“August 23, Iron Creek: This beautiful stream derives its name from a strange formation said to be pure iron. The piece weighs 300 pounds.… Tradition says that it has lain out on the hill ever since the place was first visited by Na-ne-boo-sho after the flood had retired. For ages the tribes of the Blackfoot and Cree have gathered their clans to pay homage to this wonderful manitoo. Three years ago [1866] one of our people put the idol in his cart and brought it to [our settlement] Victoria.”
In July 1874, he mentioned the stone again (apparently it had gained weight):
“I have sent on to Red River a meteoric stone weighing 400 pounds, the great memento of the plains, and requested Brother Young to forward it to your address. I intended it for Victoria College [Cobourg, Ontario].…”
Since before time, the sacred Iron Stone had rested on its solitary, pointed hill near the Battle River, overlooking the long ravines of Iron Creek. From beside it the Plains People could see the complete circle of Earth, could look west and north and east to the endless forests, and south over the scattered coppice of aspen fading into the light of the prairie where they found their daily food. The Blackfoot had dedicated the stone to Old Man Buffalo, guardian spirit of buffalo and protector of everyone who came to pray, and when the Cree moved onto the plains, they too worshipped there, chanting prayers and songs, leaving thank offerings for the gifts given, for the continuing hope of life for themselves and their children.
Now the Iron Stone was gone. Sweetgrass said bitterly, It’s lying beside McDougall’s church in Victoria. Our Father Lacombe would never have done that.
Big Bear answered nothing. He loved the older chief as he had loved his father, but he was concerned that Sweetgrass had let Lacombe baptize him. Big Bear could not quite trust any God-man. Until now they had done no real harm and were friendly enough to People, but they were always arguing with one another about an incomprehensible White “God” who was forever enraged about something. Big Bear had no feeling, no intuition, no dream that he should listen to any of them. And this inexplicable theft confirmed his refusal. Here was more proof that Whites respected only their own ways of honouring the Creator: the Methodists, who had baptized Maskepetoon and continued to help him promote peace, seemingly felt no shame in stealing the Stone.
People were stunned by the theft, and the Elders foresaw certain disaster. Disease, starvation, more bitter war must follow such a desecration. Cree Chief Pakan, whose band grew acres of Methodist potatoes east of Victoria, had nothing to say; his People could not live without buffalo either. And for several years the buffalo did continue to come north, though sometimes the tribes were forced to hunt so closely together that several men might be wounded or even killed before the chiefs could negotiate a mutual withdrawal. All the beautiful Young Men, so quick to be shamed and hot-blooded on their swift horses and longing for vengeance, were always so hard to hold in check.
And more stories arrived from the east. It was said that four or five White tribes had made a treaty and now had one Big Chief and one giant country called Canada. Big Bear rolled the word around in his mouth. In Cree it echoed the word kanâta, meaning “the place that is clean,” though he doubted it was. The chief’s name, Macdonald, sounded Methodist.
In 1870, smallpox found the Cree again. The previous fall Blackfoot had unwittingly stolen infected blankets from a Missouri riverboat, and throughout the winter the disease spread terror among them. As soon as he heard, Big Bear moved farther north, his band scattering beyond the North Saskatchewan, and so James Simpson with his horses to trade did not find him until late summer.
The Elders foretold this, Big Bear said sadly. Four years after Methodists stole Old Man Buffalo, we have smallpox.
Simpson said, Maybe it won’t attack your band if you stay north of the river.
Maybe we can stay long enough—if your good horses help us fish.
That evening they drank tea and smoked and remembered Chief Maskepetoon, who that spring had again ridden to the Blackfoot to make peace. In the camp of his Blackfoot father he had been greeted with ceremony and joy. But before they could talk, a Blackfoot named Big Swan, who had fought with Cree near Edmonton just days before, fired a shot and knocked the old man from his horse. In a frenzy of hatred, over the shouts of consternation and grief from the Elders, the warriors dragged Maskepetoon’s body out onto the prairie, hacked it up, and left the pieces to the dogs.
