Big Bear (15 page)

Big Bear knew that as soon as he left, the men would return to the store for the ammunition and powder. They were everywhere now, stripped to breechcloths in the cold air and painted. His men, who had followed him all their lives, would not look at him: they stood with guns raised around Quinn’s and Pritchard’s and Delaney’s houses—obviously the agent and his wife and nephew, Henry Quinn, and Delaney and his wife and the mill builder John Gilchrist and his wife were already captives. Big Bear could only watch as Imasees and twenty warriors brought the other Whites together: William Gilchrist, John Williscraft, trader George Dill, carpenter Charles Gouin, and three Métis men visiting him. Then the church bell began to ring. Wandering Spirit emerged from Pritchard’s house with Quinn and his Cree wife; the Delaneys and Gilchrists appeared on their doorstep as well. The war chief waved his rifle and, with some forty warriors circling around, herded the Whites down the short trail into the church.

When Big Bear entered the church, he could not know that Fathers Fafard and Marchand were trying to celebrate Maundy Thursday Mass, the commemoration of Jesus’ betrayal. He smelled incense, heard the priests chanting, sounds swinging back and forth around the low altar. As the
Whites and a few Cree knelt in the pews to pray, Wandering Spirit entered. As Cameron wrote:

“He moved cat-like on his moccasined feet to the centre of the church and dropped on his right knee, his Winchester clutched in his right hand, the butt resting on the floor. His lynx-skin war-bonnet, from which depended five large eagle plumes, crowned his head; his eyes burned and his hideously painted face was set in lines of deadly menace … while he half knelt, glaring up at the altar and the white-robed priests.”

The mass ended abruptly when the war chief stood erect and shouted, “That’s enough!” He ordered both priests to remove their vestments and told the Métis altar boy, Salamon Pritchard: “You too, hang up those things!” As the frightened congregation with the priests filed past him, Big Bear was concentrating on keeping them safe: if they submitted quietly to being captives while the stores were raided and horses were taken and government cattle were shot for butchering—and especially if Tom Quinn could keep his vicious mouth shut—there was still hope. But several men were weaving about from more than sheer excitement, almost as if they were drunk. Had they found liquor or the
alcoholic painkiller medicine at the Company or Dill’s store, perhaps even the altar wine the priests hid in the church? Big Bear could only watch; Wandering Spirit with his Winchester was in command.

As the crowd moved up the road toward Pritchard’s and Delaney’s houses, Catherine Simpson stood in her doorway watching it pass. Big Bear leaned in exhaustion against the doorpost.

Mrs. Simpson was frightened. If only her man were there!

Big Bear said, “Yes … but don’t be afraid. Better gather up your things, I think there is going to be trouble. I can’t be everywhere to look over my young men.”

And as a nervous Catherine Simpson later testified at Big Bear’s trial, “Pritchard and Tom Quinn came into my house. Tom Quinn said this: Big Bear, could I remain at my own house, and Pritchard the same? Oh I suppose you could, Big Bear said.… While Big Bear was eating, I was packing up my little things. I heard a shot outside and I ran out to the door and I saw the man [Tom Quinn] fall, so I went back into my house again. Big Bear got up and went out and I heard him say, ‘Don’t do so, stopping it … leave it alone!’”

But on April 2, 1885, there were no leafy poplar branches to wave, and Big Bear’s enormous voice roaring “Stop! Stop!”
was lost among gunshots, screams, war cries, whoops, cheers, shrieks. As Big Bear’s granddaughter Isabelle would remember:

“Some young men were daring each other … it all happened so quickly I cannot say for sure what happened other than we saw Wandering Spirit raise the gun and fire at the Agent … Mr. Quinn, who was wearing a Scottish beret, suddenly fell forward and his cap tumbled to within a few feet from where I stood. Immediately Wandering Spirit and his friend yelled, ‘Let’s all go and get some [two-legged meat] to eat now.’ All I remember is that I was then very frightened and ran away.…”

Tom Quinn sprawled in blood before Pritchard’s house, and the other Whites made the mistake of running: the warriors were after them, whooping in frenzy, some sprinting, some on horseback running the terrified Whites down like buffalo.

