The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (43 page)

Some of the chiefs accepted the coming of steel with a certain amount of fatalism; Poundmaker, for one, urged his Cree followers to prepare for it. Poundmaker had negotiated a treaty with the Canadian government in 1879 and settled on a reserve on the Battle River. In the spring of 1881, after a fruitless search for game on the prairie, he realized that the buffalo were gone and the old nomadic life was ended. At the New Year he gathered his followers and told them to work hard, sow grain, and take care of their cattle: “Next summer, or at latest next fall, the railway will be close to us, the whites will fill the country, and they will dictate to us as they please. It is useless to dream that we can frighten them; that time is past; our only resource is our work, our industry, and our farms. Send your children to school … if you want them to prosper and be happy.”

It was sensible advice, given the inevitability of settlement, but not every chieftain took it, not even Poundmaker himself. His fellow Cree leader, Piapot, ran afoul of Secretan’s survey crews in 1882, pulling up forty miles of the surveyors’ stakes on the line west of Moose Jaw. Secretan, who had little patience with or understanding of the Indians, threatened to shoot on sight any “wretched ill-conditioned lying sons of aborigines” if they pulled up more stakes – a statement that caused consternation in Ottawa. That year Piapot was further disillusioned by what he considered
government betrayal. In May, he ordered the railway workmen to advance no farther into his hunting grounds. When they ignored him, he ordered his followers to camp directly upon the right of way. The railway, he said, was the cause of all his troubles.

There followed one of those gaudy little incidents that helped to build the growing legend of the North West Mounted Police – a scene that was to become the subject of one major painting and a good many romantic illustrations:

The two young men from the Maple Creek detachment ride up on their jet-black horses. There squats Piapot in front of his tepee, quietly smoking his pipe, directly in the line of the railroad. Around him the young braves wheel their horses, shouting war cries and firing their rifles into the air, egged on by the usual rabble of shrieking squaws. The prairie, speckled with spring wildflowers, stretches off to the low horizon. From somewhere in the distance comes the ominous sound of hammers striking on steel.

The sergeant tells the chief that he must make way for the railway. The brown old man refuses to budge. The sergeant takes out his watch. “I will give you just fifteen minutes,” he says. “If by the end of that time you haven’t begun to comply with the order, we shall make you.”

The braves jostle the policemen, trying to provoke them into a fight. The two young men in the pillbox hats and scarlet tunics quietly sit their horses. The minutes tick by. Birds wheel in the sky. The chief remains impassive. The young Crees gallop about. Finally, the sergeant speaks again. “Time’s up!” he says and, throwing his reins to the constable, he springs from his steed, strides to the tepee, and kicks down the tentpoles. The painted buffalo skin collapses. Other tepees topple under the kicks of his polished boot. “Now git!” says the sergeant and, astonishingly, the Indians obey. Piapot has been stripped of his dignity.

This incident, told and retold in most of the books about the early days of the North West Mounted, helped to bolster the tradition of the redcoats as fearless upholders of the law. Yet, in the light of the Indians’ tragedy, it is inexpressibly sad; and the day was swiftly approaching when no Mounted Policeman would again dare to act in such a fashion. The Indians, already beginning to feel that they had nothing to lose, were growing bolder.

Many of the native peoples greeted the oncoming rails with scepticism and the stories of the snorting locomotives with disbelief. They watched the construction in silence. The squaws pulled their shawls over their heads in terror of the whistle and refused to cross streams on the new
trestles, preferring to wade up to their armpits. Some of the younger braves, their faces painted brilliant scarlet, would try to race the train on their swift ponies. Few would actually touch the cars. Piapot believed that the smoke of the locomotive was an evil medicine that would ruin his people; again, his fears were not groundless, but his personal appeal to Dewdney, who was Indian Commissioner as well as Lieutenant-Governor, was, of course, fruitless. Secretan, as usual, was scornful of Dewdney’s handling of the Indians, which he believed to be far too lenient. The Lieutenant-Governor’s only experience with Indians, Secretan said, was derived from the calm contemplation of a wooden image outside of Roos’s Cigar Store on Sparks Street, Ottawa. This opinion was not quite fair; Dewdney was far more aware of the Indians’ plight than his political masters in the East.