Big Bear said, He was our peace chief. There can only be more war.
Simpson murmured, Perhaps war with the Whites too.
Big Bear looked up. Why would we fight Whites?
Red River, Simpson said. Just this spring Canada marched in a thousand soldiers and chased Louis Riel across the border into the States. Half those soldiers are still there.
The Métis know what wars they want to fight. We are People.
Haven’t you heard? The Métis made Riel chief of Red River because they heard the Hudson’s Bay Company had sold the land to Canada.
Sold? What land?
Simpson said, All the land, everything around Red River, and even here where you live.
The Company has no land, just the spots where People once agreed they could build posts to trade with us.
They say Canada bought the whole land from them, everything north of the border to the mountains.
After a long pause of incomprehension, Big Bear asked, Did your father say that? That the Company owns our land?
Simpson snorted. Huh! My father thought he owned everything he stepped on. He doesn’t matter, but Macdonald in Ottawa matters. He says he’s bought all the land.
How can anyone “buy” or “own” land?
The question Big Bear would ask many times in the coming years. And no one would give him any more comfort than James Simpson:
I think maybe Whites can do more than we can dream of.
The trader was surprised at how many horses Big Bear’s band bartered for despite its poverty. The chief did not tell him that they were planning war. Their Assiniboine allies had begun it by sending a tobacco message: The Blackfoot are ravaged by smallpox; come, now is the time to destroy them. We will avenge your peace chief Maskepetoon, and we will have the prairie and buffalo to ourselves.
More than twenty Cree bands, including those of Big Bear and his close friend Little Pine, smoked the tobacco, and though Sweetgrass was too old for battle, most of his Young Men came as well. In early October 1870, the Cree met the Assiniboine in the Vermillion Hills and more than six hundred warriors rode west together, the largest force they had ever assembled.
They finally reached the Little Bow River and sent out scouts. They readied their Bay muzzle-loaders and rifles, their bows and arrows, spears, war clubs, and knives, but one day in council, Assiniboine Chief Piapot told them he had dreamed a dream. He had seen a buffalo with iron horns charging through camp, goring, tossing warriors aside in bloody pieces; clearly, his guardian spirit was warning him not to commit war. But the other leaders did not agree: they were eight days into Blackfoot territory and still had not met one single enemy! So next day, while Piapot and some followers turned back, almost six hundred warriors continued south to the Oldman River, where the scouts had discovered a Blood camp within sight of the mountains. They attacked before dawn.
But, unknown to them, several much larger bands of Peigan and Blood were camped nearby, and before the Cree and Assiniboine could completely destroy the smaller camp, they were in turn attacked. These Blackfoot were armed with the latest Winchester repeater rifles and Colt revolvers traded from the Americans, and they drove the invaders back over the open prairie and into the Oldman River coulees where a few years later Whites would dig the coal mines of Lethbridge. There, after four more hours of ferocious fighting, forty Blackfoot were killed and fifty wounded, while the Cree allies escaped total annihilation only by leaving three hundred of their dead on the cliffs and in the coulees and river valley when they retreated. They were so outgunned that Jerry Potts, a half-Blood warri
or who later became a guide for the North West Mounted Police, said, “You could shut your eyes and still be sure to kill a Cree.” The Blackfoot named that place Assini-etomochi, Where They Slaughtered the Cree.
CHAPTER FOUR
Come, Talk to Us
Chief’s Son’s Hand protected Big Bear in the disastrous battle on the Oldman River; he wore the paw around his neck and was unharmed. His sons Twin Wolverine and Imasees also returned home not badly wounded. But the bodies of so many warriors from so many bands were left behind to be shamefully mutilated by the enemy that Cree mourning continued all winter. And in the nights when Big Bear lay sleepless under his buffalo robes, he slowly came to realize that the unbelievable stories they had heard about the Americans fighting among themselves—how in their battles uncountable thousands of men were destroyed in a single day, and almost as many horses—were true. Such White wars actually happened. The Blood and Peigan had shown them how American guns could kill.
