Big Bear (11 page)

When Cree and Blackfoot Lived Together

• Crowfoot’s starving treaty Siksika settle near Carrol, Montana, and pledge peace with Big Bear’s twenty-four hundred Plains Cree. They live side by side that winter and hunt the buffalo still plentiful in the Judith basin. Good meat and hides are available, but also endless whisky, and that creates havoc. As trader James Schultz later wrote:
  

       “There were nights when a thousand Indians would be drunk together, dancing and singing around little fires built down in the timber, some crying foolishly, some making love, others going through all kinds of strange and uncouth antics. But there was very little quarrelling among Big Bear’s people, not half a dozen being killed in the
whole winter. More than that number froze to death, falling on their way home in the night.”

• A band member has a sexual affair with Big Bear’s youngest wife and, in a drunken rage, clubs the chief to death. But, as his grandson Four Souls told it later, “Big Bear’s oldest wife, Sayos, had been instructed what to do in case he got killed. So she called a medicine man who followed the instructions and Big Bear was brought back to life. He didn’t take revenge on this man right away, but later he got the medicine man to use bad medicine on him and killed him.” And Big Bear forgives his young wife because of the alcohol.
  
• In mid-February, the bands from Mosquito, Moosomin, and Poundmaker—now “the most influential chief on the Saskatchewan”—come to Battleford to declare they must hold a Grand Council with the Indian Commissioner. The treaty understandings must be changed, Poundmaker states; if extra rations are not given, he will kill government oxen for food, and there are not police enough to arrest him. But there is no commissioner in winter Battleford, nor even an agent, to answer them, and they return to their bits of “land set aside” all the hungrier.
  
• In May, Poundmaker and three thousand treaty Cree, unable to plant crops because they have no seed or draft
  animals or food, leave their reserves again to look for buffalo in the Cypress Hills. But no herds will ever again roam free in prairie Canada. To prevent violence, the Fort Walsh police dole out starvation rations of flour and rancid bacon hauled from Fort Benton, before they force the People north for treaty payments. Meanwhile, Montana ranchers petition the U.S. Army to chase Canadian Indians back over the border because, though they are “ostensibly here for the purpose of hunting buffalo, they have killed and eaten many of our cattle.”
  

When Big Bear Ran His Last Buffalo

• The Marquis of Lorne, Governor General of Canada, tours the North-West Territories. Poundmaker guides his huge party from Battleford across the bone-haunted prairie to Crowfoot on the Bow River. During the journey Poundmaker is astounded to discover that the haughty, aloof Imperial Head of Canada, whose one wife is the daughter of the Great Grandmother venerated in every treaty, can actually explain nothing about government actions. The man Macdonald, who will never visit the Territories and whom no more than a dozen Plains
  People will ever see, makes all decisions as Head of Indian Affairs through an Indian Act no Person has ever heard a word about.
  
• Another hard winter. There are still large herds along the Missouri, but rotgut whisky is more destructive than ever, and cycles of horse stealing by Young Men ruin the peace. Big Bear and his People, camped on the Musselshell River, recognize that despite adequate hunting, their life and community are being destroyed.
  
• Major John Young, in charge of the immense Indian lands along the Missouri, offers Big Bear a reservation if he signs a treaty with Washington. Twin Wolverine, Imasees, and Wandering Spirit are strongly in favour, and a deep rift develops in the band when Big Bear will not agree.
  
• In March, the U.S. Army launches “The Milk River Sweep.” Soldiers attack Little Pine’s band and harry them back across the border, but a messenger warns Big Bear in the Little Rocky Mountains, and war chief Wandering Spirit takes command. He sends scouts to watch for patrols while camp is struck and, covering their trail of travois and hoof prints, twelve hundred People disappear into the Missouri Breaks. The Benton
  Record
  is disgusted: the army should present Big Bear the “Freedom of Milk River” on a silver platter—if they can find him.
  

