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Wolf Willow

Wallace Stegner


  But the most immediate effect of the completion of the boundary in 1874 was upon the Indians. It turned out that the Line which should not be crossed by raiding Indians literally could not be crossed by uniformed pursuers, and generally wasn’t crossed even by the un-uniformed ones. The medicine of the line of cairns was very strong. Once it had been necessary to outrun your pursuing enemy until you were well within your own country where he did not dare follow. Now all you had to do was outrun him to the Line, and from across that magical invisible barrier you could watch him pull to a halt, balked, helpless, and furious. Sometimes raiders calmly camped, in plain sight but just out of gunshot, and jeered the cavalry foaming on the other side. The red coats of the Mounties, too, came only to the Medicine Line, like stars that rise only a certain distance into the sky. Altogether, a new and delightful rule was added to the game of raiding: there was a King‘s-X place.

  It became clear very soon that the Canadian side was safer than the American, that the Mounted Police had more authority and were generally more to be trusted and easier to get on with than the blue-coated American cavalry, and much more to be trusted than Montana sheriffs or marshals or posses. The seethe of excitement on the American side—miners and cattlemen and army detachments and all the commercial complex of steamboats and stores and wagon trains that supported these—had as yet no counterpart on the Canadian side, where in the 1870’s only a few Hudson’s Bay Company posts, the random métis villages, a mission or two, and a handful of whiskey forts like Whoop-Up and Stand-Off and Slide-Out foretold white civilization. It was inevitable that, being emptier and having a more responsible law force and no irresponsible free settlers, western Canada should become a refuge for hostiles from the States. Well before the surveying of the Line or the formation of the Mounted Police, the Sisseton and Yankton Sioux set the precedent when they took refuge in Manitoba after the 1862 Minnesota Massacres. Farther west, as similar crises came upon them, Teton and Hunkpapa and Brulé Sioux, as well as Cheyenne and Nez Percé, would all take the same road, and request the protection of the Great Mother. The establishment of the Medicine Line let them know precisely, as they already knew approximately, where they could step across and be safe, and they took pains to avoid trouble north of the border because they did not want to jeopardize their sanctuary. That combination of facts helps to explain why the Boundary Commission surveyors who encountered Sissetons on Turtle Mountain in 1873, and the Mounted Police who ran into some Tetons east of the Cypress Hills in 1874, found them extremely friendly and apparently willing to believe that both the survey and the police were meant for the protection of the Great Mother’s red children against their enemies. Four years before Black Hills gold hunters crowded the Sioux nation to desperate war, there were eight hundred lodges of Tetons camped in the Cypress Hills looking the place over as a possible new home.

  This is all to say that with the coming of the first line of law on the prairie’s face, responsibilities and problems that were not new, and not created by the line, were sharply clarified and brought within the possibility of control. The international boundary was the first indispensable legal basis of that control. The instrument, the Mounted Police, was being created at the same time as the survey, and arrived at the foot of the Rockies almost simultaneously with the completion of the border.

  The police did not at once establish themselves in the Cypress Hills, having some preliminary pressing business among the whiskey traders along the Belly River. But the Cypress Hills Massacre had been the crucial incident that created them, and they very soon found that the Hills were the place where they were most needed. The base from which they operated during the most critical years of the northwest frontier was Fort Walsh, not far from the spot where Farwell’s post had stood two years before their coming, and where Little Soldier’s burned encampment was still whitened with human bones and skulls, and where Ed Grace, bravely dead in a doubtful cause, lay lost under the ashes of Solomon’s fort. From Fort Walsh, which was headquarters for the Mounted Police from 1878 to 1882, the men in red coats watched over the death struggles of the Plains frontier.

  8

  Law in a Red Coat

  The waiting room of the customhouse in Weybum, Saskatchewan, had a yellow varnished wainscoting of tongue-and-groove boards, from above which framed portraits of men in red coats stared out across the smoky room. It was 1914 and I was five years old and we were going through the Canadian Plains equivalent of Ellis Island, preliminary to joining my father on the Whitemud River. This was my first look at Canada. I believe that for the half hour or so of our wait there I did not say a word, but was hushed as if in church and under orders to be quiet. The resolute, disciplined faces and the red coats glimmering in the shabby room filled me with awe. I can see those portraits yet; they were burned into me as if I had been photographic film.

