and put on the right road.'

Buchman's initial team, which was commissioned by the Bishop of Liverpool, was drawn from Britain, Holland, Germany, South Africa and the United States. It being October, with the University term in full swing, only six from Oxford were in the first party, including Reginald Holme of motor-club fame who had just got a First in theology, and Marie Clarkson, the 'dog girl'. Dr and Mrs Ebenezer Macmillan had come from South Africa, Frau Moni von Cramon from Germany, Vice-Admiral Sydney Drury-Lowe from London, and Jimmie Watt, a former Communist, from Scotland. As the Duchess of Bedford steamed into Quebec harbour, Ruth Bennett 4 remembers Buchman urging the British to forget they were British and remember only that they were Christians. 'Live on a basis of appreciation, not comparison,' he said, and then threw out the thought, 'Each of you may be leading a team of two hundred before this trip is over.'

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The team was mostly under twenty-five and certainly needed training. 'We were as green as grass,' recalls Holme. 'I remember telling a Liverpool journalist before leaving that, in view of all the crime we read about in America, some of us might not come back. We had a meeting with the Salvation Army, and one of our American girls was asked to give a benediction. There was a long silence. She knew what a Benedictine was, but had never heard this new word.' The 'dog girl', attacked by a zealous theologian as to why she had not mentioned 'the blood of Christ' in her speech, replied, 'If you'd raised that at my first meeting, I'd have run six blocks.'

Their very freshness proved attractive. After the first meeting a dignified grey-haired man got hold of Holme. He asked how to have a 'quiet time', and, when he tried it, wrote down the one word 'Customs'. A Balliol man, Bernard Hallward was now Vice-President of the Montreal Star, and when the team reached Ottawa they were greeted by an eight-column headline bearing the news that he had returned $12,200 to the National Revenue Department for undeclared goods brought through from Europe.5

In Ottawa, Prime Minister R. B. Bennett gave a lunch for his Cabinet colleagues to meet the visitors. 'If, as I believe, Wesley saved England from the effects of the French Revolution,' he said on that occasion, 'so it is my abiding faith that the influences you so powerfully represent are the only ones that can save the world.'6

Professor Grensted joined the travellers during the Oxford Christmas vacation and embarked on a heavy programme of meeting his fellow theologians and psychologists. He wrote in his diary, 'Toronto - In the afternoon, interviews; one of them well worth all the time and cost of coming. This evening three meetings, and at least 3,000 people to hear our very simple story. Each of us spoke three times, and I, at least, began to know the curious clarity that lies beyond weariness. But what a need there is, and how patiently these people listen and look for help! The lounge of the hotel is full, after meetings, of groups talking on and on... At tea I was supposed to meet a few psychologists and found the whole department had arrived. They seemed to know how but not why. And clearly they thought me an interesting exhibit....

'Hamilton, Ontario - Things moved well, as always, with the clergy, where I was led to proclaim with vigour and emphasis against the opinions of the local psychiatrist who had raised his head against us.... I write this at 2.00am, much delayed by letters. Also by the arrival of a leading Church paper full of attacks on the Group. It is curious how these attacks seem to be organised. The editor says he has waited to form a judgement until the arrival of the Group, and then reprints hostile attacks written weeks ago in an English paper. It is queer to read this attack, written by able people too, and then think of the steady stream of sober miracles going on under my very eyes. Just fear, I believe, lest young people should rise up and save the world. And the challenge to older folk who have not saved it. . . .'

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Buchman took his team of sixty for Christmas to Lucerne, Quebec. Hermann Hagedorn, the poet and biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, noted: 'No time to get presents. Ellie Forde went to the 5- and l0-cent store. Grensted and others wrote poems for each one. Frank got sixty Christmas wreaths, ribbons and tags. At hotel, big six-sided fireplace. Carols. Creche for Frank. Trees, show, etc ... Next day Grensted fixed exquisite nativity tableau. Frank loved the homeliness. Acute sensitivity to people and things. A good deal of the artist in him. Tremendous sentiment which never gets into sentimentality. But he is gregarious until he can't rest. Every anniversary has tremendous significance.'

