A Geography of Blood (13 page)

The Siksika, Crees, and Nakoda have come to the fort with an urgent agenda to press. In the short term, they desperately need supplies to sustain them until they can reach the main herds of buffalo, now south of the Milk River and under assault by all the subsistence and market hunters on the continent. In the longer term, they entreat the government to fulfill its promise (made explicitly in Treaty 6 and implicitly in all the rest) to provide emergency assistance in times of famine. In reply, Colonel Macleod speaks of the government's “great sorrow” at their suffering but reminds them that they must not expect assistance every time their stomachs growl. There is a difference between mere hunger, he informs them, and starvation. In the long run, the government expects them to “work and earn their own living,”
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and that is why Mr. Dewdney has been sent to concern himself exclusively with their interests. He has come, Macleod tells the Indians, to show you how to live.

When the conference reconvenes the following day, “Whitebeard,” as the delegation quickly nicknames Dewdney, outlines the details of the government's plan. He explains that he has brought two farmers with him from the East, with others to follow soon, and that they will immediately set to work breaking the soil and raising crops for seed and food. In addition, he tells his attentive audience, the government will send instructors to show you how to farm, so you can work the soil the same as the white man does. If only you will settle down, in two or three years—it's a promise—you will be independent and have plenty to live on, without any need for handouts from the government.

There are nods all around at this prospect, and two of the leading chiefs—Cuwiknak eyaku (The Man Who Took the Coat) for the Nakoda and Ka-wezauce (Cowessess or Little Child) for his mixed community of Saulteaux and Cree—rise to express their assent. They are eager to choose their reserves as soon as possible, somewhere in their home country of the Cypress Hills, and settle to the task of becoming farmers. But meanwhile, what they all need are rations to take them south to the herds. “Gave them some Beef & Flour,” Whitebeard notes in his journal after the meeting has adjourned. “They are awful beggars, but I think they are really hungry.”
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No sooner has this business been settled than another large group of people arrives at the fort. Here is another opportunity for Dewdney to turn on his voluble charm and advance the government's ambitions. The newcomers are non-treaty people, followers of the Plains Cree leaders Minahikosis, or Little Pine, and Mistahi-maskwa, known in English as Big Bear. More discussions are convened, and Dewdney repeats his pitch: Choose your reserves, take advantage of the government's generous assistance as you learn how to farm, and your future will be secure. Two days later, on July 2, 1879, Little Pine, with his 324 followers, enters the fort to sign an adhesion to Treaty 6. With him—taking advantage of Dewdney's new edict that any leader with a hundred followers can take treaty as a chief—is a headman from Big Bear's band, Papewes, or Lucky Man. It is not easy to resist a hand held out in generosity when your children are starving.

“Gave some Beef, Tobacco, Tea & Sugar to those who took the Treaty,” Dewdney notes in his diary that night. “Big Bear would like to come in but he is afraid of being laughed at.”
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Yet even in the face of Dewdney's derision, even as rations are handed out to their friends, Big Bear and his remaining supporters hold strong in their dissenting position.

“We want none of the Queen's presents,” Mistahi-maskwa had once told a government official. “When we set a fox-trap, we scatter pieces of meat all around. But when the fox gets into the trap, we knock him on the head.”
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Always dubious about the adequacy of the treaties and the government's sincerity in entering into them, Big Bear remains polite but steadfast in his discussions with Whitebeard.

“He wanted more land and more money,” Dewdney reports to his masters in Ottawa, after the two have met. “He said he wanted to see how [the treaties] worked with the other Indians.”
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Still, even if Big Bear hasn't been brought onside, Dewdney has to admit to a grudging admiration for him. “I have not formed such a poor opinion of ‘Big Bear,' ” he confesses, “as some appear to have done. He is of a very independent character, self-reliant and appears to know how to make his own living without begging from the Government.”
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All in all, the Indian Commissioner's ten-day visit to Fort Walsh has been time well spent. As he clambers back into his buckboard to continue his tour of the West, he is confident that the government's new Indian policy will prove a splendid success.

From our vantage point on the hillside, we watch as the Indian Commissioner rattles over the western rim of the valley and disappears from sight. The sun is low; there's a chill in the air. It's going to be a long night.

{nine} The Hunger Camp

Our people realized they had lost their land and they scattered all over like little birds.

ISABELLE LITTLE BEAR, granddaughter of Big Bear, in 1958, recalling the early 1880s

A commemorative site
like Fort Walsh inevitably has its ghosts, who may be either remembered with pride or prudently kept in the dark, their memory buried in archives or the dust of old books. But an ordinary place is different, and no place on earth could be more ordinary than the puddle on the prairie known as Cypress Lake. Located partway between Fort Walsh and Eastend, it's an oversized slough that has been “enhanced” by a dam, giving it the bloated outline and mucky, crusted shore of a water impoundment. Hydrologically speaking, the lake is more interesting than it at first appears, since it not only stores spring floodwaters from Battle Creek but also serves as the source of the Frenchman River. All the same, it's hard to believe that anything of importance could ever have happened here.

