A Geography of Blood (12 page)

Now comes the part that will never be re-enacted by tourists in the years that lie ahead. Later in the day, after the Americans have withdrawn to their quarters, Macleod holds a private meeting with the Lakota chiefs. Behind closed doors, he tells them that the Queen's government denies their claim to be British and sees them instead as “American Indians . . . who have come to our side of the line for protection.”
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He reminds them that their only hope lies with the buffalo, which will soon be gone, and when that day comes, they can expect “nothing whatever” from the Queen in the way of assistance. In response, Sitting Bull will again grasp Macleod by the hand and express the wistful hope that there will be “lots of buffalo for a long time to come.” When he accepts Macleod's gifts of tobacco, provisions, and blankets for the return trip across the plains, he may not immediately understand that, for all her apparent maternal kindness, the Great Mother is cold as stone. He cannot know that, in the corridors of power in faraway Ottawa, the Queen's government has decided to stand by and watch hunger do its work.

Month after month ticks past, and the Lakota refugees remain on the Canadian side of the border, with camps in the Cypress Hills (often along the Frenchman near the East End post) and a home base at Wood Mountain. In fact, there are more of them than ever, thanks to a straggling influx of asylum seekers who appeared soon after Terry left, looking for refuge from the misery and political confusion on the American reservations. (These are the people who may have stayed at the purported Crazy Horse camp.) With them, the newcomers have brought word that Crazy Horse, the revered leader of the Lakota resistance, has been murdered, stabbed with bayonets as government officers attempted to put him under arrest. So much for General Terry's promise of forgiveness and friendliness.

Since moving to Grandmother's Country, by contrast, life has been peaceful and good, and the Lakota children have, for the first time in years, begun to play again. But now a familiar enemy is creeping into the camps. After several years of abundance, prairie fires have swept across the Lakota's new country, blackening the grass and keeping the buffalo at a distance. In response, most of the refugees have slipped back across the border, where they have again been met with force but where the opportunities for hunting have been somewhat better. Meanwhile, reports from far and wide (from the Qu'Appelle Valley west to the foothills) speak of widespread famine—the buffalo are totally gone—and people have been reduced to eating mice, gophers, dogs, horses, even old buffalo hides. People have died, are dying, of starvation.

Yet there's no need for panic, because the Canadian government has everything in hand. With the Pacific Scandal set neatly behind him, Sir John A. Macdonald has returned to the prime minister's office with a new and improved program for national prosperity. No longer content merely with forging a geographical union of provinces linked by steel from coast to coast, Macdonald is now focused on national economic integration. As before, his vision hinges on the settlement of the West. Once the prairies are thickly populated by farmers—including “civilized” Indians—the land will produce such bounty that everyone will be fed, with an abundant surplus left over for sale on world markets. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs in eastern Canada will tool up to meet western demand for farming equipment, building materials, and household goods. Before you know it, the rails will be humming with westbound shipments of plows and cookstoves and outgoing boxcars of golden grain. It is just a matter of getting the necessary arrangements in place.

Over the preceding decade, the government has been working its way down an extensive To Do list. One of the first items to be checked off was establishing a framework for private land ownership. The incoming settlers would naturally expect to hold title to their farms, so that their lands could be bought and sold or passed down to their sons. But for this to be possible—before the longed-for influx of settlers could be persuaded to risk everything on this Last Best West—the whole wide, windswept run of the grasslands would have to be divided into precisely defined, ownable parcels. And so the work began. By 1874, an international team of surveyors had marked the Canada–U.S. boundary from Manitoba west, bisecting the Benton Trail just south of the Cypress Hills, and then continuing clear across to the Rockies, a span of almost nine hundred miles. Soon thereafter, an invisible network of latitude and longitude began to extend north across the open prairie, trapping the subtleties of the land in its impassive grid. Before the end of the decade, crews from the Dominion Land Survey were at work with their chains and theodolites across the Saskatchewan country, assigning a numerical designation to every section and quarter-section. Silently, unobtrusively, the prairie ecosystem was being transformed into supercolossal real-estate development.