On 29 January in Montreal there was, Grensted noted, 'a great service in the Cathedral in the late afternoon. The Bishop spoke with feeling and warmth, a little staggered to find the Cathedral completely full. People were coming for two hours before time....'

There was a house-party in Detroit just before the Montreal visit, and they returned there on the 30th, en route for New York, for a barn dance given for them by Henry Ford. On the Sunday morning, Bill Pickle spoke in the Chapel of Martha and Mary in Ford's Dearborn Village, and Buchman and some of his team had tea with the Fords at their home. Then on to New York where 3,200 people crowded the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom for what Grensted described as 'a special triumph for Frank, who remembers only too well his earlier difficulties in New York, when all the press was against him and friends were few'.*

(* Greensted reported his doings in North America with considerable enthusiasm at a meeting in Oxford on his return. By the next year, however, he had come to feel that he must be more detached. According to a private memo by Archbishop Lang of 13 July, 1934, Greensted had become disturbed by 'the explosive self-confidence of some of the younger whole-time members insisting that their method is practically the only one by which a man can become a Christian', but said that he would 'continue to be in full sympathy with its main purposes'.)

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From Briarcliff Buchman took his team to Washington, where the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, attended one of the meetings. Another was opened by a black choir, for which Buchman was much criticised - a criticism which became still shriller when he transferred the next meeting to a black church where 2,000 people, black and white, mingled happily, at a time when such racial integration was unusual in the capital.

The journey continued through Louisville, Akron and Kansas City - where Buchman first met Judge, later President, Harry Truman - to Arizona and California. In Phoenix he took the whole party to a rodeo, and ended up talking deeply with one of the cowboys on the platform until the train pulled out.

On the West Coast there were large meetings in Los Angeles and three house-parties nearby. The visitors also found themselves speaking in San Quentin prison. A copy of For Sinners Only had made its way there and the changes it had effected were so marked that the prison's Director of Social and Religious Services invited them in. The Director himself said the visit gave him a new approach to his work. Other prisons were visited in Canada and the Eastern States, and changes in many inmates were reported by prison authorities.

Buchman, as the tour proceeded, was more and more insisting that those who 'changed' should relate their experience of God to their public lives and the problems of the nation. Personal experience was important, but it was apt to become sentimental unless immediately applied to everyday life. Two business men who took this step were William Manning of San Francisco, who owned a string of coffee houses, and T. P. Loblaw, whose chain of provision stores spanned Canada from coast to coast.

Manning and his family gave up their large house and began to live more simply, rather than dismiss employees. He remarked that he was amused at all the safeguards he had been trying to take against the Depression: 'Once you have your family lined up on this basis, all fear of the future vanishes.'

Loblaw, whose stores were a forerunner of today's supermarkets and whose turn-over that year exceeded $25,000,000, asked Buchman to send one of his team to be his guest. Buchman sent George Wood, Lawson's eighteen-year-old brother, fresh from school in Aberdeen. One day they knelt down together while Loblaw gave his life and business to God. He promptly told his employees and competitors that his business was under new management, and began to reshape it. In this he enlisted the help of the former Communist, Jimmie Watt, who commented, 'He faced the challenge of having his business on a God-guided basis, knowing full well the adjustments and readjustments which had to be made. He made a noble beginning.' Alas, it was only a beginning, for Loblaw died three months later after a brief illness. Others, however, were stimulated by his example, among them the head of a salmon cannery in Vancouver, Richard Bell Irving, whom he introduced to the Oxford Group.

