Big Bear (6 page)

Several other chiefs added their words, but Big Bear did not. James Simpson had told him that the English translation of Cree was always a bit slanted, huh! it was hard enough to know what writing meant even if you knew English! Big Bear thought that Sweetgrass—Lacombe had baptized him Abraham—went too far into Company talk about trade, too
much into missionary talk about settlement, about pity. Only the Great Spirit’s pity meant anything. But he agreed with the statement about land. The Big Whites must come and explain what “sell land,” “Governor,” and “Great Mother” meant. And where was Canada in this letter? Big Boss Macdonald?

But despite this letter, and despite the arrival of a young soldier named William Butler who said he was travelling the North-West on orders by Prime Minister Macdonald and would give their messages directly to him, no one of authority came to talk. The Cree did hear that the forest Saulteaux and Woods Cree from Red River to Lake of the Woods were talking with Canada about a treaty for land to build a road; but they could not agree because the chiefs declared, “All this is our property where you have come. The Great Spirit planted us on this ground.” The talking would continue for another two years.

Nevertheless, talking was good; you saw Whites face to face, you knew where they were and what they were doing, they had to answer you. Not like the disaster on the Oldman River, where the Cree had not known about Fort Whoop-Up, or about trade in repeater rifles and bullets, or about the Major Baker massacre of 170 Peigan men, women, and children by the United States Army that had driven the
remaining Peigan north, so that they were on the Oldman River and could defend their Blood allies.

For four years Big Bear listened while his band hunted the plains and the winter boreal forest. They avoided Whites except for essential trade at Fort Pitt. Three wives now lived in his lodge, and the second had borne another son, Kingbird. Imasees had become a formidable Young Man, and Nowakich and Twin Wolverine were married. Nowakich’s husband was Lone Man, a fine warrior and perceptive thinker, the son of a Blackfoot woman captured in a raid; he became Big Bear’s closest confidant. Big Bear’s independent leadership attracted more and more Cree to his band, but now the northern buffalo grazed in small, scattered herds and, despite widespread peace with the Blackfoot, were increasingly difficult to find. Starvation threatened.

Many Métis had left Red River after 1870 when Canadian militia chased Louis Riel into the United States. They settled along the South Saskatchewan River near Batoche. But soon the buffalo no longer grazed there, and they were forced to hunt the same herds as the Cree and Blackfoot much farther south. The Métis summer hunts were massively organized, with a hunt captain and companies of ten policing every aspect of camp life to ensure every possible animal was taken. The captain of the 1873 hunt was
Gabriel Dumont, an extraordinary marksman of enormous prestige and ego. On the plains, Big Bear discovered that his Cree and the Métis had found the same scattering of buffalo, and he rode into Dumont’s camp to negotiate an equitable hunting arrangement. But the captain bellowed, No! The whole herd belonged to them. Big Bear walked out of Dumont’s lodge and later sent six Young Men to haze part of the herd over the river so that the Cree could hunt them undisturbed by the Métis.

But Dumont and his scouts discovered the tactic and galloped to confront Big Bear. He denied nothing. His People needed food too; they could share what the Creator had given. At that, Dumont lashed out:

“You’re a dirty, thieving chief … and if any of your Young Men have had a hand in this, it won’t be well for you.”

Insulted before his People, Big Bear walked away. As punishment, the Métis soldiers seized a Cree cart and gave it to one of their hunters. Big Bear would not acknowledge that the Métis had any more claim to the buffalo than he did, nor was he so stupid as to fight. His band broke camp to hunt elsewhere.

But no Cree forgot that confrontation or Big Bear’s unshaken dignity at public humiliation. Years later John Kerr, an Ontario adventurer who lived with the Métis, told
the story. By then Big Bear was a North-West Rebellion villain though he had shot no one, and Gabriel Dumont a hero despite the fact that at Fish Creek he had killed twelve Canadians with his unerring rifle.

Big Bear’s band tried to avoid Americans who spread like smallpox across the border as much as they tried to avoid the Métis. Not only did the Americans build fortified posts such as Whoop-Up, Standoff, and Kipp in Blackfoot territory to lure People into trade for whisky, but the ox trains of wolfers loaded with poison for wolves and barrels of rotgut followed them everywhere. No sooner was a buffalo skinned than the hide was traded for stupefied drunkenness and the carcass poisoned to kill wolves for their fur.

