As a result of Net-no-kwa’s ambivalence, the family made several transits across what is now southern Manitoba and western Ontario during the closing years of the eighteenth century. To a degree, the family’s long-distance roaming reflected a pattern common to all western Ojibwas and Ottawas as they adapted to their new prairie environment. Many Ojibwas and Ottawas traveled back and forth between the Red River area and their ancestral villages around Lake Superior and Lake Huron, in some cases repeating those long-distance trips annually.2 However, Tanner’s family roamed farther west than that, and probably covered even more miles in these years than was typical. Net-no-kwa had at least three reasons to lead her family on such long journeys. One was her on-again, off-again plan to take the family back to Lake Huron. Another was to seek out the most productive beaver grounds. The third was her new alliance with an old Ottawa war chief named Pe-shau-ba, who had a snug log hut far to the west.
Pe-shau-ba entered young Tanner’s life during their first winter on the prairie. He appeared in their camp one day, announcing that he had come from afar on news that a powerful old Ottawa woman was living near Prairie Portage in a destitute condition after losing her husband and son-in-law on her westward journey. He recognized Net-no-kwa as a relative, and she him. Pe-shau-ba had three male companions, Waus-so, Sag-git-to, and Sa-ning-wub. In Ottawa culture, these followers were known as his “young men,” although one of the three, Waus-so, was not so young, having more winters behind him than his leader did. Waus-so had once been a principal hunter himself but had long since retired from that position. Since Pe-shau-ba’s subsistence group had no women or children and Tanner’s family had no men, they were a good fit to come together as one unit. Pe-shau-ba proposed that they combine, and Net-no-kwa agreed.
Everyone in this new group took to their customary gender roles. The men and boys brought home wild game; the women dressed the skins, dried the meat, made moccasins, cooked, and performed sundry other camp chores. Tanner noted that Net-no-kwa soon began to address Pe-shau-ba as her son, though he was not many years younger than she was. Perhaps it signified that their relationship was not sexual, though the two did become fond of each other and vied for leadership over the others in an amicable sort of way. Net-no-kwa, seeking to reclaim some of the status she had possessed back home, established clear divisions within the group; she took care of Pe-shau-ba’s needs and left it to her daughter and the young widow of Taw-ga-we-ninne to attend the needs of the other three men. Net-no-kwa also claimed responsibility for Tanner and Wa-me-gon-a-biew, while the younger women looked after the two small children in their group. At first their group had no young girls who were old enough to work, but Net-no-kwa corrected that circumstance by purchasing a ten-year-old female slave, one formerly of the Gros Ventre tribe, who had been captured by an Ojibwa war party.3 Tanner and his brother, for their part, mostly followed the men in their activities. Net-no-kwa encouraged the boys to look up to Pe-shau-ba not as an older brother but as a new father figure. Tanner greatly admired him, later describing him as a large and very handsome man, a brave and principled war chief, and a great provider who taught him most of what he knew in the arts of hunting.4
Pe-shau-ba taught them how to utilize the prairie’s greatest resource, bison. Even though they were in the depths of winter, he told them to discard the stiff reed pukkwi mats they used for covering their wigwams, insisting that they were too bulky to transport. Thenceforth, traveling the wintry prairie on snowshoes, they carried only their blankets and slept under the stars. Whenever they needed more protection from the cold, they killed bison and made a shelter with the hides. The fresh hides quickly froze in the wind, making a sturdy little tent. (Pe-shau-ba’s device was a crude form of the buffalo-hide tepees that the western Ojibwas and Ottawas would soon adopt from other Plains Indians in place of their reed-mat wigwams.) Sometimes they huddled in their little buffalo-hide tents for a week or more, waiting for clear weather before resuming their journey. In this way they covered a distance of about 150 miles in 75 days to reach Pe-shau-ba’s lodge.5