“Do you see the Great White-man coming?” an Aboriginal man asked one of the land speculators who, by the mid-1870s, had begun to haunt the West. No, the other responded. “I do,” the speaker continued. “And I hear the tramp of the multitude behind him. When he comes you can drop in behind him and take up all the land claims you want, but until then I caution you to put up no stakes in our country.”
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Therein lay the other big item on the government's agenda: the Indian Question. The challenge on the Canadian prairies was exactly the same as in the U.S.—to get the Indians to forfeit their traditional territories and settle on government-approved plots, where they could be introduced to the arts of farming and “civilization.” North of the border, however, force was not an option. Not only did Canada fancy itself above such brutal tactics, it frankly could not afford a war. (The United States was expending around $20 million a year on fighting its Indians, more than the entire budget of the young and impoverished Dominion.) Instead, the Canadian government again opted for the lofty virtues of order and governance. Beginning in 1871, the nation, on behalf of the Great Mother and in response to repeated requests from Aboriginal leaders, entered into a series of agreements with the Aboriginal people of the plains, starting in present-day Manitoba with Treaties 1, 2, and 3, and then proceeding west and northwest and west again to cover off one vast stretch of the country after another.

Treaty 4, for example, which was signed by the Plains Cree and Nakoda in the Qu'Appelle Valley in 1874, encompassed all the lands south of the South Saskatchewan River as far west as—and including—the Cypress Hills, a principality of about 75,000 square miles. Treaty 6, signed two years later, took in an even larger area—more than 120,000 square miles in all—centering on the Saskatchewan River system, across what would one day become central Saskatchewan and Alberta. Finally, Treaty 7, formalized at Blackfoot Crossing in 1877, dealt with a further 50,000 square miles of desirable farming and grazing land, from the Red Deer River south to the border and from the eastern margin of the Cypress Hills west to the Rocky Mountains. Although the nations of the Niitsítapi had hunted and camped in the Cypress Hills for longer than memory, they were formally alienated from this territory by the boundaries of the treaties.

The treaty documents appeared to reflect a meeting of minds between the various indigenous peoples and the Queen but, in fact, they stood at an intersection of conflicting needs. For the government side, the crux of the matter was the clause in which the Aboriginal signatories agreed to “cede, release, surrender and yield up to the Government of the Dominion of Canada, for Her Majesty the Queen, and Her successors forever, all their rights, titles and privileges whatsoever” to the wide prairie land. (To people hearing these words in translation, the concept of “yielding” something to which they had never claimed “title” was just so much gobbledygook, in keeping with the
whereas's
and
hitherto's
of the rest of the document.) What the Native signatories did take away from the discussions, by contrast, were the promises of help with the traumatic transition that was rapidly bearing down on them.

“The Queen knows that you are poor,” the government's spokesman had assured the chiefs at the signing of Treaty 4. “The Queen knows that it is hard to find food for yourselves and [your] children; she knows that the winters are cold, and your children are often hungry...

“The Queen always keeps her word,” he went on, “always protects her red men. She learned . . . that bad men from the United States had come into her country and had killed some of her red children. What did she say? This must not be, I will send my men [the police] and will not suffer these bad men to hurt my red children, their lives are very precious to me . . .”

Now, “out of her generous heart and liberal hand,” the government's Treaty Commissioner affirmed, “she wants to do something for you, so that when the buffalo get scarcer, and they are scarce enough now, you may be able to do something for yourselves . . .”