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Throughout the trip Buchman took care to keep his green young colleagues from taking themselves too seriously. One of them became somewhat elated by his success as a speaker. At two o'clock one morning in Quebec, Buchman, on the way to bed, rang him up from the lobby of the hotel. 'My name's Walker,' he said in a disguised voice. 'I heard you speak this evening and was deeply impressed. I want you to come downstairs at once and get me started.' The young man jumped out of bed and went down, only to find, after some fruitless waiting, that he had fallen into a Buchman trap against self-importance. The young, however, had their own back at a mock trial of Buchman for chewing gum - something he never did - on a college campus. The skit parodied all his characteristics and mannerisms, and Buchman laughed uproariously.

The trip was overshadowed for at least one of the party by Hitler's rise to power in Germany. Frau Moni von Cramon was from an old Junker family, had been a lady-in-waiting to the last Kaiserin, and was related to the famous German airman of the First World War, Baron Manfred von Richthofen. She herself ran a finishing school for girls in her large home near Breslau, in Silesia. She had left her three children there. 'Both the National Socialists and the Communists hate me because of my link with the Kaiser,' she told Buchman. 'I must go home.' She arrived home just as Hitler was proclaimed Chancellor.

Throughout the trip, as Ruth Bennett remembers, Buchman's people were so inexperienced that he had to handle all the arrangements himself: travel, luggage, laundry, hotel reservations, checking and paying bills, press coverage, and printing. 'The only time I saw him lose his temper,' she says, 'was when we were all sitting peacefully eating our breakfast at the hotel in Montreal when we should have been well on the way to the station.' 'I say, you fellows,' said someone, 'Buchman's turning cartwheels in the lobby because we're not on our way!'

Buchman was often criticised for using large hotels, but his reply was that they alone had the facilities necessary for the team's work - telephones, a ballroom, the use of which for meetings was often thrown in free, and rooms for smaller meetings. Hotel owners frequently made special concessions. One always gave Buchman a suite at the price of a single room in gratitude for a change he saw in his nephew. Another cut $2,000 from the bill because a large amount of silver had been returned to the hotel as a result of Buchman's meetings: principally, the owner alleged, from people who had been there for other religious gatherings.

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In one city the hotel into which Buchman had booked had been burnt down and the proprietor of the only alternative demanded absurd rates. In spite of every argument, he would not budge. Finally Buchman said, 'If that is your last word, I will call a press conference and tell how you have treated us.' The proprietor swiftly climbed down. 'When the other fellow plants his feet you just have to plant yours more firmly,' commented Buchman.

The financial basis of the trip amazed those taking part, and caused curiosity, incredulity or shock to the public at large. Buchman never had in hand more than enough for the next week's needs. Shortly before he left Britain, Roger Hicks, a recently recruited whole-time colleague, offered Buchman, £10,000, the remains of the capital left him by his father. Buchman refused to take it. 'It's not my job to look after your money for you,' he told Hicks. 'Now that you are free from the false security of money, God will show you how to use it.' Hicks, unable to get him to change his mind, took further thought and returned with £2,000. 'Frank,' he said, 'I've guidance to give you this.' After a few moments' reflection Buchman accepted it.

'Tell me,' Hicks then asked him, 'how will you spend it?'

'I have thirty-two people going to Canada with me next week,' Buchman replied. 'I have reserved the passages, but I haven't the money to pay for them. That will be the first claim.' Hicks soon afterwards joined him in Canada.

Buchman never asked for money on the tour. No collections were taken at the meetings, though people assured him that this would raise all he needed. He believed that people who had been helped would give out of gratitude, and so it turned out. In fact, an average of forty people travelled from end to end of the continent for eight months in the middle of the Depression without any assured means of support, and none of them ever lacked food or shelter.

Numerous instances of how they were provided for could be given. A Scot, George Marjoribanks, and a colleague found themselves alone and penniless in Edmonton. They prayed about it and half an hour later ran into a man in the street who, without being asked, gave Marjoribanks $25. Francis Goulding, in England, had the thought to send someone on the Canadian trip £4. He had not got it. He prayed, 'If You want me to do it, You will have to send me the £4.' In his post that morning came two letters, each containing £2. A registered envelope cost 10 pence: an hour later a man returned 10 pence he owed him.

