Big Bear

by Big Bear (retail) (epub)

  Company clerk William Cameron was first hidden under a clothes pile by Catherine Simpson, then she led him away disguised under a red blanket like a Cree woman.

  Henry Quinn, Quinn’s young nephew, escaped between the buildings and reached Fort Pitt on April 3, Good Friday, with news of the killings.

  Toward evening the third Frog Lake White man to survive returned from Fort Pitt in his buckboard. James Simpson found the settlement deserted, the church, the houses, the barns abandoned, doors and windows smashed, all plundered. Quinn’s mutilated body lay in front of Pritchard’s house, Charlie Gouin’s nearby. After looking into his destroyed store, Simpson drove to the Cree camp where, as he later testified at Big Bear’s trial, he found his old friend of forty years with

  “all the Indians sitting in a circle. I asked him, hallo, I said, you are here … did you make a good hunt? He said, no, and that is all I asked him just then, and then he said to me afterwards, if you wish to come into my tent and remain in my tent, you [can] come in.… [But] I went down to my own tent first [to his wife and stepson, Louis Patenaude] and then about an hour or so after I went back to Big Bear’s tent, and I said to him, I am sorry to see what you have done here. Well, he says, it is not my doings. I said, now this affair will all be in your name, not your young men. It will be all on you, carried on your back. He says, it is not my doings, and the young men won’t listen, and I am very sorry for what has been done.… They have been always trying to take my name from me. I have always tried to stop the young men, and they have done it this time and taken my name away from me.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Wild Young Men

  “It will be all on you, carried on your back.”

  On April 4, 1885, news of the Frog Lake killings reached the rest of Canada by telegraph from Battleford. The media understood nothing about Wandering Spirit or Imasees or Cree Young Men. All they knew about was the “cowardly, very troublesome” Chief Big Bear, and instantly he became a “bloodthirsty savage,” a “fiend to be wiped out of existence.” In particular, hysteria about the two White women known to have survived, their certain, frightful abuse and “fate worse than death” at the hands of savages, drove thousands of Canadian men to volunteer for the army that “Old Tomorrow” Macdonald was assembling with astounding speed. Conquer the West, finish the Indians and Métis!

  As news of Crozier’s rout by Dumont at Duck Lake burned across the west, a few starving Cree pillaged stores at Peace Hills, Green Lake, Lac la Biche, Beaver Lake, and Cold Lake; Poundmaker’s band ransacked some Battleford stores after the villagers fled to the police stockade and Agent Rae refused to talk with them. An Assiniboine in the Eagle Hills killed a despised farm instructor, and another a hated settler.

  But there was no general Cree uprising; along the Saskatchewan, no band travelled to Batoche to assist the Métis. At Frog Lake, the war council debated whether to shoot the remaining Whites and local Métis who worked for the government as translators and contractors. The neighbouring Woods Cree bands joined them for days of feasting on plunder and butchered cattle, but they strongly opposed more killing. Catherine Simpson and John Pritchard were related to Chief Cut Arm’s band; they and the Woods Cree protected the captives in their lodges, especially the two Teresas, who were never physically hurt but cared for as well as the chaotic circumstances allowed. And though Imasees and Wandering Spirit, always with his rifle in his hand, dominated the combined council decisions as their continuing rage against everything White moved them, no one else was shot. Big Bear said nothing in council.

  Ten days of feasting, wild dance, song, war exploits retold, cattle run like buffalo, and endless councils. For Fort Pitt must be next: four buildings piled to their peaked roofs with Big Boss McLean’s magnificent Company stores, and in two other buildings scrawny Inspector Dickens with his twenty-four police and all of six horses! Wandering Spirit had more than three hundred mounted warriors: what he needed was Winchesters and ammunition.