“I know,” the same spokesman continued two years later, at the signing of Treaty 6, “that the sympathy of the Queen, and her assistance, would be with you in any unforeseen circumstances. You must trust to her generosity . . . All I can promise is that you will be treated kindly . . .”
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And so, we arrive at midsummer 1879. With a decade of preparation behind him—and with alarming rumors of famine echoing around the North-West—Sir John A. Macdonald is anxious to kick his Indian policy into high gear. His immediate goal is to bring the treaty process to fruition by signing up the few remaining holdouts, fulfilling the government's side of the bargain at a manageable cost, and getting the estimated 23,000 Indians on the Canadian plains established on reserves as quickly as possible. To perform this mission, the prime minister has recently recruited the Honourable Member for Yale, British Columbia, a sometime-surveyor, cattleman, land agent, auctioneer, gold miner, trailblazer, and all-around up-and-comer, who just happens to be one of the prime minister's most loyal supporters in the House of Commons. His name is Edgar Dewdney, and for nearly six weeks, he and his muttonchop whiskers have been making their way across the continent by what (in the absence of Macdonald's railroad) is still the only feasible route, traveling first by train from Toronto to Collingwood, then across the Great Lakes by steamer to Duluth, onward by rail to Bismarck, up the Missouri by steamboat to Fort Benton, and thence by horse-drawn wagon to his first official port of call in the Canadian Interior. With a relief that we can only imagine, his team pulls over the final ridge and his destination comes into view: a huddle of whitewashed buildings surrounded by a rustic stockade, flanked by a straggling town site, and embraced by a circle of hills. Welcome to Fort Walsh, Mr. Indian Commissioner.

As it happens, Ned Dewdney is not the only high muck-a-muck who is in residence at the fort. In fact, he has traveled cross-country with the top officers of the North-West Mounted Police—Commissioner James Macleod and his wife, Mary, and Assistant Commissioner Irvine—together with a fresh intake of horses and eighty-one new men, recruited in the East as police reinforcements. Almost the only notable who won't be here is the fort's commanding office, Inspector Walsh, who is focusing his time and attention on the Lakota camp at Wood Mountain. Evicting a few dozen whiskey traders had been nothing compared with the challenge of getting a few thousand unwanted Indians across the border. With the Sioux now at the forefront, Fort Walsh has recently been upgraded to serve as Mountie headquarters, with an official residence for the commissioner, barracks for a garrison of up to 150 men, and an armory of seven-pound field guns, or small cannons.

Celebrating their first Christmas in their roomy new mess hall, the men of “B” Division had sat down to dinner beneath a portrait of their absent commanding officer, his handsome visage framed in greenery and bracketed by a festive display of six-shooters, carbines, and lances. Under the picture, ingeniously worked with curb chains and bits against a background of black cloth, someone had outlined the triumphant words “Sitting Bull's Boss.”

On the subject of the “American hostiles,” Commissioner Dewdney's instructions are clear. He is to keep Ottawa informed of their whereabouts and do whatever he can to hurry them back across the border. Under no circumstances is he to authorize an issue of rations. “Sitting Bull and his people, seeing that the buffalo is failing them in our territory, will go back to their own country,” Ottawa has decreed, “the only other alternative being starvation for themselves, their wives, and their families.”
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But this hard line obviously cannot be taken with Canada's “own” Indians, at least not with those who, by taking treaty, have recently accepted the hand of the Queen in friendship.

Although Dewdney is not a greenhorn—fifteen years in British Columbia had put paid to that—he knows nothing about the prairie or the buffalo or the people who depend on them. (When he'd pointed this deficiency out to Macdonald, his boss had been unmoved. “Indians are all alike,” the prime minister had assured him.
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) Yet despite his ignorance of local conditions, Dewdney knows trouble when it stares him in the face. “Continually meeting hungry Indians,” he'd noted in his journal on the way up from Fort Benton. “Saw a few [pronghorn] antelope, but no buffalo,” he'd scribbled the following day. “Lots of old dried carcasses all over the prairie.”
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So he isn't surprised to find a large number of gaunt-looking Indians congregated at the fort, waiting for him and Macleod to put in an appearance. And he is gratified two days later when a delegation of Nakoda men ride up in procession, looking “very pretty” with their treaty flag flying overhead, and acknowledge his importance with a display of precision horsemanship.

Like many an immigrant before and since, Indian Commissioner Dewdney is a man on the make. (A child of the English tenements who has somehow managed to pass as upper class, he will die a wealthy man, enriched by kickbacks on government contracts and insider land transactions.) For the moment, his fortunes depend entirely on implementing Macdonald's Indian policy and making it a success, and he doesn't waste any time in getting down to business. All the Aboriginal leaders who have gathered, including Siksika “visitors” from Treaty 7 and Crees and Nakoda from Treaty 4, are called together to confer with Colonel Macleod and the new government chief.