Big Bear could only stand, frozen, and watch his hopes and plans and unending prayers for a better treaty and one huge Plains People Confederation disintegrate in the spring air. All the White men living at Frog Lake except for three were killed: Tom Quinn first and then Charles Gouin were
shot dead in front of Pritchard’s house. John Delaney, John Gowanlock, Father Leon Fafard, and Father Felix Marchand were shot dead on the trail leading north to the lake. John Williscraft, George Dill, and twenty-year-old William Gilchrist, who ran best of all, were chased down on horseback and shot dead along the same trail.

But the two White women, Teresa Delaney and Teresa Gowanlock, were not shot; they were torn from their husbands’ bodies and taken captive.

Company clerk William Cameron was first hidden under a clothes pile by Catherine Simpson, then she led him away disguised under a red blanket like a Cree woman.

Henry Quinn, Quinn’s young nephew, escaped between the buildings and reached Fort Pitt on April 3, Good Friday, with news of the killings.

Toward evening the third Frog Lake White man to survive returned from Fort Pitt in his buckboard. James Simpson found the settlement deserted, the church, the houses, the barns abandoned, doors and windows smashed, all plundered. Quinn’s mutilated body lay in front of Pritchard’s house, Charlie Gouin’s nearby. After looking into his destroyed store, Simpson drove to the Cree camp where, as he later testified at Big Bear’s trial, he found his old friend of forty years with

“all the Indians sitting in a circle. I asked him, hallo, I said, you are here … did you make a good hunt? He said, no, and that is all I asked him just then, and then he said to me afterwards, if you wish to come into my tent and remain in my tent, you [can] come in.… [But] I went down to my own tent first [to his wife and stepson, Louis Patenaude] and then about an hour or so after I went back to Big Bear’s tent, and I said to him, I am sorry to see what you have done here. Well, he says, it is not my doings. I said, now this affair will all be in your name, not your young men. It will be all on you, carried on your back. He says, it is not my doings, and the young men won’t listen, and I am very sorry for what has been done.… They have been always trying to take my name from me. I have always tried to stop the young men, and they have done it this time and taken my name away from me.”

“It will be all on you, carried on your back.”

On April 4, 1885, news of the Frog Lake killings reached the rest of Canada by telegraph from Battleford. The media understood nothing about Wandering Spirit or Imasees or Cree Young Men. All they knew about was the “cowardly, very troublesome” Chief Big Bear, and instantly he became a “bloodthirsty savage,” a “fiend to be wiped out of existence.” In particular, hysteria about the two White women known to have survived, their certain, frightful abuse and “fate worse than death” at the hands of savages, drove thousands of Canadian men to volunteer for the army that “Old Tomorrow” Macdonald was assembling with astounding speed. Conquer the West, finish the Indians and Métis!

As news of Crozier’s rout by Dumont at Duck Lake burned across the west, a few starving Cree pillaged stores at Peace Hills, Green Lake, Lac la Biche, Beaver Lake, and Cold Lake; Poundmaker’s band ransacked some Battleford stores after the villagers fled to the police stockade and Agent
Rae refused to talk with them. An Assiniboine in the Eagle Hills killed a despised farm instructor, and another a hated settler.

But there was no general Cree uprising; along the Saskatchewan, no band travelled to Batoche to assist the Métis. At Frog Lake, the war council debated whether to shoot the remaining Whites and local Métis who worked for the government as translators and contractors. The neighbouring Woods Cree bands joined them for days of feasting on plunder and butchered cattle, but they strongly opposed more killing. Catherine Simpson and John Pritchard were related to Chief Cut Arm’s band; they and the Woods Cree protected the captives in their lodges, especially the two Teresas, who were never physically hurt but cared for as well as the chaotic circumstances allowed. And though Imasees and Wandering Spirit, always with his rifle in his hand, dominated the combined council decisions as their continuing rage against everything White moved them, no one else was shot. Big Bear said nothing in council.

Ten days of feasting, wild dance, song, war exploits retold, cattle run like buffalo, and endless councils. For Fort Pitt must be next: four buildings piled to their peaked roofs with Big Boss McLean’s magnificent Company stores, and in two other buildings scrawny Inspector Dickens with his twenty-four
police and all of six horses! Wandering Spirit had more than three hundred mounted warriors: what he needed was Winchesters and ammunition.

