A Geography of Blood (10 page)

When the guns finally fell silent, the attackers swarmed the Nakoda campsite, helping themselves to anything of value and setting fire to the rest. In one lodge, they came upon Hunkajuka, or Little Soldier, the chief who, a few weeks earlier, had led his people across the plains to the safety of the hills. One of the wolfers raised his rifle and shot Hunkajuka at point-blank range, while another busily mutilated the corpse of an old man named Wankantu, and yet another rounded up five women and took them captive. That night four of the women were raped repeatedly inside Solomon's trading post, while the severed head of Wankantu looked mutely down from the top of a lodgepole in the smoldering Nakoda camp.

The fifth woman, a teenager, was spared the same fate as the others through the courage of Horse Guard, Abe Farwell's seventeen-year-old Crow wife, who marched over to Solomon's fort, pistol in hand, and demanded the young woman's release. The rest of the women were held prisoner until morning, when the traders packed up and fled, leaving both posts in flames behind them. As for the Nakoda, many of them headed for Chimney Coulee, at “the end of the mountain,” with what little they had left. There the Métis gave them dogs, kettles, and other goods and treated them with kindness. From there, they went on their sorrowful way, aghast at what they had learned about the bitterness of the white intruders.

I can't be sure how much of the story I actually absorbed on that first encounter and how much has sunk in over the years, either on return visits to the site or through reading about it. I can't even be sure exactly what happened after our driver had finished his sorry tale, though I do have a vague recollection of being handed over to a summer student in the red-serge uniform of the North-West Mounted Police, who took us to Farwell's post and did his best to beguile us with the romance of the Wild West. As I recall, there was something about how the whiskey traders doctored their rotgut by flavoring it with tobacco, coloring it with red ink, and even adding strychnine to give it that extra kick. For the most part, however, whatever it was the good “constable” had to say was wasted on a mind still reeling with gunshots and children's screams.

Better to go outdoors. Better to see the flash of warblers in the willows, to smell the spicy aroma of sage, to hear the bright gurgle of the creek as it speeds under the footbridge. Better just to be here and try to accept the solace of this land that refuses to let us forget.

So there you have it, the story of the Cypress Hills Massacre in its essentials, though inevitably there's more to tell. As John Donne almost put it, no story is an island entire of itself; every story is a piece of the continent, a link in an ecology of narrative. For at the same time as chaos was descending on Battle Creek, a separate but ultimately related chain of events was playing out on what might almost have been another planet. Far, far away, across the vastness of the plains and the almost impassible barrier of the Precambrian Shield lay the national capital of Ottawa, and there Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and his grand project of nation building were running into trouble.

One thing had led to another. Building a nation required western settlement; settlement could not proceed without a railroad; the railroad depended on winning elections; winning elections called for funds; funds could be extracted from the fat cats who were competing to build the railroad. Ergo, building a nation meant accepting large sums—some would say bribes—from railway proponents. By the summer of 1873, as the government's financial misdeeds were exposed, Macdonald's ambitious plans for western expansion were in serious hot water.

It was in this context that the prime minister learned, two months after the event, of the spasm of violence in the Cypress Hills. Even before this communiqué reached him, Macdonald's advisers had been pressing him to send an armed force to the plains to establish law and order, keep Native discontent in check, and generally promote the colonization of the country. In fact, Macdonald had already begun to act on this recommendation with the passage, just days before the tragedy in Whitemud Coulee, of an act establishing a paramilitary service to be called the North-West Mounted Police. So far, the force existed only on paper, but news of the Cypress Hills atrocities gave the project a political boost. Americans were spilling over the border, threatening Canada's claim to the promised land and bringing their gunslinging racial violence with them. It was time for Canada to act.

Within weeks, a force of 150 red-coated recruits had been dispatched to Manitoba, where they were joined by a second contingent a few months later. Although Macdonald resigned in disgrace midway through this deployment and despite a shambolic march across the plains that nearly ended in disaster, the force arrived in southern Alberta late in 1874 and at Fort Walsh the following summer. The whiskey posts were disbanded, and the police, in concert with the Canadian government, proceeded to do their level best to bring the perpetrators of the Cypress Hills Massacre to justice.