Canada claimed all territory north of the Medicine Line, but its government had no way of stopping Americans from crossing the border and doing whatever they pleased. The Americans hauled hides, however they acquired them, back to Fort Benton and shipped them down the Missouri to be made into belts in their eastern factories. The Hudson’s Bay Company petitioned Ottawa again and again, reporting their trade ruined by illegal businesses that destroyed the Plains People, but nothing happened. Until May 1873, when six American whisky louts in the Cypress Hills massacred forty drunken Assiniboine and violated both women
and children. Only then did Macdonald legislate the North West Mounted Police into existence, to enforce Canadian law on the prairies. A hundred and fifty men arrived in Red River from Canada that summer.

The Plains Cree heard this, heard how more men were being recruited and trained all winter. In July 1874, four hundred police, with hundreds of horses and workers and supply carts, started their monumental trek west for the Cypress Hills and Fort Whoop-Up. About the same time, Big Bear learned that George McDougall in Victoria had had the Iron Stone heaved into a cart and sent shrieking off to Red River.

(For well over a century, Old Man Buffalo survived in Ontario, but in 2008 he is on display in the Syncrude Gallery of Aboriginal Culture at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. As you approach, the gleaming black, pockmarked shape shifts into a conical human head; a great eagle-beaked nose with deep nostrils and mouth emerge. After a moment you recognize that the civilized steel that holds the head on its stand is clamped precisely through that open mouth, so it cannot utter a sound.)

So, while Old Man Buffalo was being dragged east, an army of Whites was marching west: was this the new order of protection under which People must now somehow live?

Big Bear contemplated the smoke drifting from his pipe. Then he stood up, walked between the lodges and evening fires and women and men and dogs and children chasing one another for happiness—there were more than five hundred in his band now, because Lucky Man and his followers had just come—and went onto the silent prairie, where prayer was possible. And, perhaps, if the Spirits were compassionate, vision. He remembered the McDougall log church, and how the Iron Stone had been fixed in humiliation beside it for twice four years. He could not count the times he had brought thank offerings when the Stone rested on the hill, where the dust of buffalo lay beyond every horizon.

Did the Spirits have no power once the Stone was torn from its sacred hilltop? Fenced into that little churchyard in the valley, forced to hear those Christian songs? How could Chief Pakan and his band walk past into that square building when they, too, had once left offerings on the hill? It must be the land; even Old Man Buffalo had no power without it.

And yet … despite the violation, Big Bear felt a certain respect for McDougall father and son. Sometimes he felt he could forgive them because they were so generous, their word so trustworthy. One autumn, when Big Bear’s band was starving, they dug up acres of Methodist potatoes, and the McDougalls, when they found out, just said, Fine, you
needed food. They suffered too when buffalo couldn’t be found, but also from the silent enemy smallpox: John’s wife and two children were in the Victoria cemetery with many Cree. But strangely, Maskepetoon had been more committed to peace than these contradictory Whites; their God seemed very violent at times, and, they preached, Only we know how to deal with Him, so listen to us!

The immense land remained. Big Bear stood, listening. No one could drag it away in a cart. The land grew grass, grass fed buffalo, buffalo fed People. They were all land. They would remain; he prayed.

The North West Mounted Police hauled themselves west over the prairie along the Medicine Line border. At La Roche Percée, one column rode north for Edmonton via Carlton while the other continued west. Big Bear’s band heard of both columns’ slow progress throughout the summer. The cart treks the Métis and traders and missionaries made routinely every year became overwhelming sagas of drought and mud and dying horses for these Whites who were supposed to guard the country for Canada. The western contingent got lost between the Bow and Oldman rivers; they could not find Fort Whoop-Up to arrest the illegal Americans there, though they searched for two weeks. Finally, worn and starving, they trekked south into Montana, where they met the half-Blood
Jerry Potts in Fort Benton, who led them back into Canada on the wide Whoop-Up wagon trail two hundred and thirty miles to the fort. They found neither trader nor whisky inside its palisade, only one crippled White man and four Blood women. No shot was fired nor voice raised. The women cooked the exhausted Canadians all the buffalo they could eat.