  When Henry Quinn arrived at Fort Pitt with his horrifying news, McLean and Dickens prepared for an attack. Fort Pitt now stood without palisade on the flats beside the North Saskatchewan River, so all they could do was knock down outbuildings, barricade the spaces between larger buildings with logs and grain sacks, and cut rifle-holes between the house logs. And wait. The aspen and willows burst green along the river in beautiful stillness. Finally Dickens, against McLean’s strongest warnings, sent out a patrol. His three men had barely disappeared when armed warriors appeared above the fort. To quote Dickens’s laconic diary:

  “Monday, April 13 [actually Tuesday, April 14]. Fine weather. Const. Loasby, Cowan and Henry Quinn left for a scouting expedition to Frog Lake. A number of Indians arrived from Frog Lake, at top of hill 800 yards behind Fort. Sent letter signed by Big Bear demanding that police lay down their arms and leave the place, they report all prisoners safe.… Mr. McLean went out and parleyed with them and gave them grub. By contents of letter it appears 250 armed men are around the Fort to our 38, plus the three Misses McLean. Everything quiet during night.”

  John Pritchard later testified that Big Bear persuaded Imasees and Wandering Spirit not to attack Fort Pitt immediately but to urge McLean to surrender. So next morning McLean again walked with his interpreter, Francois Dufresne, to the camp just beyond the horizon hills. Big Bear passed the council pipe around but did not speak. The war chief argued that the Cree wanted to get rid of government completely and live only with the Hudson’s Bay Company “as they and their forefathers before them had, while receiving many useful supplies and help.” As McLean remembered it:

  “When Wandering Spirit approached me, he put some additional cartridges into his Winchester and then, placing it in readiness on his arm, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Do not speak too much. That is why I killed the Agent. You say too much about Government, we are tired of him and all his people and we are now going to drive them out of our country. Why do you keep Government’s few Red Coats in your Fort? That is the only thing we have against you. That Fort was built for us many years ago, and we would have killed them long ago were it not for you and your family being in there.’”

  McLean could not convince Wandering Spirit that the twenty-five “Red Coats” meant that Government (the war chief spoke of it as a person) could send thousands of soldiers armed with cannons to enforce the Queen’s law. While they were tussling over these ideas, disaster struck: the three returning police scouts blundered into the camp and the warriors’ tension burst into action. To quote Dickens:

  “[April 15]: During parley the three scouts out yesterday galloped through the camp towards Pitt. Const. Cowan was shot dead and Loasby wounded in two places before hauled over barrier. Horse killed and Quinn got away, but missing. Indians fired upon by all. McLean and Dufresne taken prisoner. Indians threatened to burn Fort tonight with coal oil brought from Frog Lake.”

  The barricaded buildings could not withstand an attack by fire. McLean wrote his wife a note explaining that, to prevent more bloodshed, the civilians must surrender to the Cree and the police must use the Company scow and leave, downriver for Battleford. Big Bear persuaded the warriors to give the police some hours to get ready (they used the time to pack, scatter gunpowder, and smash extra rifles) and himself dictated a letter to Henry Halpin for Sergeant Martin, Dickens’s second in command:

  “My dear friend:

  “Since I have met you long ago we have always been good friends, and you have from time to time given me things, and that is the reason I want to speak kindly to you; so please try and get off from Pitt as soon as you can. And tell your Captain that I remember him well, for since the Canadian Government had left me to starve in this country, he sometimes gave me food, and I don’t forget the blankets he gave me, and that is the reason I want you all to get off without bloodshed.

  “We have had a talk, I and my men, before we left our camp, and we thought the way we are doing now the best—that is, to let you off if you would go. So
try and get away before the afternoon, as the young men are wild and hard to keep in hand.

  —Big Bear

  “P.S. You asked me to keep the men in camp last night, and I did so; so I want you to go off today.

  —Big Bear.”

  Snow began to fall as the wounded Constable Loasby was carried down the bank of the North Saskatchewan and into the scow. Then the twenty-three police clambered in and pushed into the crushing river ice. They left Cowan’s mutilated body on the flats, and forty-four civilians to trudge into the hills as captives. Individual Cree families volunteered to take the captives in, guard, and care for them. Eleven McLeans surrendered, nine of them children, including the three eldest—Elizabeth, Amelia, and Kitty—who spoke fluent Cree and had stood guard for two weeks, fired guns during the scout disaster, and fearlessly carried messages between Whites and Cree.

  Dickens’s siege diary ends: “Wednesday, April 15 [Thursday, April 16]: Very cold weather. Travelled.”