Through the winter nights, with all his relations breathing around him, Big Bear remembered again and again riding south in darkness with the crunch of frosted grass under his horse’s hooves, and then, along the crest of the plain, the jagged wall of snow-covered mountains slowly rising into light before him. The Cree warriors charged screaming with him into the Blood camp, the lodge-hide split at the stab of his knife, a child’s eyes stared up at him—and then the sudden, terrifying revelation of blazing mountains, like a stampede of white buffalo charging up over him, trampling all the Cree among the Blood lodges. He had thought it had been revealed only to Piapot, but gradually he knew he had to think differently. He began to understand something he could never have comprehended without that little child’s eyes and the mountains of white buffalo vision when they attacked the Blood and had been attacked in turn by repeater rifles and revolvers, beaten back into the coulees, retreat upon desperate retreat, until they fell from the cliffs into the Oldman River. He finally understood what he should have recognized in the dawn light: that the honourable battles of hand-to-hand combat with an enemy you knew by name were gone. Brutal, faceless killing war had come, war fought at such long range you could barely see a body nor find a breath between the unending bullets. Never on Earth would there be enough People to survive such capability for slaughter.
So, think different. For People to live, they must try to think like Whites too.
That winter, Sweetgrass, Big Bear, Little Pine, and all the chiefs along the river from Carlton to Rocky Mountain House agreed: war among the Plains People must end. Sweetgrass negotiated a peace treaty with the Blackfoot so that the Cree could safely visit Chief Factor William Christie of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Edmonton. On April 13, 1871, Christie sent a long letter to Lieutenant-Governor Archibald at Red River that declared: “The buffalo will soon be exterminated.… The establishment of law and order in the Saskatchewan District is of most vital importance to the interest of Canada.…” And to his letter he attached messages from the Cree:
“The Chief Sweet Grass, the Chief of the country:
“Great Father—I shake hands with you, and bid you welcome. We heard our lands were sold and we did not like it; we don’t want to sell our lands; it is our property, and no one has a right to sell them.
“Our country is getting ruined of fur-bearing animals, hitherto our sole support, and now we are poor and want help—we want you to pity us. We want cattle, tools, agricultural implements, and assistance in everything when we come to settle—our country is no longer able to support us.
“Make provision for us against years of starvation. We have had great starvation the past winter, the small-pox took away many of our people, the old, young, and children.
“We want you to stop the Americans from coming to trade on our lands, and giving firewater, ammunition and arms to our enemies, the Blackfeet.
“We made a peace this winter with the Blackfeet. Our young men are foolish, it may not last long.
“We invite you to come and see us and speak with us. If you can’t come yourself, send some one in your place.
“We send these words by our Master, Mr. Christie, in whom we have every confidence. That is all.”
Several other chiefs added their words, but Big Bear did not. James Simpson had told him that the English translation of Cree was always a bit slanted, huh! it was hard enough to know what writing meant even if you knew English! Big Bear thought that Sweetgrass—Lacombe had baptized him Abraham—went too far into Company talk about trade, too much into missionary talk about settlement, about pity. Only the Great Spirit’s pity meant anything. But he agreed with the statement about land. The Big Whites must come and explain what “sell land,” “Governor,” and “Great Mother” meant. And where was Canada in this letter? Big Boss Macdonald?
But despite this letter, and despite the arrival of a young soldier named William Butler who said he was travelling the North-West on orders by Prime Minister Macdonald and would give their messages directly to him, no one of authority came to talk. The Cree did hear that the forest Saulteaux and Woods Cree from Red River to Lake of the Woods were talking with Canada about a treaty for land to build a road; but they could not agree because the chiefs declared, “All this is our property where you have come. The Great Spirit planted us on this ground.” The talking would continue for another two years.
Nevertheless, talking was good; you saw Whites face to face, you knew where they were and what they were doing, they had to answer you. Not like the disaster on the Oldman River, where the Cree had not known about Fort Whoop-Up, or about trade in repeater rifles and bullets, or about the Major Baker massacre of 170 Peigan men, women, and children by the United States Army that had driven the remaining Peigan north, so that they were on the Oldman River and could defend their Blood allies.