Not far from Calgary, the railway builders encountered the most remarkable Indian leader of all, the sagacious Crowfoot, chief of the Black-foot nation – a slender, intelligent man with the classic Roman nose, who carried himself with great dignity and was renowned for his many feats of bravery. He had fought in nineteen battles, had been wounded six times, and had once rescued a child from the jaws of a grizzly bear, dispatching the animal with a spear while the whole camp watched. Crowfoot had many good qualities – eloquence, political skill, charity, and, above all, foresight. Long before his fellows he saw what was coming: the end of the buffalo, the settlement of the West, the spread of the white man’s style of living across the plains. Crowfoot pinned his hopes on the government and signed a treaty in 1877.

Thus, when the tents of the construction workers went up on the borders of the Blackfoot reserve, there was anger and bitterness among Crowfoot’s followers. The tribe was in a ferment: the white man was invading the land of the Blackfoot. The chief sent envoys to warn the foremen that no further construction work would be permitted and that seven hundred armed braves stood ready to attack.

At this point, Albert Lacombe, the Oblate missionary to the Blackfoot bands, stepped into the picture. For some time Lacombe had been concerned about the creeping advance of civilization, which would change his own way of life as surely as that of the natives. “Now that the railway gangs are coming nearer to our poor Indians,” he confided to his diary in May, 1883, “we can expect all kinds of moral disorders.” When Lacombe learned of the trouble at the Blackfoot reserve, he rode immediately to the construction camp – a homely priest in a tattered cassock, bumping over the prairie, his silver curls streaming out from beneath his black hat.

At Cluny Station, where the steel ended, Lacombe met with a brusque rebuff when he tried to alert the foreman to the danger. The Indians, he was told, could go to the devil; the rails would continue to advance. Lacombe decided he would have to make his appeals to higher authority. He had met Van Horne during his period as chaplain to the railway workers on the Thunder Bay Branch. The general manager had been impressed.

“Near the Lake of the Woods at sunrise one morning in 1882,” Van Horne wrote some years later, “I saw a priest standing on a flat rock, his crucifix in his right hand and his broad hat in the other, silhouetted against the rising sun, which made a golden halo about him, talking to a group of Indians – men, women and pappooses – who were listening with reverent attention. It was a scene never to be forgotten, and the noble and saintly countenance of the priest brought it to me that this must be Father Lacombe of whom I had heard so much.…”

Lacombe dispatched telegrams to Van Horne, Donald A. Smith, and Edgar Dewdney. The answers were not long in coming; nobody wanted another Custer-style massacre. The orders went straight to End of Track: cease all work until the Indians are placated. Lacombe was asked to appease them any way he could.

The priest had known Crowfoot for years. They had met first under dramatic circumstances near Rocky Mountain House on a snowy December night in 1865, after a band of Crees had attacked a Blackfoot camp where Lacombe was sleeping. After ten hours of bloody fighting, in which Lacombe himself had been temporarily felled by a spent bullet, the outnumbered Blackfoot warriors had been saved by a strong relief force under Crowfoot. The incident, besides launching a lifelong friendship between the two men, also helped foster the legend of Lacombe’s invincibility – he appeared to have risen from the dead. This legend was strengthened in the years that followed. In 1867, Lacombe led a party of starving Crees for twenty-two days through a blizzard to apparently miraculous safety. On another occasion, when an entire Blackfoot camp was succumbing to scarlet fever, Lacombe worked tirelessly among the stricken for twenty days before he himself contracted the disease; he recovered. Again, in 1870, when smallpox ravaged the North West, Lacombe exhausted himself in succouring the victims, his only protection against the disease being a piece of camphor held in his mouth. Fellow priests died and so did three thousand Indians, but Lacombe kept working, scraping out mass graves with knives, axes, or his own hands, comforting the sick, solacing the dying. Hundreds of Indians were so moved that they became Christians in tribute to his selflessness.