If you happen to be in the vicinity, the lake is easy enough to find. It can be reached from either Fort Walsh or Eastend via pavement that gives way to gravel and then dwindles to a rough track before debouching at the optimistically named Cypress Lake Provincial Recreation Site. But if people actually come here to recreate, they clearly don't come in droves. The site is equipped with an uneven rank of picnic tables (sans picnickers) set under drought-stressed trees, a serviceable wharf and boat dock (sans boaters), and—as an unexpected touch of cheer—a couple of pots of petunias tagged with a wistful request for anyone who happens by to please water them.

The atmosphere is thick with silence, and when you move, you seem to leave ripples in your wake. You might be swimming through quicksilver. And this unearthly mood is not quite broken by the delight of watching butcher birds—rare loggerhead shrikes—plunging from the trees to the ground to catch grasshoppers, which they then stuff, one by one, into the beaks of their insatiable young. The heaviness doesn't even lift entirely when you gaze across the lake and discover that the bright dots along the far shore, viewed through binoculars, are actually a flotilla of white pelicans, huge and dazzling in the glimmer. Everything that is here carries an echo of something that is not. Trapped between lake and sky, this is a world that has been hollowed out.

That same description could be applied to an old photo I came across one day, on the website of the Canadian national archives in Ottawa. In a sense, it's a picture of nothing, the same kind of emptiness that you find at Cypress Lake. It might even have been taken there, and I used to think that it was, though after examining it more closely I'm not so certain. In the photo, a featureless sky hangs over a featureless prairie landscape inset with a featureless pond that bleeds out of the picture frame along the right margin. In the foreground, two horses are drinking, hock deep in the water, while nearby, along the shore, two child-sized figures are seated in identical slumped postures. Their faces are turned away from the camera and from one another as well, and each figure appears to be lost in its own small world. Across the center of the image, a scattered line of conical tipis, some distinct, others smudged by distance, extends along the horizon, spanning a low run of hills. By my count, there are more than sixty dwellings in the encampment, with shelter for several hundred souls. How odd that except for the huddled figures in the foreground, no one else is in view. And how disconcerting that some kind of corrosion has set in around the edges of the picture and appears to be creeping toward the center, like an incursion of fungus.

According to the archival records, this photograph shows “Big Bear's (Cree) Camp, Maple Creek, Saskatchewan” on June 6, 1883, as it was seen through the lens of one George M. Dawson of the Geological Survey of Canada. Just as a matter of interest, it is worth noting that Dawson also deserves credit as the first scientist to discover dinosaur bones in southwestern Saskatchewan and as one of the first to appreciate the stratigraphic importance of the Cypress Hills. In the summer of 1883, however, he was merely passing through, bound from Ottawa via Fort Benton to the Crow's Nest Pass, on a mission to survey that region's massive coal deposits. (Settlement could not proceed without a railroad; trains could not run without fuel; it was all part of Macdonald's transcontinental megaproject.) But it's a shame Dawson was in such a hurry that summer that he didn't have time to stop. If he'd ridden into the Cree camp and asked for a cup of tea, he would have encountered the nightmare side of the national dream. Sit back and light your pipe: it's quite the story.

It is summer 1883. Four years have elapsed since Whitebeard made his first tour of the Canadian North-West, dispensing gifts and promises. Life had been hard before he arrived, and it has been worse ever since. That first fall, 1879, the Métis at Chimney Coulee had enjoyed a reasonable harvest, filling their carts with buffalo hides and pemmican for transport to Fort Qu'Appelle, but it would never happen again. By early winter, grass fires had broken out all along the border, keeping the buffalo south of the line. Some people, including the Canadian authorities, said that the fires had been set by American soldiers under orders to starve out the Lakota “hostiles,” who were still holed up at East End and Wood Mountain. Others pointed a finger at the commercial hide hunters or at the Aboriginal people themselves, whether “British” or American. Worst of all was the possibility that the fires had been an act of nature, or an act of the gods, and that the buffalo people had been forsaken by the powers who had sustained their ancestors.

Then, as if to compound the misery, the weather turned brutally cold. With the backing of the Canadian government, hundreds of people—including Métis families from Chimney Coulee and Cree bands led by Big Bear, Little Pine, and Lucky Man, among others—fled south to the Milk River in Montana to search for buffalo. As many as five thousand other half-starved people huddled at Fort Walsh and in tattered camps around the Cypress Hills, hoping against hope that the Great Mother would keep her word. And so, for a time, she did, sending her red-coated policemen into the cold and storms with rations of flour and beef. When spring finally came, the Queen continued to keep her commitments by doing what she could to help her “red children” make the transition from hunting to agriculture. As soon as the frost was out of the ground, the two farmers who had arrived with Dewdney set to work breaking the land and, with the assistance of Native crews, seeding small fields of grain and vegetables.

Soon, everything was clicking along exactly as Whitebeard had said. When The Man Who Took the Coat requested a reserve for the Nakoda at the westernmost end of the hills, from the summit all the way down onto the plains to the north, his proposal was accepted at once. Within months, an official survey had been completed, and the documents were sent off to Ottawa for an approving rubber stamp. Meanwhile, Cowessess and his people (one of the other bands who had taken treaty during Dewdney's initial visit) selected land along Maple Creek, north and east of the fort, although in their case, the survey had to be postponed. All over the country, bands were eager to select their lands and start producing crops, and the government surveyor simply could not be everywhere at once. His services were urgently required in the Qu'Appelle Valley and along the North Saskatchewan, where numerous signatories of Treaties 4 and 6 had elected to settle down.