While the Mounted Police were getting lost, Company trader William McKay visited the Cree on the plains in the name, he said, of the Great Mother. He explained that the police would “mark out the line between Her territories and those of the United States so that Her Indian and White subjects might know where the lands of the Queen begin.” The police had no military purpose but had come to “preserve the Queen’s law and order,” especially now that crews were surveying routes for railroad and telegraph lines to be built across the prairie. Big Bear and his council were disturbed. The Queen’s land? The Queen’s law? A railroad? McKay could only repeat the words he had been told—someone else would come to explain more—then he gave them tea, sugar, tobacco, and, oddly, fifteen scalping knives and left for the next band.

During the summer of 1874, the Plains Cree began to comprehend what a mass of Whites was pouring in upon them. Police troops, surveyors for railroad and telegraph lines,
land speculators, settlers trekking their carts along the Carlton Trail from Red River to Pitt and Victoria and Edmonton. The first sternwheeler steamer on the Saskatchewan River crawled over shoals and rapids from Lake Winnipeg to Carlton filled with passengers and three hundred cartloads of Company freight.

And, after two years of talk, the Lake of the Woods–Red River People settled with the government commissioners on agreements they called Treaty One and Treaty Two. In 1874, new commissioners then called the central Qu’Appelle Cree and Assiniboine People together to enact a similar treaty for their prairie lands. Big Bear heard how the Saulteaux speaker Gambler had tried to negotiate a list of conditions with Lieutenant-Governor Alexander Morris, arguing, “The Company has stolen our land.… The earth, trees, grass, stones, everything I see with my eyes.” The Cree speaker Pis-qua pointed at Company Factor McDonald and declared, “You told me you had sold your land for 300,000 pounds. We want that money.” But the talking went nowhere; Morris stubbornly repeated he had no authority to make major changes for them to the treaty already negotiated at Lake of the Woods, and after barely six days of meetings that would determine their lives forever, the Qu’Appelle chiefs signed Treaty Four. An excellent treaty, Morris said in congratulation,
which gave them “the full breadth and width of the Queen’s goodness”—five dollars per person per year forever.

It was now four years after Sweetgrass’s Edmonton letter, and still no commissioner had come to talk with the North Saskatchewan Plains Cree. Then, during the summer of 1875, after the SS
Northcote
had burned its way two thousand river miles from Lake Winnipeg to Edmonton and back, three Cree warriors stopped a telegraph crew hanging their endless wire in the air approaching Pitt. The leader spoke for Mista-wasis (Big Child), head of the Carlton People, who declared that the crew would not cut down one more Cree tree to hang up its wire, which would certainly frighten their animals away, until a treaty was made. The contractor “could do nothing but put all the wire, insulators, brackets, etc., in one large pile” and return to Carlton. Lieutenant-Governor Morris at Red River heard his report that same day, by telegraph, and within two weeks a messenger was driving to visit every Cree band in the Saskatchewan district and the plains. The government messenger was missionary George McDougall, who had stolen Old Man Buffalo and shipped him away.

Considering McDougall’s hairy face—not smooth like the Catholic Lacombe’s—Big Bear tried to remember why he respected him. McDougall sat in the band’s place of honour,
on the chief’s left in the council circle, with his wagonload of presents piled behind him, and spoke about the Queen who loved all her children so much, her Red as much as her White. Thousands of her Red children had already taken her hand, through her commissioners, in five great treaties, and next summer the same commissioners would come and make treaty with them too. Big Bear was thinking, If the Queen—wherever and whoever she might be—was indeed their Great Mother who cared for them so overwhelmingly, why did she not visit them? What mother never visited her children, only sent messengers with rigid instructions: this bit can be yours, but the rest is mine forever? She had paid her Hudson’s Bay Company “child” money for rights the Company didn’t have, but how could she claim the land was hers when his People knew the Creator had given it to them?

Since before the story memory of their oldest Elders, People had lived and hunted on this earth. They belonged here; it was their home, they were this earth’s family. It was impossible to give away the Creator’s gift by making “treaty,” especially with someone whom no one, not even her commissioners, had ever seen. Just because she said it was her land and, if you said it wasn’t, she would send thousands of her Young Men with guns and take it? That was no mother. That was a war chief.