By this time, of course, the malefactors (at least half of whom were technically Canadian) had retreated to Montana, where their many supporters rallied vociferously to their defense:
The Canadian authorities were deluded. The Indians had to be kept under control. No white man should ever stand trial for killing a savage. The wolfers were “the advance guard of civilization.” Etc. Etc.
2
In the end, only three of the accused ever faced charges, and none was convicted. Curiously, however, a rumor spread across the Canadian prairies that the murderers had been severely punished, a belief that burnished the reputation of the red coats and helped them win hearts and minds in the West. Across the line, the U.S. Army was mopping up the last of the “hostiles” and claiming the plains by force. In Canada, the thin ranks of the mounted police were already learning to be more artful.

The last time I returned to the massacre site, that valley of the dead, I came on a very specific mission. Parks Canada had sent a team of archaeologists to reopen and extend an earlier excavation at Farwell's trading post, and members of the public were encouraged to come and help. I'd never been on a dig before, so I was in a cheery mood as a dozen or so of us assembled at the visitors' center and climbed on board the bus for the short, dramatic drive up and over the hogback and down its steep face. The dome of the sky was already hazed with heat when we arrived in the valley—it was going to be blistering hot—and I was relieved when my mentor for the day, a pleasant young archaeology student named Tasha, pointed out a patch of shade inside the reconstructed palisade of Farwell's little fort.

“Here you go,” she said, holding out a knapsack filled with the tools of the trade: an assortment of trowels and brushes, a dustpan, a collection of dental picks, and a stylish pair of pull-on pads to protect my knees. Patiently, master to apprentice, she showed me how to measure out a square of dirt and mark it with string so that if we uncovered anything important (or anything at all) its location could be mapped to the last centimeter. “You do it like this,” she said, as she picked up a trowel, grasped it at a sharp angle, and scraped away a thin film of earth. “The dirt goes into your dustpan and then you dump it into this pail. We'll run it through a screen later in case we've missed anything.”

So
scritch scritch scritch,
I set to work under her watchful eye. After perhaps half an hour of this hypnotic repetition, I uncovered a precious artifact (“Should I pedestal this?” I asked, trying to sound as if I knew what I was talking about), but alas my prize turned out to be an ordinary pebble. Fifteen minutes afterwards, a bent nail appeared. (“Looks recent,” Tasha said doubtfully, “but I guess we could bag it.”) Lumps of what might have been chinking from a log building surfaced, but it was hard to tell for sure. Then, about two hours and one hand's width below the surface, my trowel bumped against something solid and came up tinged with soot. “Let me see,” Tasha ordered. “Yes, I think that's it. That's a charred floorboard from Fort Farwell.”

All around us, other teams were also hitting pay dirt in the form of buried sill logs, floor joists, and what might have been fallen timbers from the original palisade. Every discovery spoke to the day, 137 years earlier, when the post had been abandoned in the aftermath of slaughter. Yet none of us seemed troubled by this attribution—I know that I wasn't. Instead, I was having quite a nice time grubbing around in the dirt, chatting with my companion, and enjoying the everyday pleasures of a fine summer morning. Although we were literally in touch with the charred testament of an atrocity, everything that we were doing felt remarkably ordinary.

The boundary between the banal and the momentous is often eerily thin. Kneeling inside Farwell's post, scraping away at the dirt, I found myself remembering a story that I'd read in one of my new favorite books,
Recollections of an Assiniboine Chief.
It was written by the late Dan Kennedy, or Ochankugahe, and published in 1972, a year before its author died, in his nineties. Ochankugahe was born sometime in the 1870s, somewhere in the Cypress Hills, and although he did not witness the massacre, he heard about it at first hand from survivors. What he did see with his own eyes, however, were the signs and symptoms of an even larger and more devastating disaster, and whiskey traders like Farwell again figured in the story.