Not that this way of living came easily. 'One morning', recalls a member of the team, 'we gathered, some fifty strong. Buchman started by asking whether there was anyone with absolutely no money and held up a very small bundle of notes, all that was left in the treasury. One man stood up and said he was penniless. Buchman walked down and gave him $2. He then talked to us about our lack of faith in a way I shall never forget. "Some of you are content to travel on my faith," he said. The outcome was that we all went to our rooms to ask God's forgiveness for our faithlessness and to implore His continued support.'

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Western Canada gave the party a big public welcome. '30,000 Flock to Hear Oxford Group' was the headline in the Vancouver News.7 James Butterfield, a columnist in the rival Vancouver Daily Province, took a sceptical view. For four days he attacked.8 On the fifth, Buchman spied him at a reception. 'Hello, Butterfield,' he said, 'you're the fellow who has spelt my name right all week.' That started a talk. Next day, Butterfield's column was headed, 'Dr Buchman, You Win!'

In Edmonton, the Premier of Alberta, who had offered to preside at the first meeting, found himself also speaking to three overflow meetings, all packed to the doors. He said the crowds had the sniff of an election meeting but surpassed any election interest he had known.

When Buchman and Hicks got back to their hotel one night, they found a distinguished-looking older man, in full evening dress and a bit drunk, lying on Buchman's bed. Buchman sent Hicks down to ask the manager how he had got in. When Hicks returned, he heard the visitor saying, 'Now, Dr Buchman, please tell me again - what are those four standards?' Buchman told him. 'I sometimes forget by morning what I heard the night before. Please write them on my shirt front,' the man replied. So Buchman wrote on his shirt front: 'Absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. Tea with Buchman, 5 o'clock.' He came, decided to change, and was a transformed person.

The final all-Canadian gathering at the Chateau Frontenac Hotel in Quebec ended on Whit Sunday, and to the astonishment of the hotel staff Buchman asked one Sully Wood, a highly successful car salesman, to read the Whitsun story from the Acts of the Apostles. Wood had stayed at the hotel twenty-seven times, and never remembered how he had left. The manager could never let the rooms to either side of his because of the racket he made. When Sully arrived this time he said, 'This is the wrong place for you, Sully. A lot of religious people have come.' 'I've come with them,' Sully replied. 'Something may happen.'

The manager was sceptical, and the bell-hops had a sweepstake on how long he would stay sober. One night, finding him roaming the kitchen, they thought they had caught him. But he was only after milk. The 'something' happened. Soon his estranged family joined him, and they were reunited. Six weeks later, while a hundred other Canadians sailed to England for the Oxford house-party, Sully led a team from Toronto to some of the neighbouring cities.

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G. Ward Price, one of Britain's leading reporters of the period, visited Canada just after the Oxford Group team left. 'I found the whole Dominion, from Vancouver to Quebec, discussing the success of the mission of the Oxford Group,' he wrote in the Sunday Pictorial. 'I must admit I was impressed by the hold it has evidently taken on the minds of many Canadians whose education and knowledge of the world would safeguard them against mere emotional methods.'9

In March 1934 Buchman led a second, larger expedition to Canada, with side forays into the United States. The trip through Canada was, as to the crowds and official receptions, a repeat of the year before. But Buchman, from the first, had told his team, 'Our aim is not to win new people, but to get everyone to apply their new experience in the life of the nation. Last rime we drove in some pylons. Now we must raise the building upon them.'10 'The Oxford Group and World Peace' and 'Oxford Group Influence on Racial Strife' were the titles of two editorials in the Toronto Mail and Empire,11 while the Ottawa Citizen 12 wrote of the implications of the Group's message for unemployment. The Colonist of Victoria, BC, stated: 'The Oxford Group seemed to one observer to have grown in sensitiveness to the needs of humanity. . . The listener need not deduce that the movement has in any way retired from its leading tenets nor is giving up its characteristic modes of religious life . . . But without doubt, it is giving a new emphasis. It is facing up to the social implications of the gospel.'13