But the Plains Cree cannot live a life in hiding. After one more good hunt, and some warrior adventures for the Young Men stealing back horses stolen from them in past years, as the leaves open on the Missouri cottonwoods, Big Bear’s band trails slowly north. Past the valley where Chief Joseph and his Nez Percé made their last stand in the Bears Paw Mountains, north along Battle Creek, across the Medicine Line and past Old Man On His Back to the Cypress Hills. They circle their lodges at Cypress Lake; a day’s ride away, near Fort Walsh among the green-grass hills are the destitute camps of five thousand treaty Indians. After four years of difficult independence, of watching and waiting, Big Bear and his People have returned to ignored promises, impossible farming conditions, and starvation. From the northern reserves around the Peace Hills, named to honour Chief Maskepetoon, Chiefs Bobtail, Ermineskin, and Samson have sent a bitter letter to Macdonald:

“The conditions of the treaty were mutually agreed to. We understood them to be inviolable and in the presence of the Great Spirit reciprocally binding. But alas! how simple we were.… We are now reduced to the lowest stage of poverty. We were once a proud and independent people, and now we are mendicants at the door of every white man in
the country, and if it were not for the charity of white settlers, we should all die on government fare.… Our young women are reduced by starvation to become prostitutes to the white man for a living, a thing unheard of before amongst ourselves. What shall we then do?.… Shall we still be refused [assistance] and be compelled to adhere to the conclusion that the treaty is a farce enacted to kill us quietly, and if so, let us die at once?”

At Fort Walsh in July, Police Commissioner Irvine forces the People to go north for their treaty payments by withholding all rations. As Indian Farm Instructor Robert Jefferson later commented: “The Indians were more law-abiding than white men under the same circumstances would ever have been; had it been otherwise, ten times the number of police would not have kept them in order.”

THE RUNNING HOOVES DRUMMED
Big Bear into another country, calling and calling, as the buffalo effortlessly fanned out before him. The gashed wounds left in the animals’ flanks by hunters they had once and then again outrun dripped brilliant red in the rhythmic bunch and release of their muscles, and then there was only one great cow running, floating strong, growing large until beside him
streamed the tufted stick of her tail, the rolling leap of muscle in her hindquarters, and he felt life surge within her, her heart in that violent, happy thunder as she ran true the great curve of Earth, as he drifted along her flank, and for an instant his arrow pointed her, one instant and its feathers burst in the coarse hair behind her shoulder. And her rhythm rippled momentarily, her heart staggered as his arrow feathers flamed into double blossom. Then his horse had to swing sharply aside or he would have pitched over her, falling.

He stood where her magnificent head furrowed the ground and he prayed, asking forgiveness of the Buffalo Spirit for this death, giving thanks for the life that had thereby been granted. And saw a coyote standing on a rise beyond her, mouth open, laughing. And he also saw what Coyote was laughing at: a fountain of blood growing out of the ground like a hideous prairie lily opening upward, and he stretched out his hands to stop that. But it burst between his fingers, higher, he would never be able to squash it back into the earth, while Coyote on another rise now stood laughing, mouth open. As his whole world changed to blood.

It was all very well for Indian Commissioner Dewdney to write his friend the prime minister in 1879 that “Big Bear is a very independent character, self-reliant …,” but there was no independence, no self-reliance for prairie People without buffalo. By 1876, everyone knew the buffalo were in drastic decline. But no one anticipated that the animals would disappear from Canada within three years, nor that the U.S. Army would build two more military posts, increase border patrols, and deliberately stop the annual buffalo migration north to save the last animals for their own Native Peoples. And the Ottawa government’s blithe assumption that, within two years, Aboriginal hunters could transform themselves into self-sufficient farmers on northern prairies where well-equipped, experienced settlers barely survived revealed a downright criminal level of ignorance. At Fort Walsh, Big Bear saw the ravages done to his People by six years of treaty; a century later, Cree historian Blair Stonechild would present the harsh data:

• in 1870 total Indians in treaty areas, estimated 40,000;
  
• in 1880 total treaty Indians counted, 32,549;
  
• in 1885 total treaty Indians counted, 20,170.
  

“This meant an average of over 2000 more deaths than births each year and a mortality rate of approximately 1 in 10 per year.”