  Despite churning ice and a blizzard, the police reached Battleford safely. Dickens’s official report offered no alternatives to the fact that McLean’s trust in Big Bear’s word saved both civilians and police from annihilation. Rather, he tried to cover his leaving civilians in the hands of hostiles with this final, self-righteous sentence: “The surrender of the civilians was entirely owing to the pusillanimity of Mr. McLean of the Hudson’s Bay Company.”

  During three days of winter the Cree war party feasted, plundering Fort Pitt, but when the sun returned they travelled back to their families on the shore of Frog Lake with captives and booty. The settlement stores, houses, and church had been burned, most of the bodies buried, but Quinn’s lay rotting beside the puddle where it fell. For a month, while spring gathered, they lived well and held councils to consider what was to be done. Wandering Spirit sent messages to numerous reserves, but, as John Pritchard later testified, every chief, including Pakan, refused “to come in and join them.”

  Meanwhile, the government inevitabilities moved on with deliberate speed, as Big Bear knew they would. During April soldiers by the thousands arrived on the railroad and marched north in three columns hauling cannons, field artillery, and massive supplies: General Middleton left from Fort Qu’Appelle with the main militia destined for Batoche, Colonel Otter from Swift Current for beleaguered Battleford, and Major General Strange from Calgary to Edmonton, determined to reach Fort Pitt. On April 24, Dumont and his Métis fought Middleton to a standstill at Fish Creek; on May 2, Otter’s attack on Poundmaker’s sleeping camp at Cutknife Hill was beaten into desperate retreat by the brilliant tactics of warriors under war chief Fine Day. Two days later Wandering Spirit received a letter from Poundmaker’s band written in French promising the Cree generous supplies if they came to help “take Battleford and then go on and join Riel at Batoche.” Big Bear said he would not go, and after two days of fierce disagreement between Plains and Woods Cree, Imasees himself rode for Poundmaker’s to verify the situation. In the meantime, Wandering Spirit began moving the fifteen hundred People toward Fort Pitt, the first leg of a very long possible journey to Poundmaker’s and eventually Batoche.

  News came from Pakan at Saddle Lake that an army had reached Edmonton. Wandering Spirit was convinced they were the “thousands of American soldiers” Riel had assured him last summer would march in from Montana to kill Government and offer the Cree a splendid new treaty. But Imasees returned with news that government troops were everywhere, in overwhelming numbers. Poundmaker had driven Otter’s soldiers off, but after Fish Creek, Middleton continued his advance on Batoche. And the troops in Edmonton were not Americans; they were Canadian soldiers heading for Fort Pitt.

  Imasees had not heard, and so no one in camp could know, that on May 12, Middleton’s troops had overrun Batoche—thirteen Métis, eleven Canadians killed—and ended the rebellion with Riel’s surrender. Gabriel Dumont had vanished into the prairie.

  But Big Bear recognized clearly what he most feared. The fountain of blood had burst up with nine men killed at Frog Lake. He had almost managed to squash it at Fort Pitt—only one man killed by blunder—but it would surely flow again, and inevitably now among his own People, because they were led by men who hated Whites. Here in Canada no police had ever killed a single Person, yet Wandering Spirit and Imasees and Lucky Man longed for the American Long Knives, who they knew had often attacked and killed sleeping Indian camps. And even if the Cree, now, had thousands of warriors, where could they get enough guns and ammunition to kill any Whites? Only from Whites! Why could he no longer convince his own son that talk was the only power People had? Words, only words.

  With words he had saved sixty-eight lives at Fort Pitt, so he would speak once more in council. As McLean recalled Big Bear’s words:

  “You have heard the news from Poundmaker. It is alarming to you, what are you going to do about it? You were in a hurry to commence trouble, and now you have it, the soldiers of the Queen have come to fight you, and very shortly you will likely have to show how you can fight them. You were told that they do not take their women and children with them when they go out to fight, and you will see it now.”

  Big Bear’s great council voice would not speak again. Imasees and Wandering Spirit as war chiefs now led all the Cree, including the intimidated Woods Cree.

  At Fort Pitt they dug out the last Company flour and rounded up straying cattle. Then, while the buildings burned, they trailed east paralleling the river cliffs, meandering toward Battleford. Mounted scouts guided the long, straggling trek of ox- and horse-drawn carts, burdened women and children trudging with men herding cattle, horses and dogs dragging travois, captives bent under bedding. At the very end, Big Bear walked with his youngest children; he carried a food pack and his sacred bundle.