A just rebuke, however, came from the Ottawa Evening Journal when Holme inferred from the case of his friend Hallward in Montreal that 'the people of Canada are beginning to pay their taxes on a basis of "absolute honesty"'. '"Beginning" is the word used,' commented the paper. 'The inference that Canadians generally have been dishonest in their income tax payments and that it remained for the Oxford Group to convert them to honest practices, is one which touring ladies and gentlemen would find it difficult to maintain.' Nevertheless, the paper added, 'there is room for improvement'. The statement seemed 'to value this evangelical movement according to its measurable cash return,' the editorial concluded. 'We should like to be permitted to think its objectives are on a higher plane.'14

An early part of the tour was spent in the Maritimes, unvisited the previous year. From there Buchman planned to move to the prairie-provinces, and this time he was determined that he would not do all the preparation work. Rather he saw it as a way to train younger people by throwing them in at the deep end. One of them, Howard Blake, remembers a night of planning as the train took them from the Maritimes to Toronto: 'While most slept peacefully in the darkened sleeping cars, one drawing room glowed with the light as Frank and a group of friends gathered round the table to plan a lightning dash right across the continent. After two days in Toronto, they were to visit in rapid succession Winnipeg and Regina, there divide into two simultaneous visits in Calgary and Edmonton, to meet again in Vancouver, then Victoria and Seattle. After that was to come a final training period at Banff before the force returned for the summer assembly at Oxford.

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'During the night advance parties of two for each city were chosen to move ahead on a connecting train the following morning, while the force visited Toronto. Frank had visited these cities just two years before. So far as we knew, he had no expectation of returning in the foreseeable future. As soon as it was clear which two would go to each city, he began dictating letters of introduction to relays of secretaries on through the night, so that the young men would quickly find their way in each city.

'I have never experienced anything like that night's dictation - each letter a personal one to every major hotel owner and every newspaper editor in those cities, and to other leading men. With no notes or diary, Frank dictated from memory, with name and correct spelling, greetings to wives and often to children with their names, letters brimful of news, of what had happened and what was going to happen, with warmth and spontaneity as though he had seen them a week or two before. By morning all was clear. Fourteen men carried on to seven cities, and prepared the way for the big team that followed shortly afterwards, while Frank in full vigour led the rest into the United States.'

This move took the form of a brief visit to New York and Washington, followed by two days at Allentown. 'Fortunately Buchman has not been a prophet without honour in his own country,' wrote the Allentown Call. 'Allentown is going to welcome him not only for himself, but for the message he is bringing to millions of people.'15

Back in Canada again, Buchman and his team were received by the Premier in each province, Prime Minister Bennett spending five hours with them in Ottawa. In Vancouver they found that one of the worst shipping strikes in North America up to that time was paralysing the Pacific Coast ports from San Francisco to Alaska. Parts of Alaska had already been put on rations. If the strike continued, the year's salmon run - on which the canning industry depended - would be lost. By the time of the Group's arrival complete deadlock had been reached.

Mainly through the intervention of two of Buchman's team - George Light, the Warwickshire Socialist, and Walter Horne, a Californian ship-builder - a fair settlement was reached. It took them seventy-two hours of continuous effort, moving between the men, who had long-standing and justified grievances, the strike committee, union leaders and employers. The resolution was reported at a business men's lunch in Toronto by the salmon-canner from Vancouver, Richard Bell Irving.16 'This was accomplished by the application of Christ's principles as advocated by the Group to the problems of both owners and strikers,' he said. 'My company was very seriously affected by the strike and I therefore know whereof I speak.'17 The Ottawa Evening Citizen commented, 'When Christianity is put into practice it is spiritual dynamite. There is no greater force for enduring reform known to mankind.'18

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The impetus behind this settlement was studied at the house-party in Banff, immediately after the visit to the far West. There Buchman had two main themes. The first was the need for a society totally controlled by God, through the free co-operation of individuals. The second was how a group, in any situation, could set to work to bring this about.

