Big Bear (10 page)

That winter, Big Bear’s camp below Bull’s Forehead Hill at The Forks grew to a hundred lodges—eight hundred People. And in January 1877, a message arrived to tell them Chief Sweetgrass was dead. Killed by his Morris rifle—accidentally perhaps, because it was in the hands of his brother-in-law when it fired. A beautiful rifle that weighed almost nothing and needed only a copper cartridge; you simply slipped it into the breech and touched the trigger.

The messenger travelled through the hard drifts with his own and three other families. They told Big Bear, Sweetgrass is gone. You are our chief now.

By summer, when it was time to ride to talk treaty again, there were more than a thousand People in his band. But so many could not travel over land covered with nothing but bones, and neither Little Pine nor Bobtail nor Piapot, all
hunting in the south, wanted to talk to a governor. They asked Big Bear to ride to Pitt with as many councillors as wanted to go.

The gathered council advised him: Chief Sweetgrass followed the advice of White priests and gave away our greatest gift, the land, and so quickly his soul walks with the dead. You have given away nothing. Speak for our Plains People, to keep us free on the land and protect the buffalo, especially from the Sioux.

Big Bear had eight days of prairie riding to pray for the wisdom he would need to lighten the Grandmother’s heavy hand. The land must remain, and also the buffalo: if they were hunted respectfully, People could live. But Piapot had reported that the two thousand Sioux under Four Horns and Sitting Bull, who had fled American soldiers by crossing the border, were now killing every buffalo near Wood Mountain. No animals would escape them to go north in their usual summer migration—how could buffalo survive, hunted like that? Or the northern Cree? O Great Spirit, pity us, O Only One, hear us.

But there was nothing to discuss at Fort Pitt anyway. The new governor, David Laird, was far away talking treaty at Blackfoot Crossing, and he simply sent an assistant to make payments to the fifteen hundred hungry Cree waiting for
him. If you were on the treaty list, M.G. Dickieson gave you five dollars. If you signed for the first time, he gave you twelve dollars, but he could not change one word of the treaty, nor talk about it. Also, a Buffalo Ordinance had been passed: no hunting of cows from November to August, no hunting of calves all year.

How, Big Bear asked, could the People on the prairie stay alive with such a law? Buffalo must be hunted only by Plains People, not by Sioux or Whites. But no, the ordinance applied to everyone, no exceptions.

Simpson said in disgust, I’m leaving this miserable place. There’s nothing to trade, a clerk just hands out money, and I.G. Baker drags big carts from Benton and sells crap nobody needs. I’m going east to breed horses.

So Big Bear could ask him: Why did you sign Treaty Six?

Simpson exclaimed, You heard that? I signed as a witness, I saw your chiefs make their X marks.

But the Great Spirit gave you the land too, through your grandmother.

Simpson laughed. You sound like Louis Riel! Too bad he had to run to the States to stay alive.

Strangely, via messenger David Laird readily accepted Big Bear’s request that the 1878 treaty payments, and discussion, should take place at Sounding Lake, nearer the non-treaty
People hunting on the southern prairie. It came to Big Bear that perhaps the government was no longer concerned about Plains Cree refusals; after all, on September 22, 1877, Laird had talked the entire Blackfoot Confederacy into signing Treaty Seven, surrendering forever the remainder of the prairies not already yielded up in Treaties One, Two, Four, and Six. Crowfoot’s X led the long list of Blood, Peigan, Stoney, and Sarcee leaders.

Big Bear knew every prairie treaty was essentially the same. With this final treaty signed, changing a White word in any one of them would be harder than ever.

That winter was mild, but by spring 1878, those Cree living on small, measured treaty lands faced starvation. What little garden food they had grown with few tools and no experience didn’t last half the winter; they had no mills to grind their sparse grain and there were almost no animals to hunt. Nevertheless, Laird declared there was no “general famine throughout the land” and that therefore he need do nothing. What could they do?

When the leaves came out, People trekked south from Carlton, from Jackfish and Saddle and Frog lakes, from Edmonton and the Peace Hills until more than three thousand People crowded into The Forks valleys with Big Bear’s band. There were festivals of dancing and food, Elders told
Wîsahkêcâhk stories that Horsechild had never heard, and children’s laughter spread under the cottonwoods to the sandbanks of the ice-running river. But to feed themselves they had to move to the buffalo, south, so deep into Blackfoot territory that the great cones of the Sweetgrass Hills floated grey as dreams on the horizon.

They look like animals, Imasees said, waiting for us. Why don’t we go live there? Just follow the Milk River.

It’s Long Knives country, said Twin Wolverine.