Unlike the pemmican traders at Chimney Coulee, whose main interest had been in acquiring buffalo meat as a source of food, Montana-based operators like Solomon and Farwell were intent on acquiring buffalo hides as a source of leather. As a result of recent technical innovations at a tannery in far-off Pennsylvania,
otapanihowin,
the peoples' livelihood, had suddenly been transformed into a source of industrial-strength belting material. Henceforth, for as long as the buffalo lasted, the natural capital of the prairie West would literally be used to power the machines and factories of eastern cities. Like Charlie Chaplin's horror-struck little tramp, the buffalo were now trapped in the whirring cogs and wheels of modernization.

Out on the plains, the result was butchery of unparalleled rapacity and rage. The hide hunters hit the southern plains en masse in 1871, and by the time their campaign ended, the southern herd had been shattered. The death toll reached a million buffalo per year and counting, buyers sometimes took in 200,000 hides a day, and block-long stacks of reeking hides awaited the east-bound trains. As U.S. Army Colonel Richard Dodge noted from Kansas in 1873, land that had once been home to “myriads of buffalo” was now strewn with “myriads of carcasses.”

“The air was foul with a sickening stench,” he wrote, “and the vast plain, which only a short twelvemonth before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.”
3

Mind you, there could be an upside to this picture, depending on your point of view. For as Colonel Dodge himself once cheerfully remarked, “Every dead buffalo is an Indian gone.”
4
Another army officer made the point even more explicitly: “Only when the Indian becomes absolutely dependent on us for everything,” he said, “will we be able to handle him . . . It seems a more humane thing to kill the buffalo than the Indian, so the buffalo must go.”
5
However regrettable the extermination of the southern herd might be, it had to be understood as a necessary phase in the advancement of settlement and civilization.

Of course, young Ochankugahe, the future Dan Kennedy, didn't know anything about these distant developments. He was just a little kid growing up in the Cypress Hills, far away from the main field of slaughter. Although the southern herd had been exterminated, buffalo still persisted in significant numbers on the northwestern plains, and his family was able to live and hunt in their traditional way. But one day, without really knowing what he was seeing, Ochankugahe caught a glimpse of the change that was advancing from the south. “I have every reason to remember the event,” Kennedy recollected, but not for the reason that you might expect. What made the day so memorable for him was a skunk bite.
6

It was a day like any other. Ochankugahe and his family were traveling with a small hunting party (ten or twelve lodges in all) and stopped by a tree-lined creek to spend the night. “The men were watering and tethering the horses and the women were busy pitching camp,” he recalled, “but we boys were excited over what we saw a short distance away. There were acres and acres of dead buffalo packed closely together, bloated and rotting in the sun.

“We hurried and made a beeline towards the carcasses,” he continued, jumping “from one carcass to another, having the greatest time chasing each other over the hurdles, when suddenly a skunk darted out from one of the carcasses. We gave chase but the skunk beat us to its den. When one boy reached the den, he poked in his arm. I and the others did likewise, but unlike the others, the skunk gave me an unexpected reception. I ran back to camp, howling at the top of my voice, holding my bleeding fingers aloft and wringing them in the air.

“Later that evening as we were eating our supper our elders voiced their indignation and anger at the carnage.

“ ‘It is the work of Play-ku-tay, the white vandals,' they said.”

Throughout the rest of his childhood Ochankugahe wondered what and whom his elders had meant. Then finally, in 1897, he had a chance to put the question to his friend Major Thomas W. Aspdin, a veteran of the North-West Mounted Police.

“I asked him if he knew who the culprits were who had perpetrated this shameless crime, for which we, the Plains Indians, had to endure untold hardships.

“I told the Major of the winter of 1880–81 at Cypress Hills, when we had to eat our horses to survive, and the winter of 1883–84, when five hundred or six hundred of my people [the Nakoda] starved to death at Wolf Point [Montana] because of the ruthless slaughter of the buffalo by Play-ku-tay.