'What agency will save civilisation from suicide?' he asked. 'It is no use patching up old tyres. We need a new car.' This 'car' would be a nation as totally controlled by God as the totalitarian states of the dictators were controlled by men. 'The main thought at Banff was "Totality" - a Church, a University, a City, a Province, a Country, wholly Christian,' stated the house-party report. 'What vision, what imagination, what devotion, what discipline was needed for the realisation of such a great objective - this was the consideration of the house-party.'19

Buchman went into his second theme one morning, instancing how a group of seven dedicated people could operate in a city. They could sit down and listen to God so as to get the names of the seven most strategic, or the seven most tempted, or the seven most difficult people in the city. Then they could set out in a 'shoe-leather activity' to change these people. 'God works on difficult people,' he said. 'It's like a triangle. God at the top, you and the other person. To any group short of the basis of life-changing wave goodbye. Have you thought of a gangster changing? How many Communists do we know personally? Some of you will have unexpected companions on this business.'

Both elements were essential to his strategy: the proclaiming of a vision adequate to interest thousands, and the art of the 'fisher of men', who knew how to go patiently after the big and difficult fish with the right fly or bait.

While at Banff the Stoney Indians, a tribe of the Sioux people, made Buchman a blood brother. Only members of the British royal family may be made chiefs of the Stoneys, and up till then only six other whites had been made blood brothers. During the winter the squaws had made the ceremonial costume of soft white leather and beads, with the traditional feather headdress. Buchman's answers to the ritual questions, given on his behalf by Loudon Hamilton resplendent in a kilt, revealed a sad lack of tepees and cattle, made up for by the number of his braves and by the fact that he and they 'worked without money for God'. The Stoneys gave him the name A-Wo-Zan-Zan-Tonga - Great Light in Darkness - which Chief Walking Buffalo said had come to them as a thought from God. They pledged the tribe's help 'in sorrow or sickness, hunger or plenty, by day and by night,' and ended, 'Thus will you grow great in the hearts of those who now adopt you, and the Great Spirit will look with love and compassion on you when He calls you to the Happy Hunting Grounds.'*

(* Grant MacEwan, in his biography of Chief Walking Buffalo, Tatanga Mani (Hurtig, 1969), states that the Chief was introduced to Buchman in Banff by a white Canadian friend, was asked by this friend to make Buchman a blood brother, and thereupon organised an immediate ceremony. However, the present account is taken from contemporary eye-witness reports.)

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'The work you are doing has made the task of government easier,' said Prime Minister Bennett in a farewell message to Buchman and his team. 'Your influence has been felt in every village and city, even in the remotest outpost of the Dominion.'20

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 1 Harpers, August 1932.

 2 William Gilliland to Buchman, 23 May 1932.

 3 Buchman to Mrs Henry Ford, 16 June 1932.

 4 Now Ruth Lamond.

 5 Ottawa Evening Citizen, 15 November 1932.

 6 Church of England Newspaper, 2 December 1932.

 7 Vancouver News, 3April 1933.

 8 Vancouver Daily Province, 11 April 1933 and following days.

 9 Sunday Pictorial, 25 June 1933.

10 Calgary Herald, 12 June 1934.

11 Mail and Empire, 20 March 1934 and 9 May 1934.

12 Ottawa Evening Citizen, 23 March 1934.

13 The Colonist, 3 June 1934.

14 Ottawa Evening Journal, 12 March 1934.

15 Allentown Morning Call, 24 April 1934.

16 Toronto Evening Citizen, 18 June 1934.

17 Witness and Canadian Homestead, 27 June 1934.

18 Ottawa Evening Citizen, 16 June 1934.

19 Report on 'The North American House Party, Banff, Canada', 6-11 June 1934.

20 See Boston Evening Transcript, 26 January 1935, article by Albert Diefenbaker headed 'The Conversion of Canada's Prime Minister'.