Pe-shau-ba’s cabin stood on the shore of Clear Lake in what is now Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba. In the preceding months he and his companions had taken a great many beaver in the surrounding hills, caching the skins in the woods near the cabin. When the new group arrived at the end of winter, they immediately broke into the cache and the women dressed the skins while the men and boys made canoe frames for transporting them out. As there was no birchbark for sheathing the canoes, they used green moose hides instead. The women carefully sewed the hides together, and the men stretched them over a wood frame to dry and harden in the sun. The technique made a serviceable watercraft capable of carrying a few hundred pounds of cargo apiece, although it did not last long in warm weather.6
In the spring, Pe-shau-ba’s and Net-no-kwa’s group took their several packs of skins to a trading house they called Mouse River Fort. The Mouse River is today’s Souris River, and the fort was the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Brandon House located near the junction of the Souris and Assiniboine rivers. The country stretching from the Red River westward up the Assiniboine to the Souris and Qu’Appelle rivers was the scene of much competition between fur traders in this period. The Hudson’s Bay Company had established Brandon House four years earlier in 1793, challenging the North West Company’s monopoly in the area. Independent traders followed the next year, and soon a number of trading houses vied for the Indians’ trade. Near the mouth of the Souris the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company each had a post; the two houses faced off across the Assiniboine River. The Indians welcomed the competition between traders, since it meant better prices for their peltries. The watershed of the Assiniboine River was known as the territory of the Assiniboine tribe; however, the Ojibwas and their Ottawa allies were fast moving into the country, for they were aggressive beaver hunters. Though the Ojibwas and Ottawas soon located the best beaver grounds, the Assiniboine nonetheless welcomed the newcomers as allies against their common enemy, the Sioux. The traders assumed that they were leading the Ojibwas and Ottawas into Assiniboine territory, but the Ojibwas and Ottawas saw it the other way around: the traders followed them there.7
At Brandon House, Pe-shau-ba and his companions proceeded to get drunk. The trader had a variety of goods for sale—blankets, ironware, articles of clothing—but all this went untouched, because the first “present” the trader gave them was a quantity of rum. When the men began drinking, the trader readily supplied them with more. Being too young to partake in the festivity, Tanner looked on with dismay as the adults drank the firewater and alternately brayed and blustered, loafed and passed out. As he later remembered it, Pe-shau-ba and his companions sold their entire stock of 100 beaver skins for four gallons of watered-down rum. Despite the obligatory ritual of treating the rum as a present, the trader effectively started a bar tab and took everything they had. The price, Tanner recalled, was six beaver skins for a quart of mixed rum. The drinking went on for days.8
Possibly the group received additional articles besides liquor that went unmentioned in Tanner’s account. Indeed, the pattern of furs for rum is repeated in Tanner’s Narrative with such regularity that one suspects it colored his memory, crowding out other items included in the exchange. Obviously, Tanner’s group had acquired their guns and blankets through previous trade. If nothing else, they had to obtain more ammunition. The North West Company trading houses had a standard issue of “small equipment” for Indian hunters that included measures of shot and powder, 25 balls, 4 gunflints, 1 gunworm, 1 firesteel, 3 awls, 3 skeins of thread, and 2 needles, as well as 1 fathom of tobacco and 5 pints of rum.9 The package suggests the variety of items required just to use and maintain guns. Still, the traders’ records basically confirm what Tanner described. As often as not, the Indians exchanged furs for practically nothing but rum. As much as the traders disliked seeing the Indians engage in boissons, or drinking bouts, outside the trading houses, they encouraged it
by their own practices. Sometimes this furs-for-rum exchange also wiped away “debt,” or the value of “presents” that the trader had supplied to the Indian on an earlier visit.