When Henry Quinn arrived at Fort Pitt with his horrifying news, McLean and Dickens prepared for an attack. Fort Pitt now stood without palisade on the flats beside the North Saskatchewan River, so all they could do was knock down outbuildings, barricade the spaces between larger buildings with logs and grain sacks, and cut rifle-holes between the house logs. And wait. The aspen and willows burst green along the river in beautiful stillness. Finally Dickens, against McLean’s strongest warnings, sent out a patrol. His three men had barely disappeared when armed warriors appeared above the fort. To quote Dickens’s laconic diary:

“Monday, April 13 [actually Tuesday, April 14]. Fine weather. Const. Loasby, Cowan and Henry Quinn left for a scouting expedition to Frog Lake. A number of Indians arrived from Frog Lake, at top of hill 800 yards behind Fort. Sent letter signed by Big Bear demanding that police lay down their arms and leave the place, they report all prisoners safe.… Mr. McLean went out and parleyed with them and gave them grub. By contents of letter
it appears 250 armed men are around the Fort to our 38, plus the three Misses McLean. Everything quiet during night.”

John Pritchard later testified that Big Bear persuaded Imasees and Wandering Spirit not to attack Fort Pitt immediately but to urge McLean to surrender. So next morning McLean again walked with his interpreter, Francois Dufresne, to the camp just beyond the horizon hills. Big Bear passed the council pipe around but did not speak. The war chief argued that the Cree wanted to get rid of government completely and live only with the Hudson’s Bay Company “as they and their forefathers before them had, while receiving many useful supplies and help.” As McLean remembered it:

“When Wandering Spirit approached me, he put some additional cartridges into his Winchester and then, placing it in readiness on his arm, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Do not speak too much. That is why I killed the Agent. You say too much about Government, we are tired of him and all his people and we are now going to drive them out of our country. Why do you keep Government’s few Red Coats in your Fort? That is
the only thing we have against you. That Fort was built for us many years ago, and we would have killed them long ago were it not for you and your family being in there.’”

McLean could not convince Wandering Spirit that the twenty-five “Red Coats” meant that Government (the war chief spoke of it as a person) could send thousands of soldiers armed with cannons to enforce the Queen’s law. While they were tussling over these ideas, disaster struck: the three returning police scouts blundered into the camp and the warriors’ tension burst into action. To quote Dickens:

“[April 15]: During parley the three scouts out yesterday galloped through the camp towards Pitt. Const. Cowan was shot dead and Loasby wounded in two places before hauled over barrier. Horse killed and Quinn got away, but missing. Indians fired upon by all. McLean and Dufresne taken prisoner. Indians threatened to burn Fort tonight with coal oil brought from Frog Lake.”

The barricaded buildings could not withstand an attack by fire. McLean wrote his wife a note explaining that, to prevent more bloodshed, the civilians must surrender to the Cree and the police must use the Company scow and leave,
downriver for Battleford. Big Bear persuaded the warriors to give the police some hours to get ready (they used the time to pack, scatter gunpowder, and smash extra rifles) and himself dictated a letter to Henry Halpin for Sergeant Martin, Dickens’s second in command:

“My dear friend:

“Since I have met you long ago we have always been good friends, and you have from time to time given me things, and that is the reason I want to speak kindly to you; so please try and get off from Pitt as soon as you can. And tell your Captain that I remember him well, for since the Canadian Government had left me to starve in this country, he sometimes gave me food, and I don’t forget the blankets he gave me, and that is the reason I want you all to get off without bloodshed.

“We have had a talk, I and my men, before we left our camp, and we thought the way we are doing now the best—that is, to let you off if you would go. So try and get away before the afternoon, as the young men are wild and hard to keep in hand.

—Big Bear

“P.S. You asked me to keep the men in camp last night, and I did so; so I want you to go off today.

—Big Bear.”

Snow began to fall as the wounded Constable Loasby was carried down the bank of the North Saskatchewan and into the scow. Then the twenty-three police clambered in and pushed into the crushing river ice. They left Cowan’s mutilated body on the flats, and forty-four civilians to trudge into the hills as captives. Individual Cree families volunteered to take the captives in, guard, and care for them. Eleven McLeans surrendered, nine of them children, including the three eldest—Elizabeth, Amelia, and Kitty—who spoke fluent Cree and had stood guard for two weeks, fired guns during the scout disaster, and fearlessly carried messages between Whites and Cree.