At the
CPR’S
behest the priest set out to placate his old friend. He arrived at Crowfoot’s camp bearing gifts: two hundred pounds of sugar and a like amount of tobacco, tea, and flour. At Lacombe’s suggestion, the chief called a grand council where the priest, standing before the squatting braves, spoke:

“Now my mouth is open; you people listen to my words. If one of you can say that for the fifteen years I have lived among you, I have given you bad advice, let him rise and speak.…”

No one budged. It was a dangerous, electric situation. Lacombe kept on:

“Well, my friends, I have some advice to give you today. Let the white people pass through your lands and let them build their roads. They are not here to rob you of your lands. These white men obey their chiefs, and it is with the chiefs that the matter must be settled. I have already told these chiefs that you were not pleased with the way in which the work is being pushed through your lands. The Governor himself will come to meet you. He will listen to your griefs; he will propose a remedy. And if the compromise does not suit you, that will be the time to order the builders out of your reserve.”

Lacombe sat down and Crowfoot stood up. “The advice of the Chief of Prayer is good. We shall do what he asks.” He had already consulted with Lieut.-Colonel A. G. Irvine, the Commissioner of the North West Mounted Police, and asked him if he thought he, Crowfoot, could stop the railway. Irvine replied by asking Crowfoot if all the men in the world could stop the Bow River running. The sagacious chief resigned himself to the inevitable. He did not believe in foolhardy gestures. Not long afterward, Dewdney arrived and agreed to give the Indians extra land in return for the railway’s right of way.

3
Prohibition

In a curiously roundabout way, the presence of the Indians in the North West had aided the railway in its swift progress across the plains. Without the Indians it is doubtful whether prohibition would have existed; without prohibition it would have been impossible to drive steel so efficiently. The entire North West Territories were dry by law – a law that had its roots in the scandalous days of the whiskey forts and the trek across the Great Lone Land by Lieut. William F. Butler, who wrote in his
report to Ottawa that he felt “convinced that if proper means are taken the suppression of the liquor traffic of the West can be easily accomplished.” Long before the railway was commenced, the liquor traffic west of Manitoba had been driven underground.

A. C. Forster Boulton, a
CPR
land examiner, gave in his memoirs a remarkable picture of a bone-dry Medicine Hat, as he first came upon it in 1883.

“It was a rough place then.… Miners, cowboys, trappers, prospectors gathered in the saloons to drink soft drinks and play cards. I remember I thought at the time what a fine thing it was that no spirits could be bought for love or money. If whisky had been allowed, then life, with the men gathered in these saloons, would have been cheap.” It makes an incongruous and somehow typically Canadian spectacle – the rough frontier town full of men in outlandish dress crowding into the saloons to purchase mugs of sarsaparilla.

Lively they certainly were, and never entirely dry, but the prairie railway camps, in contrast to those south of the border, were relatively tame. The contractors, American and Canadian, were grateful. “When a man breaks the law here,” one American boss told George Grant, “justice is dealt to him a heap quicker and in larger chunks than he has been accustomed to in the States. I tell you there is a way to do it, and they
are
doing it here, right from scratch.” What he was praising, of course, was the Canadian passion for order imposed from above – a British colonial heritage – as against the American concept of localized grass-roots democracy. There were no gun-toting town marshals keeping the peace in the Canadian West; instead there was a federally appointed, quasi-military constabulary. The Mounties did not have to stand for election, they were relatively incorruptible, and they were fair; that was one of the reasons why the Canadian West lacked some of the so-called colour of its American counterpart. Many an American felt some of his basic freedoms curtailed when he crossed the border. He could not buy a drink in a saloon, he could not carry a gun on his hip, and he could not help select the men who enforced the law. On the other hand he was safe on the streets and in the bars from hoodlums and bandits, and on the lonely plains from painted savages. If he did overstep the mark he could be sure that no hastily organized mob of vigilantes would string him up to the nearest tree.

Though the prohibition laws had been made originally to protect the natives, they were enforced as strictly as possible for the railroad workers – sometimes too strictly to suit the local residents. There were some intriguing arrests. In Maple Creek a man was charged because a chemist
without his knowledge put six bottles of vanilla in a case of chemicals he was carrying. He was clapped into jail overnight and fined one hundred dollars. Another was haled before a magistrate for having a small bottle of peppermint in his possession. It may be that both were not as innocent as was supposed, since explanations tended to be ingenious. One man in Medicine Hat, arraigned as a drunk, pleaded that he had got high from drinking Worcestershire sauce.