For Tanner, the drinking party on this occasion led to a second disappointment. A large number of Assiniboines and Crees had gathered near the trading house at the same time Tanner’s group was camped there. After a time, the Assiniboines and Crees formed a war party to go against the Hidatsas, who lived on the upper Missouri. Among Tanner’s group, the elderly Waus-so decided to join the war party. Net-no-kwa had intended to take their group to Lake Huron, but now Pe-shau-ba demurred, for he did not like the thought of the old man going to war without him. As he and Net-no-kwa were at loggerheads, they at last agreed on a new plan: the four men would go to the upper Missouri while the women and children would go to Lake Winnipeg, where the boys would hunt beaver, and in the fall the men would rejoin them there. Just before the group divided, Wa-me-gon-a-biew decided to go with the men. Abruptly, Tanner received the mantle of hunter for Net-no-kwa’s shrunken party.10
Young Tanner and the women and children set out down the Assiniboine River, the youth feeling anxious to prove himself in his new role as provider. They had not gone very far when they came upon a sturgeon stranded in a shoal behind a sandbar, its spiny back protruding out of the water. Tanner jumped out of the canoe and killed the great fish with a rock. As the sturgeon was the first one he had ever caught, Net-no-kwa insisted that they pause in their journey to celebrate the feast of Oskenetahgawin, or first fruits, even though they were alone in that country without any friends to join in the ceremony.11
As they proceeded down the Assiniboine to its junction with the Red River, Tanner soon realized he had no need to worry about finding enough game for them to eat. The abundance of animals on the prairie in those years was a thing to behold; no one could have imagined how fast they would disappear in the coming decades. Every spring, the swollen rivers carried thousands of dead bison downstream. These animals had perished along the river or fallen through the ice during the winter, and where their carcasses washed ashore the riverbanks were lined with wolves and bears feasting on carrion. There was also an abundance of smaller game such as otters, muskrats, foxes, and beavers. Near Lake Winnipeg the Red River branched into many channels. The islands in the middle of the river were thick with rushes and reeds, and the place teemed with waterfowl. Camping there through much of the summer, Tanner killed many geese, swans, and ducks, as well as beavers. Tanner also took his first elk, which provided occasion for another ceremonial feast.12
After reuniting with Pe-shau-ba and the others in the fall, they all went to Clear Lake to pass the winter. This was the best time of year for hunting beaver, since the beaver pelts carried a plush layer of underfur for insulation from the cold. When spring came Tanner went with the women and children to a place ten miles upstream from Brandon House to make sugar. Around Lake Huron, the Ottawas made sugar by tapping into maple trees when the sap began to flow in the spring. There being no maples on the prairie, the western Ojibwas and Ottawas found that box elders provided a good substitute. While the women made sugar, Tanner hunted bison to feed the camp. The bison were so numerous he was able to hunt them on foot with bow and arrow and the help of some hunting dogs. Tanner’s older brother, meanwhile, went off with the men to hunt beaver. Late in the spring they came down the river with their beaver skins loaded in canoes; but once more they all went to Brandon House, where they sold practically the entire stock for rum so that the grownups could enjoy another round of riotous drinking.13
Here the members of the group decided to split up for the last time. Net-no-kwa wanted to travel to Lake Huron, but Waus-so and Sa-ning-wub declined to go. Pe-shau-ba chose to stay with these two, while Sag-git-to elected to accompany Net-no-kwa and her group. Sag-git-to was troubled by an abscess on his belly, and he had begun to think he might die soon. Moreover, it seems he had fathered a child with Net-no-kwa’s daughter, so he may have been reluctant to abandon them. Pe-shau-ba and Net-no-kwa parted on amicable terms, but the breakup placed Tanner’s group in a difficult situation. Once more they were without a principal hunter. Tanner’s brother, Wa-me-gon-a-biew, was not yet old enough to fill the role. Sag-git-to was too sick to hunt, and in fact he did die that summer as he had predicted.14
Slowly Tanner’s family migrated eastward, hunting beaver along the way. When winter came they tried to join a band of Ojibwas near Lake of the Woods. Rebuffed by these Indians, they backtracked to the Red River to the trading house of Alexander Henry, a clerk in the North West Company. Presumably they obtained provisions from him on credit, for they hunted beaver with his men through the rest of the winter. In the spring they set out again for Lake Huron. Along the way they recovered over 400 beaver skins, plus a like amount of other animal skins, which they had cached the previous year near Lake of the Woods. Altogether this amounted to twenty-one packs, or nearly one ton of product. Net-no-kwa intended to transport the whole lot all the way to Mackinac to get the best possible price.15