For four years Big Bear listened while his band hunted the plains and the winter boreal forest. They avoided Whites except for essential trade at Fort Pitt. Three wives now lived in his lodge, and the second had borne another son, Kingbird. Imasees had become a formidable Young Man, and Nowakich and Twin Wolverine were married. Nowakich’s husband was Lone Man, a fine warrior and perceptive thinker, the son of a Blackfoot woman captured in a raid; he became Big Bear’s closest confidant. Big Bear’s independent leadership attracted more and more Cree to his band, but now the northern buffalo grazed in small, scattered herds and, despite widespread peace with the Blackfoot, were increasingly difficult to find. Starvation threatened.
Many Métis had left Red River after 1870 when Canadian militia chased Louis Riel into the United States. They settled along the South Saskatchewan River near Batoche. But soon the buffalo no longer grazed there, and they were forced to hunt the same herds as the Cree and Blackfoot much farther south. The Métis summer hunts were massively organized, with a hunt captain and companies of ten policing every aspect of camp life to ensure every possible animal was taken. The captain of the 1873 hunt was Gabriel Dumont, an extraordinary marksman of enormous prestige and ego. On the plains, Big Bear discovered that his Cree and the Métis had found the same scattering of buffalo, and he rode into Dumont’s camp to negotiate an equitable hunting arrangement. But the captain bellowed, No! The whole herd belonged to them. Big Bear walked out of Dumont’s lodge and later sent six Young Men to haze part of the herd over the river so that the Cree could hunt them undisturbed by the Métis.
But Dumont and his scouts discovered the tactic and galloped to confront Big Bear. He denied nothing. His People needed food too; they could share what the Creator had given. At that, Dumont lashed out:
“You’re a dirty, thieving chief … and if any of your Young Men have had a hand in this, it won’t be well for you.”
Insulted before his People, Big Bear walked away. As punishment, the Métis soldiers seized a Cree cart and gave it to one of their hunters. Big Bear would not acknowledge that the Métis had any more claim to the buffalo than he did, nor was he so stupid as to fight. His band broke camp to hunt elsewhere.
But no Cree forgot that confrontation or Big Bear’s unshaken dignity at public humiliation. Years later John Kerr, an Ontario adventurer who lived with the Métis, told the story. By then Big Bear was a North-West Rebellion villain though he had shot no one, and Gabriel Dumont a hero despite the fact that at Fish Creek he had killed twelve Canadians with his unerring rifle.
Big Bear’s band tried to avoid Americans who spread like smallpox across the border as much as they tried to avoid the Métis. Not only did the Americans build fortified posts such as Whoop-Up, Standoff, and Kipp in Blackfoot territory to lure People into trade for whisky, but the ox trains of wolfers loaded with poison for wolves and barrels of rotgut followed them everywhere. No sooner was a buffalo skinned than the hide was traded for stupefied drunkenness and the carcass poisoned to kill wolves for their fur.
Canada claimed all territory north of the Medicine Line, but its government had no way of stopping Americans from crossing the border and doing whatever they pleased. The Americans hauled hides, however they acquired them, back to Fort Benton and shipped them down the Missouri to be made into belts in their eastern factories. The Hudson’s Bay Company petitioned Ottawa again and again, reporting their trade ruined by illegal businesses that destroyed the Plains People, but nothing happened. Until May 1873, when six American whisky louts in the Cypress Hills massacred forty drunken Assiniboine and violated both women and children. Only then did Macdonald legislate the North West Mounted Police into existence, to enforce Canadian law on the prairies. A hundred and fifty men arrived in Red River from Canada that summer.
The Plains Cree heard this, heard how more men were being recruited and trained all winter. In July 1874, four hundred police, with hundreds of horses and workers and supply carts, started their monumental trek west for the Cypress Hills and Fort Whoop-Up. About the same time, Big Bear learned that George McDougall in Victoria had had the Iron Stone heaved into a cart and sent shrieking off to Red River.
Big Bear Page 4