A Geography of Blood (8 page)

Bull moose, deer, nighthawks, bluebirds, glittering beetles feeding on purple vetch: there was always something on offer at Chimney Coulee. But if the land was resplendent with life, the narrative on the signboards could have been written in blood. This lovely place had witnessed an apocalypse.

As soon as I read the first sentence on the kiosk, I realized that I'd encountered this story before, during my apprenticeship with
Wolf Willow.
(Apparently, there was no getting away from Mr. Stegner.) “In the winter of 1871–72,” the text began, “Isaac Cowie established a Hudson's Bay Company trading post in this coulee.” I glanced around the quiet site, trying to imagine log buildings, stacks of baled furs, the hustle and bustle of people going about their work. Did any of them feel a prickling at the back of the neck, an uneasy sense that all hell was about to descend upon them? The year before Cowie arrived, the HBC had sold its vast holdings of western lands to the British Crown and thence to the infant Dominion of Canada. In far-off Ottawa, back rooms were filled with fat talk about a transcontinental railroad that would link the country from coast to coast and service the anticipated onrush of settlers. In the ledgers of the new nation, the buffalo ecosystem was already being written down for obliteration.

In the few short months of his occupation that winter, Cowie acquired the hides of 750 grizzly bears and 1,500 elk, with as many more going to other traders in the area. And hides were only a sideline of his operation. His real interest was acquiring buffalo meat that, made into pemmican, provisioned the company's posts and brigades in the northern forest. When it came time to pack out in the spring and head for Fort Qu'Appelle, Cowie had amassed so much meat that he couldn't squeeze all of it into his fleet of carts. Forty carcasses—more than eleven tons dressed weight—had to be left behind to rot or be scavenged.

Eleven tons of carrion. Fifteen hundred elk. And 750 pathetic slaughtered bears. Of the latter, Cowie would one day write, “Most of these were unprime summer bearskins—mere hides which every hunter was using for cart covers instead of the ordinary buffalo bull hides, for large numbers had been slain off horseback in a run on the prairie. Many of them were of immense size approaching that of a polar bear; one skin measured by me was thirteen feet from tip to tail. This natural reservation of the grizzly and the elk soon ceased to harbour them . . . owing to [the consequences of] our invasion.”
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During the next ten years, the entire Great Plains, from western Canada south to Texas, would become a slaughterhouse. The foundation for agricultural settlement was being laid in wholesale carnage.

In the Middle Ages, scholars often kept human skulls in their libraries as objects of contemplation. They served as memento mori, bleak reminders of the human life span. On my desk at the moment in continuation of this tradition, I have the partial remains of a buffalo cranium, a lifeless reminder of the power of commodity markets to wreak havoc. The right eye socket of the skull is broken, the entire snout is gone, and the top of the skull is open, revealing a honeycomb-like pattern of interior reinforcements. On either edge of the shattered face, the horns sweep out to the sides, their surfaces as ridged and rough as if they were made of coral.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
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This relic actually belongs to my friend Mary, who lives at the town end of Chimney Coulee road, on a bend of the Frenchman River. She was out in her kayak one day when she saw a large object underwater, on the bank below her house, and reached out to capture it.

“I was excited when I saw it,” she remembers. “It looked so big. But I sort of wish I had never disturbed it now. Once I got it out, I discovered that it was a crayfish apartment house, with someone at home in every compartment.”

Deprived of this purpose, the skull's one good eye socket stares at me blindly, and I find myself longing to reclothe its bones in flesh. Imagine the great shaggy head, the massive shoulders and tapered hindquarters, the ridiculous fly-swat tail. Once conjured, the phantom stands impatiently between my desk and the piano, striking the floor with its hooves, waiting for me to open the door and let it loose. If one buffalo were magically to reappear on the Great Plains every minute, nonstop round the clock, it would take almost sixty years to restore the population to its historic numbers. According to the best available estimates, the Great Plains were once home to more than thirty million buffalo. Within a decade of Cowie's stopover at Chimney Coulee, however, that number would be reduced by 99.993 percent. By the mid-1880s, there were about two hundred survivors on the continent, in half a dozen shattered groups. The last wild herds in Canada, and the last subsistence hunts, occurred on the rich pasturelands of the Cypress Hills.