Around midsummer they arrived at the ten-mile-long Grand Portage between the Pigeon River and Grand Portage Bay on Lake Superior. The North West Company had established an outlying post on the Pigeon River side, and the clerk there eagerly offered to transport their twenty-one packs across the portage in the company’s wagons. But Tanner’s people, fearing they would be robbed, declined the offer. Instead, they carried the heavy loads on their backs, making several trips over the portage in the course of several days. In the meantime, as they began to accumulate their peltries on the other side, the traders in charge of the big trading house on Grand Portage Bay offered to stow them in one of the storerooms. The principal trader was William McGillivray, the future head of the North West Company, and his assistant was Charles Jean Baptiste Chaboillez. These two gave Net-no-kwa a present of rum and allowed her to stay in the room to safeguard the packs while her sons completed the portage. The traders then tried to persuade her to sell them the furs rather than take them to Mackinac. When Net-no-kwa refused, Chaboillez’s son, a man in his midthirties, threatened to beat her until she would submit. But Net-no-kwa still did not budge, and the older Chaboillez called off his son before he laid any blows on the old woman. The furs were, for the moment, left in her possession.16
But at this juncture Wa-me-gon-a-biew unexpectedly thwarted Net-no-kwa’s long-cherished plan to return to Lake Huron. At Grand Portage, Wa-me-gon-a-biew met an Ojibwa girl with whom he became instantly infatuated. Just as his own family was preparing to depart for Mackinac and Lake Huron, he eloped with the girl and her family to the other side of the portage. Frustrated though she was with her son, Net-no-kwa would not leave without him.
Unable to deliver the twenty-one packs to Mackinac herself, she divided them into two lots. The bigger lot she entrusted to the young widow of Taw-ga-we-ninne, who agreed to board the traders’ schooner and dispose of them at Mackinac according to Net-no-kwa’s wish. The smaller lot she traded for rum, which she shared with the other Indians encamped at Grand Portage. As Tanner saw it, when Net-no-kwa realized that she might never return to Lake Huron, she decided to drown her sorrow by throwing a party. Much to his chagrin, three packs of beaver skins plus a number of buffalo robes were squandered in a single day of drinking.17
Tanner was now seventeen years old. Already he had seen his Indian family wantonly dispose of its hard-earned wealth several times over. He had garnered hundreds of those furs by his own labors, contributing the whole lot to the family coffers, only to see them sunk again and again in a drinking spree. The Indians’ penchant for such prodigality was one aspect of their culture he could not understand and had come to loathe. He himself did not take part in the drinking bouts. He disliked the white traders, and he associated the trading houses with his family’s reversals of fortune. Yet he blamed his Indian kin, too. He felt sorry for Net-no-kwa who, despite her strength and determination, ultimately failed in her plans to take her family back to Lake Huro
n. In Tanner’s mind, the group’s zigzag pursuit of that goal and its senseless trading of furs for rum went hand in hand. Both epitomized elements of an Indian mindset that he still found foreign.
10
The Test of Winter
Winter in the north country was a brutal test of endurance and survival. Algonquian peoples had developed a way of life that was finely adapted for dealing with those hard months. Everything from their material culture to their diet and metabolism conformed to the rhythms of the northern winter. Their pared-down social structure was specifically tailored to get them through it. But, well adapted as Algonquian peoples were to the harsh conditions, individuals and families still had little leeway in the event of accidents. The line between survival and death was very fine. If a wigwam burned down and a family was left without shelter, it might perish in a single night. A hunter who got his clothes wet could succumb to hypothermia in a matter of minutes. The loss of a subsistence group’s hunter might lead to starvation for the whole group.
The fur trade may have affected the Indians’ odds of survival through the winter. The trading posts functioned as emergency shelters. They were fixed points where people could go for assistance when they found themselves in dire straits. Moreover, the fur trade introduced new goods and technology that made it easier for Indian peoples to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves. The contrary view is that the fur trade made winter survival more problematic, as the hunt for furs diverted energy away from the basic hunt for food. Moreover, as the decades passed, the commercialization of hunting led to overharvesting of various resources, including vital food resources. Thus, by disrupting aboriginal patterns, the fur trade weakened the Indians’ safety net and left them more vulnerable to starvation, despite what the trading posts offered by way of emergency assistance.
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