But no need to worry: everything in due course. As soon as the surveyor was freed up, he'd be back not only to look after Cowessess but also to establish reserves for several other leaders—notably the new Treaty 6 chiefs Little Pine and Lucky Man, together with two chiefs from Treaty 4,Piapot (Payepot), or Hole-in-the-Sioux, and Nekaneet, or Foremost Man—all of whom had requested land in the Cypress Hills. Too bad about the delays. Simply unavoidable. New country, blah, blah, blah. But rest assured that, given time, all the t's would be crossed and i's dotted, and everything would be arranged.

Meanwhile, on the height of land at the Nakoda reserve, wheat was pushing out of the ground for the first time in history, and the carefully hilled fields of potatoes looked green and promising. For a crazy, fleeting moment, it was almost possible to believe that Dewdney had told the truth and that things would be coming up roses before you knew it.

Disaster struck in late summer, in the form of a killing frost—not entirely exceptional at an altitude of four thousand feet—and Dewdney's too-easy promises were blighted in a single night. The grain had to be cut for green feed; the potatoes turned to slime in the bin. Although the red coats continued to provide rations, there was never enough to eat. Thus began the terrible winter of 1880–81, when the Nakoda were forced to kill and eat their precious horses to keep from starving.

But even in the face of this setback, the Canadian government kept up its front of good cheer. Quoth Sir John A. Macdonald in his wrap-up report for 1881, “The condition of Indian Affairs in the Territories has, on the whole, been satisfactory during the past year.”
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In private, however, he and his officials had begun to acknowledge the unpalatable truth: the entire North-West was in crisis. Although ragged groups of buffalo were still occasionally found north of the border, they were walking dead, too few and too far between to sustain even themselves. The only significant herds, while they lasted, were in Montana, around the Missouri and the Milk, mostly on the large but soon-to-be-diminished Indian reservation that flanked the American side of the border. In theory, the Canadian government had obtained emergency permission for “British” Indians and Métis to cross the line and hunt, a concession that, by Dewdney's estimate, had already saved eastern taxpayers 100,000 bucks. (Bands who were out hunting didn't have to be rationed.) In practice, however, Montanans were aghast at Washington's largess and gave the intruders a surly welcome.

Hundreds of blue-coated soldiers—now garrisoned at a massive brick stronghold called Fort Assinniboine, just across the line—kept the intruders under close watch, ready to pounce at the first hint of possible trouble. One day, for instance, members of a hunting party from Big Bear's camp on the Milk River were butchering sixty buffalo that they'd had the good fortune to kill when a troop of American cavalry, armed with cannons, descended on them, confiscated their horses, and ordered them back to camp. When two of the hunters protested, the soldiers beat them up and left them injured on the ground.

Back in the Cree village, Big Bear and his councilors decided that rather than attempt to retaliate—“Our strength is nothing . . . we are strangers here”—they would send their head chief to Fort Assinniboine on a peace mission. Here is how the meeting went, as recalled in detail by an eyewitness.
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“In peace I come and would speak,” Big Bear told the fort's commander, through an interpreter.

“Yes, I'm listening,” the tall, thin officer replied curtly.

“I have done no wrong,” Big Bear said. “My people get blamed for everything that happens but we have done nothing. We have come to this land to make our livelihood, to support ourselves.”

“Yes?”

“I come to you today with a good heart, thinking that you will have a touch of sympathy for us, that you will pity us. We are poor and in a bad way. I have come to ask you to give us back our horses.”

The officer did not have to search for an answer. “Obviously you do not understand our laws here,” he retorted. “Plenty of cattle are missing in our country, and we blame you people from Canada . . . If I carried out my orders to the letter of the law, I would take everything you have, not just your horses, but your guns, your lodges, and your clothes, until you would have nothing left.”

“But we have little or nothing now,” Big Bear objected.

“You are thieves from another land,” the officer shouted, “and you should be shot like dogs! If you had behaved yourselves in the first place you would have been treated well and this wouldn't have happened. You will not get your horses back.”

Here at least was a point on which Big Bear and the Canadian government might have agreed: The Great Father was armed and ornery.

North of the border, the milk of human kindness was drying up as well, not that it had ever been very abundant. Faced with a choice between the barren teat of the Great Mother and the armed embrace of the United States, the Lakota refugees had been brought to the breaking point. As the months of exile crept by with no action, it had become apparent that the Macdonald government meant exactly what it had said and that Canada was prepared to stand by and watch the refugees starve to death. This conclusion was reinforced, in the summer of 1880, when Inspector Walsh was suddenly taken off the case—“Sitting Bull's Boss” no more—and a hard-line officer was sent in as his replacement. (Walsh had drawn the ire of his superiors by trying to be the hero, getting chummy with Sitting Bull, and generally playing both ends against the middle.)