If the Sioux come to this side of the Line and kill our buffalo, we can go there and kill theirs.

The Long Knives would shoot us.

Sayos and her daughter Nowakich were roasting buffalo haunch over the lodge fire. Nowakich’s husband, Lone Man, chewed meat, saying nothing, and suddenly she spoke: Maskepetoon had a big silver medal from their Great Father, like Sweetgrass got from the Grandmother. Does that mean Maskepetoon made treaty with the Whites over there?

Yes, he had a medal, Big Bear said. That “Father’s” face was on it too.

Who cares, a dead silver face. Imasees rose, belching comfortably. You can’t even see their stupid Line, it’s wherever Whites say it is. I say, if we’re strong enough to ride on the prairie, it’s our land.

Once that had certainly been true, but no longer. Big Bear contemplated that as he cantered north with several councillors while their Young Men searched the prairie ahead. They had only two hundred miles of steady riding to Sounding Lake, but most of the treaty People remained hunting with his. They knew that five dollars gave you one thin blanket or half a bag of mouldy flour; one buffalo, with liver and brain and heart and tongue and nose and intestines and hooves and horns and bones and mounds of meat and a huge hide, made mockery of a little pile of paper.

Nevertheless, two thousand Cree now living on reserves of “land set aside” waited for the governor on the flats where Sounding Creek entered the lake. Stone-faced David Laird arrived on August 13 with his troop of police surrounding the money-chest wagons. As Laird reported it, Big Bear immediately stated his most direct demand:

“‘The Great Spirit has supplied us with plenty of buffalo for food until the white man came. Now as that means of support is about to fail us, the Government ought to take the place of the Great Spirit, and provide us with the means of living in some other way.’”

In three days of talk, Laird conceded nothing. He described Big Bear as an “old [he was fifty-three] and weazened” man whom he disliked intensely because “he was an untrustworthy and bad Indian.” In any case, the Canadian prairie had been signed away by most of the plains chiefs: what did a few hardline Cree matter, even if their bands numbered some thousands? Let them eat buffalo, wait them out.

The White wife of a trader certainly did not consider Big Bear “weazened.” She wrote:

“He was to be seen every day riding round the camp on an Indian pony, haughty and defiant, his face and body adorned with war paint and his long black hair decorated with eagle feathers.… He was the typical red Indian in all his savage glory and was a striking figure, with his brown body well tanned by the sun exposed to view.…”

Together with the treaty chiefs, who delayed accepting their annual payments because living on reserves was proving so disastrous, Big Bear argued that the government had added crucial living clauses of extra food to Treaties One and Two, and therefore Treaty Six must be augmented as well to deal with the deadly sudden loss of the buffalo.
Laird remained adamant: he could add nothing. When Cree Young Men galloped around his circled wagons in protest, firing shots into the air, he threatened them with arrest.

On Monday, August 25, 1878, the first issue of the
Saskatchewan Herald
, handset and printed by P.G. Laurie at Battleford, now the capital of the North-West Territories, reported that Big Bear spoke “not only for himself and his band, but for those who had already signed” and that “he would come again next year to receive the answer.”

The first newspaper west of Red River had half its information wrong. Big Bear did not mention coming again next year, and part of the reason was Sounding Lake. The shallow water so beautiful in its surround of shaggy Neutral Hills, which the Cree and Blackfoot had once dedicated as a peace boundary between them, the lake where, their stories told them, the buffalo had burst up from the hand of the Creator—this doubly sacred place. The wind shifting in the wolf willow whispered his prayer back to him:
Trust the buffalo
. To face Whites he needed the resolute courage of that faith, and the wisdom of time to understand what The Only One wanted People to do. Out of three annual attempts to talk treaty and now three
days of deadlock with Laird at Sounding Lake grew a conviction, and a vow.

He told Laird he would watch for four Cree years to see how Government kept faith with those Cree who had signed Treaty Six. For four years his band, and every Person who wanted to join them, would watch and live the independence and freedom they had always had: with buffalo, without treaty.

Four years. Had Big Bear’s band been Blood or Siksika, an Elder would have focused his memory of those years in the cryptic oral code of the Blackfoot Winter Count. The Cree, however, had highly respected Old Men who were “professional rememberers” for their communities; they could recount, with practised accuracy, key tribal events of the near and distant past. The band’s Old Men might have remembered those four years with these happenings:

When Little Pine and Lucky Man Signed

• Saskatchewan Herald
  , November 16: Government surveyors staking land near the Bow and Oldman rivers are confronted by Assiniboine, who tell them they “know of no one in Canada who has a right to take away their
  land.” Big Bear is sent for, and a parley results in deadlock. When Police Commissioner Irvine arrives from Fort Walsh with twenty-six police, he finds three hundred Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Cree, and Sioux warriors waiting. Big Bear and Irvine agree that the surveyors will stop their work and the Indians and police will “leave the dispute to be settled between the Governor and Big Bear when the leaves come out.” There is no mention of Big Bear wearing his war Bear paw.
  
