With them was associated, in an advisory capacity, the Rev.Father Lacombe, O.M.I., Vicar-General of St.Albert, Alta., whose history had been identified for fifty years with the Canadian North-West, and whose career had touched the currents of primitive life at all points.
[Father Lacombe is by birth a French Canadian, his native parish being St.Sulpice, in the Island of Montreal, where he was born in the year 1827.

On the mother's side he is said to draw his descent from the daughter of a habitant on the St.Lawrence River called Duhamel, who was stolen in girlhood by the Ojibway Indians, and subsequently taken to wife by their chief, to whom she bore two sons.

By mere accident, her uncle, who was one of a North-West Company trading party on Lake Huron, met her at an Indian camp on one of the Manitoulin islands, and having identified her as his niece, restored her and her children to her family.

Father Lacombe was ordained a priest by Bishop Bourget, of Montreal, and in 1849 set out for Red River, where he became intimately associated with the French half-breeds, accompanying them on their great buffalo hunts, and ministering not only to the spiritual but to the temporal welfare of them and their descendants down to the present day.

In 1851 he took charge of the Lake Ste.