Big Bear could not know these staggering numbers, but he breathed them in the air of the tattered camps he visited: Poundmaker, Piapot, Little Pine, Thunderchild, Mosquito, Bear’s Head, Red Pheasant, Foremost Man … all friends, some since their childhood … Lucky Man, whose children were his own grandchildren. The endless malnutrition and family deaths, especially of wise Elders and beloved children, of newborns too weak to nurse and mothers too emaciated to have milk and fathers strangling their last dogs to retain every drop of blood—how could that not destroy all will to live? The considered, careful discipline essential in any hunting band, the friendship, the generosity, the mutual help and celebration were annihilated by starvation, by relentless dying. O Great Spirit, how have we lost your incomprehensible gifts so suddenly, so dreadfully? Where has gone the power of life in the land, in the water, the very air we breathe, the sunshine …

Big Bear’s spiritual struggle over the destruction of his world was almost beyond endurance. He could not believe that any but the most hate-filled Whites—the Company men he knew best were as appalled as he—could want human beings to endure what they were now forced into. Clearly the promise they had signed, Treaty Six, and the way it was being applied, must be changed, and he began to dig for what the Whites understood the treaty to say. What it literally said, beyond the often contradictory details he had heard. He tried to talk with every official he could find, with Police Boss Irvine and every Indian sub-agent who dared approach the Cypress Hills, but they were evasively vague with their eternal, slavish response: they obeyed specific orders, they could change nothing. “The Treaty” had become some absolute malevolence hidden beyond reach, and only tiny bits of it could be known, such as “half a pound of flour per grown person every third day,” or “no name on Treaty list, no rations.”

On May 22, 1882, the
Saskatchewan Herald
editorialized: “Big Bear, with an exceptionally large following of non-treaty and malcontent Indians … are eking out a miserable existence by fishing [at Cypress Lake] … It is impossible to over-estimate the danger of having these worthless Indians leading an idle, roaming life, with no higher aim than horsestealing and similar depredations.”

“Worthless Indians.” In June, translator Peter Erasmus arrived at Walsh, sent by government from Edmonton to convince treaty People to again return north to their reserves. By talking to Erasmus, who understood the treaty disasters as well as any Person, Big Bear found that he could speak to ordinary Whites through their newspapers.

The
Saskatchewan Herald,
August 5, 1882, reported:

“Though generally not known, it is nevertheless true that the Indians on the plains keep themselves well posted as to what the newspapers say about them.…Big Bear sends a message denying having held secret meetings at which mischief against the whites was discussed.… So far as having held treasonous secret meetings, Big Bear states that repeated efforts were made by Americans and other traders, Louis Riel and others, and Indians from across the line, to commit acts designed to embarrass the Government because the Government had failed to keep its promises to him, but he always resisted their seductions .… ”

And the Edmonton
Bulletin,
October 21, 1882, stated:

“A crisis arrived near Cypress last spring, and it is altogether probable that by the [Treaty] Cree being
removed, a first class Indian war was averted.…It was all laid to Big Bear and his band, and he was described as a very bad Indian. Mr Erasmus gives us Big Bear’s side of the story, which certainly does not show the southern police or government officials in a very favorable light. In regard to horse stealing, Big Bear said,

‘It is true our young men steal, but they were not the first to commence it. Both Blackfoot and Americans were the first to take our horses and continued to do so for two years. When we complained to them here as well as at other places, all the satisfaction we got was that we were told, “Go and do the same.” … I said to them, “Do you want us to break the peace? I thought your office here was of another character, I see plainly you do not want to help us.” Our Young Men heard this and this is how so much stealing has been done. We the chiefs try all we can to keep the Young Men from stealing but it is hard to manage them. Having once roused the old spirit, they desire to make braves of themselves and I do not know where or how it will end. There was a time when we had faith in the white man and believed his
word … now when a white man says anything to us, we listen, and in the meantime say in our hearts he is lying. How can we have faith in men we know do not take an interest in helping us?… Let an American or any white man say, “There are some of my horses in the Cree camp,” the police come at once and all the man has to do is to say “This is my horse” or “that is my horse” and the horse is at once taken and delivered to him without any regard as to where we may have got him from.

‘Although we trusted to the law to help us, we never got the benefit of it, because our word is as the wind to the white man.’”