The near-extinction of the buffalo is an oft-told tale but, judging from the current global status of wild species, one from which little has been learned. Instead, we prefer to pass over the tragedy lightly, with phrases like “after the buffalo disappeared” and “when the buffalo vanished,” as if the animals had wandered peacefully into the great beyond. This wording has become standard in prairie histories and memoirs—with
Wolf Willow
as a notable exception, to Stegner's enormous credit—and I never encounter such euphemisms without a pang of distress. It's bad enough to know that the buffalo were slaughtered in the name of profit and progress. It's worse to know that, collectively, we have shrugged off our duty to grieve this tragedy.

As an outpost of the pemmican trade, Isaac Cowie's occupation of Chimney Coulee played a role, albeit a minor one, in this destruction. By the 1860s, the Hudson's Bay Company was drawing a total of 106.5 tons of pemmican out of the northern plains each year, almost twice as much as it had required a decade earlier. Watching the long trains of Red River carts heading east, heavily laden with robes and meat, some Native people concluded that the prairies were being tapped to provide sustenance for the entire white populations of North America, England, and France. When a visitor attempted to convince them otherwise, they remained suspicious. “Where then,” they asked, “does all the pemmican go to that you take away in your boats and in your carts?”
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In the spring of 1872, when Cowie and his teamsters were preparing to depart from Chimney Coulee with their groaning loads, the slopes around the HBC outpost were tense with suspicion. For some time, the traders had been aware that a party of South Peigan, or Piikáni, defenders was in the area, keeping armed watch on their every move. “We tried to open communication with these scouts, by signals,” Cowie reports in his memoir, “to which they only replied by signs of hostility and derision, mocking us with flashes from their little round mirrors.”
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Clearly, the Piikáni warriors were in no mood for compromise or discussion.

From my reading, I know some things that Cowie may not have known about the Piikáni people's circumstances that winter. Over the preceding months, their community had been hit by a series of traumas. The first, in the winter of 1869–70, was an outbreak of smallpox that killed one-third of the people it touched. The second, on January 23, 1870, was the massacre by the U.S. 2nd Regiment of 173 people on the Marias River, just across the border in northern Montana. Dispatched to exact revenge for an earlier fracas over stolen horses, Major Eugene M. Baker (a notorious drunk) had led his forces in a predawn attack on the wrong camp of people. In the hectic confusion that followed, the cavalry suffered one casualty, when a soldier fell from his horse. Since the men of the camp were out hunting that day, most of the Piikáni people who died were elders, women, and children.

These were heartbreaking losses and, nearly 150 years later, are still a cause for grief. More trouble struck a few months later when, on October 24, 1870, a large party of Cree and Nakoda soldiers attacked a Piikáni camp on the Belly River (now the site of Indian Battle Park in Lethbridge, Alberta). Although the engagement ended in a brilliant victory for the Piikáni and their Siksika and Káínai allies, who unbeknownst to the attackers had been camped near at hand, the action claimed the lives of another forty men. The death toll among the Crees and Nakoda approached three hundred.

In the old days, warfare on the prairies had been a kind of lethal sport, in which touching an enemy or stealing his horse counted for almost as much as claiming a scalp or a life. But now, when a noose was tightening around the buffalo and the people who depended on them, when the life-giving herds were contracting year by year in both number and distribution, when thirty million had shrunk to one million, and a weird stillness had fallen on the eastern and southern plains—every skirmish had become a fight to the finish. “Fight on!” a Piikáni chief had exhorted his people, a month after the Baker Massacre. “Fight on, fight on! Go on fighting to the very last man; and let that last man go on fighting too, for it is better to die thus, as a brave man should die, than to live a little time and then . . . starve.”
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Late in the winter of 1871–72, the struggle came to Chimney Coulee. From the vantage of the surrounding hills, the Piikáni watched as the train of heavily laden carts pulled away to the east and as, a few minutes later, Cowie and another trader followed on horseback. “We had not gone, at a lope, more than a quarter of a mile,” Cowie recalled, “when we heard a spluttering volley, evidently from a large party, and by the time we reached the carts the smoke, which arose from the site of our wintering houses, proclaimed that the Blackfeet had set them on fire.”
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Nine people—Nakoda from Wood Mountain, who had arrived to scavenge for odds and ends as the traders were packing out—were killed in the melee. Their remains were found by Métis hunters the following summer.