  They could advance only a few miles a day through the boreal landscape, crossing muskegs and streams running with melt water. Beneath the high crest of Frenchman Butte the leaders decided to rest and hold a Thirst Dance to revive everyone’s spirits. No preparation ceremonies had been held, but the centre tree was set and the leafy lodge almost complete when a scout galloped down from the Butte. Using a spyglass taken at Fort Pitt, he had seen canoes and six scows crowded with men and horses rounding the bend of the North Saskatchewan River above Pitt!

  Ceremony dissolved into a flurry of retreat. Wandering Spirit ordered the camp moved from the indefensible clearing to beyond a wooded hill north of the Butte. Scouts rode out to establish the soldiers’ positions and discovered Inspector Sam Steele’s Scouts tracking their trail from Fort Pitt. Shots exploded in the spring dusk, and the warrior Maymenook was hit. Corporal Thomas McClelland threw a rope around Maymenook’s neck and dragged the body in triumphant circles, galloping up a hill. Someone slashed the rope, and they left the warrior’s body to rot.

  General Strange’s two hundred infantry, thirty cavalry, and one nine-pounder gun glimpsed Wandering Spirit’s muzzle-loader and Winchester-armed warriors at sunrise on May 28, two miles north of Frenchman Butte. The Dominion Survey later proved that the battleground fit exactly into the never cultivated northeast quarter of Section 35, Township 53, Range 25, west of the third meridian. Trooper Joseph Hicks recorded:

  “We had advanced perhaps three miles when the Indians opened fire on our advance guard.

  “The Indians had chosen an impregnable position.… On the north side of a muskeg was a small hill or rising ground in big timber right down to near the water. On this [hill] they had dug trenches about four feet deep and had logs placed so that they could fire from under the logs without exposing themselves to our fire. The approach to this position was exposed to a direct fire from the trenches … at least a quarter of a mile long.… The 65th Battalion extended to the muskeg’s edge, indeed a number of them went in up to their necks only to find that they could not even swim because of the tall grass. They then lay down and fired at the trenches, which was all that could be done.”

  Big Bear was well behind those expert trenches, with the wo
men and children and captives down in wooded ravines. When Strange’s first nine-pounder cannon ball tore through the aspen overhead, the huddled camp broke into chaos. Big Bear organized the retreat, assuring the terrified People that the gun was aimed too high to be dangerous. Half their carts and animals were left behind in the flight. The cannon continued firing, and they heard explosions behind them—that big gun speaks twice, he explained, once when it fires and again when the ball lands and explodes. They heard the trees shudder even when they were several miles away.

  Big Bear had helped dig the trenches overlooking the bare glacis. He knew the warriors would stop the soldiers there because Wandering Spirit could choose and build a defensive position as brilliantly as he could make a thousand People vanish before the American Army. At war tactics he was superb. But seemingly he could not grasp the strategies of politics, the agreements that words alone can fashion; that People cannot long be led with only a loaded Winchester in your hand.

  The distant gun stopped soon after the first warriors left the trenches and caught up with the fleeing camp. The men said the gun had finally gotten range of their trenches with those exploding balls. Five warriors were wounded and another, He Speaks Our Tongue, was dying with his leg blown away. By then the soldiers and gun had retreated as well, so they had time for Tongue’s harrowing death chant and burial. Elizabeth McLean would remember that, during the mourning, she first noticed that Wandering Spirit’s hair was turning white. Pritchard and five half-breed families, together with the two Teresas, had disappeared during the battle. Some men rode back for supplies scattered in flight, and then, while other warriors fought skirmishes with soldier scouts, for the next four days Wandering Spirit led the People north. Over hills, through intermittent rain and dense forest, a remarkable retreat into wilderness. Cameron, Halpin, and other captives were let go, but the main camp with the McLeans and Simpsons struggled on until one brilliant evening they reached Loon Lake Crossing. Facing the lake, arms high, Big Bear gave thanks for one more day, for the lovely call of the loons across the light on the water that warmed dryness into their sodden clothing.