• Few fall buffalo and early snow with weakened horses make hunting barely possible. The Eagle Hills People are so near starvation that they petition officials to give them next summer’s treaty payments in January. They receive nothing.
  
• Father Lestanc with the Métis at The Forks writes to the
  Herald
  on March 24: “Very severe winter. All the tribes—the Sioux, Blackfoot, Bloods, Sarcees, Assiniboines, Stoneys, Cree and Saulteaux—now form but one party, having the same mind. Big Bear up to this time cannot be accused of uttering a single objectionable word, but the fact of his being the head and soul of all our Canadian plain Indians leaves room for conjecture. They also seem desirous of securing Sitting Bull’s assistance to obtain another, and better, treaty.” But on May 5, the
  Herald
  reports: “The great confederacy of which Big Bear was to
  be the chief has come to nothing. The Blackfoot declined to give him their allegiance, actuated perhaps by a lingering remembrance of past enmity. The large party that wintered at The Forks has now dispersed.”
  
• Prime Minister Macdonald appoints his friend Edgar Dewdney as the new Indian Commissioner. Arriving at Fort Walsh via Montana, Dewdney notes:
  

       “July 2: Had an interview with some non-Treaty Cree Indians. They are said to have cut themselves off from Big Bear, although they deny it.

       “July 3: Had interview with Big Bear and other Indians that promised to take the Treaty. Little Pine [270 persons] and Lucky Man [200 persons] did so, leaving Big Bear almost alone.

       “July 4: Had long interview with Big Bear but no results. The same—talk but would not take the Treaty. Parted good friends.”

Dewdney writes to Macdonald confidentially: “I have not formed such a poor opinion of Big Bear as some appear to have done. He is a very independent character, self-reliant, and appears to know how to make his own living without begging from the government.”

When the Buffalo Disappeared across the Line

• At Sounding Lake, Dewdney pays Little Pine’s band and those who signed with Big Bear’s councillor Lucky Man—Imasees’s father-in-law—the twelve-dollar signing bonus plus another fifteen dollars for three years’ back pay. Little Pine trades and leaves immediately to hunt buffalo.
  
• A number of Big Bear’s band—which still numbered more than two thousand People—make the long trek with him to Fort Pitt carrying their few hides. It will be their last free trade on the North Saskatchewan; bleached bones cover the prairie, and they realize that whatever living animals remain have disappeared into Montana. Police Commissioner James Macleod writes Ottawa that increased American military manoeuvres along the border, including deliberate grass fires, are preventing the usual buffalo migration into Canada.
  
• Big Bear’s band lives that winter in Montana, hunting along the Milk River and into the Bears Paw Mountains. Louis Riel is trying to organize a Métis-Indian coalition to possibly invade Canada and invites Big Bear to visit the Big Bend Métis settlement. The chief stays one day and, as his grandson Four Souls remembered it in 1975, tells Riel: “Let’s fight the Queen with her law, not with guns. This way we
  might have a chance.” Riel notes in his papers: “The Cree have a very good chief. He is Big Bear. He is a man of good sense.”
  
• Fort Benton
  Record
  , March 12: Five thousand starving Indians from Canada’s northern reserves are camped around Fort Walsh and existing on sparse rations distributed by police. “There is nothing whatever to keep them from starvation north of the line.”
       During treaty payments at Battleford in July, Poundmaker speaks for all the emaciated People just returned from Fort Walsh. He tells Dewdney the Cree are weak, without provisions, and that they need more resources to farm their reserves. “I am not asking for more money. We need ten cows and ten yokes of cattle on each reserve because now, when one family works with one yoke, lots of others must remain idle and we cannot put in much crop. If we get what we ask, I think we can make our living out of the ground. The Cree that are not settled are watching us.”
       Dewdney responds: “Poundmaker is very sensible; when Indians talk that way, the government is much more likely to assist them than when they use threats.” Within weeks Dewdney officially names Poundmaker a chief, and he and 182 followers take a reserve along Cutknife Hill on the Battle River. But more cows and oxen never appear.
  
• Saskatchewan Herald
  , August 2: It seems Wandering Spirit has ridden from Montana to observe the new commissioner in Battleford. Big Bear’s war chief declares: “I am very happy at what Poundmaker has said. I intend to abide by it.” Not long after, he is again hunting buffalo with Big Bear across the Line.