All I had wanted to know was who had made the stone circles, and yet here I am instead, surrounded by desperation and the nameless bodies of the dead. Yet if these memories are part of my inheritance as a prairie person, I am determined to accept them as my own. I will let them settle around me quietly, layer after layer, loss upon loss.

Standing by the signboard at Chimney Coulee, I strain my senses to pick up a hint of what is no longer there: the bellowing of buffalo, the hair-raising huff of a bear, an acrid whiff of gunpowder. Instead, the air is sweet with sunlight and dappled by a clean breeze that spangles the poplar leaves. I turn my eyes back to the signboard and pick up the story.

I'm not sure what I expected to happen next, but it certainly wasn't this. In 1873, the year after the Piikáni evicted Isaac Cowie, a group of about sixty Métis families had taken up residence here. Although the Piikáni were no doubt troubled by this intrusion, the struggles of the preceding months had left them reeling and in no position to resist the sudden, determined arrival of an entire settlement. As the Piikáni shifted out onto the buffalo plains of the Bow, the Milk, and the Two Medicine Rivers to the west, the Métis (some of whom were returnees from Cowie's party) rolled in from the east, eager to hunt buffalo in the Cypress Hills and on the surrounding plains.

It's often said, only half jokingly, that the Métis nation was born nine months after the first trader arrived on the shores of Hudson Bay in 1670. As the offspring of Scots, English, and French-Canadian men who married into Native families, the Métis were literally and figuratively the children of the fur trade. Whenever a strong back or a skilled hand was needed, the Métis had been engaged, and it was only natural that they became involved in the pemmican trade. At first, their annual hunting expeditions onto the plains—festive communal excursions of five hundred, then eight hundred, then a thousand or more screeching carts, governed by an agreed-upon code of laws—were staged from Pembina, south of present-day Winnipeg. But as the buffalo herds contracted to the west, it had become impractical to trek across the emptied prairie,
va et vient.
Some families began to stay on the plains for the winter months, as
les hivernants,
and so the settlement at Chimney Coulee was born. In the summer, when they were hunting buffalo, the Métis lived in tipis, like their relatives.

If it had been difficult to imagine this peaceful place as the scene of an armed encounter, it was almost as hard to picture it, just a few months afterwards, as a lively community of several hundred people. According to the text on the kiosk, the Métis called their new winter home Chapel Coulee—probably
Coulée de la chapelle
—and it had “consisted of a Roman Catholic church, a cemetery with six known graves, and several cabins . . . about 14 feet wide and between 30–40 feet long. They were partitioned every 10–12 feet to form separate living quarters, each with a stone fireplace and chimney.” When the agricultural settlers arrived in the area twenty years afterwards, the houses had disappeared but dozens of the chimneys still stood sentinel.

When the wind sings in the tops of the spruce trees, you can almost catch the lilt of a Métis fiddler playing the Red River jig. And when a hawk screams overhead, it recalls the voices of children racing
sosemanuk,
or snowsnakes, down the slopes or flying past, shrieking with joy, on their toboggans. But there is little now to remind us of the terrible winter of 1879–80, when the wind howled around the log houses and the snow lay in deep drifts and the children were pale and listless from lack of food. The buffalo ran thin and scrawny in the Cypress Hills country that summer, and by autumn they were done. The Métis pulled out of the coulee that year and never returned.

To Wallace Stegner and other historians of his generation, the Métis were an “unwashed and barbarous” people who had brought disaster upon their own heads,
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and there can be no doubt that the Métis were highly efficient buffalo hunters. Long before the pemmican trade hit its peak, they were already delivering more than a million pounds of meat and hides to Red River in a year. Did their activities contribute to the extermination of the buffalo from the Canadian prairies? Yes, of course, it did. But were they responsible for sponsoring the slaughter or for creating the rapacious demand for buffalo products or for failing to regulate the hunt? Just as obviously, they were not.