  No other memory of that trip from Iowa to Saskatchewan sticks to me in quite this way, not even Buck Murphy, who is at least half reconstruction from family reminiscences. But these portraits I never discussed with anyone, and the memory has to be from my own direct perception. They hang in my head unaltered and undimmed after nearly half a century, static, austere, symbolic. And if I had known all the history of Canada and the United States I could not have picked out a more fitting symbol of what made the Canadian West a different West from the American.

  A long dirty train ride and a dusty jolting stage ride later, when we stumbled out of the stage at the edge of a rutted road in the construction camp of Whitemud, among overturned Fresno scrapers, lumber piles, and yellow mud puddles, the first thing I saw was another man in a red coat. He was stooping out the doorway of a shack across the road, a shack whose door bore the initials R.N.W.M.P., and he wore not only the scarlet tunic of the men in the portraits, but yellow-striped blue breeches, glistening boots, and a wide campaign hat. Holstered at his belt he had a revolver with a white lanyard, and he was altogether so gorgeous that I don’t even remember meeting my father, who must have been there to welcome us and whom I had not seen for six months. This Mounted Policeman, like the portraits in Weyburn, was instantly part of me, as ineradicable as a scar. I can see him yet in the brilliant uniform, stooping to close the shack door behind him, as if moving out, as if in symbolic relinquishment of the West he had made tame and now left to us.

  I have played with the notion, which is not out of the question, that this Mountie I saw on the moment of our arrival was the one who later shot Buck Murphy off a buckboard in the Shaunavon street, and I have contrived idle little comic scenes reminiscent of “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” in which the policeman and his troublemaking opponent confront each other, the armed roughneck dismounting from the stage encumbered by two small children and a lady to whom he pays a deferential and crippling attention. But these are only curlicues that the fancy makes, doodling around something more important. The important thing is the instant, compelling impressiveness of this man in the scarlet tunic. I believe I know, having felt it, the truest reason why the slim force of Mounted Police was so spectacularly successful, why its esprit de corps was so high and its prestige so great. I think I know how Law must have looked to Sioux and Blackfoot when the column of red coats rode westward in the summer of 1874.

  Never was the dignity of the uniform more carefully cultivated, and rarely has the ceremonial quality of impartial law and order been more dramatically exploited. Since the middle of the 18th century the red coat of the British dragoons had meant, to Indian minds, a force that was non- and sometimes anti-American. The contrast was triply effective now that the blue of the American cavalry had become an abomination to the Plains hostiles. One of the most visible aspects of the international boundary was that it was a color line: blue below, red above, blue for treachery and unkept promises, red for protection and the straight tongue. That is not quite the way a scrupulous historian would report it, for if Canada had been settled first, and the American West had remained empty, the situation might well have been reversed.
Certainly Canada had its own difficulties with the tribes when the buffalo disappeared and the crisis came on; and though its treaty system was better considered and its treaties better kept than the American, still Canada in red coats hunted down its hostiles in 1885 just as the blue-coated Long Knives had used to do. But given the historical context, red meant to an Indian in the 1870’s friendship and protection, and it is to the honor of an almost over-publicized force that having dramatized in scarlet the righteousness of the law it represented, it lived up to the dramatization.

  Lt. W. F. Butler, F.R.G.S., was an Irish officer who came west to Red River on a secret mission while Wolseley’s expedition to suppress the métis was cutting its way through swamps and forests along the Dawson Route in the spring of 1870. Butler had his adventures, escaped a métis trap by jumping off the steamer International at the mouth of the Assiniboine, eluded pursuit until Riel called off the hunt and requested him to come in for a conference, made his investigation of the situation at Fort Garry, and finally delivered his report, along with two water-soaked bags of Her Majesty’s mail, to Col. Wolseley at the mouth of the Winnipeg River on August 18. Six days later Wolseley marched into Fort Garry to find the métis leaders flown, and Lt. Butler was temporarily out of a job. By October he had another: on the 24th of that month, carrying a commission as the first Justice of the Peace for Rupert’s Land and the North-West, and with two similar commissions to be conferred upon men out along the Saskatchewan, he set out with a métis guide to look into the state of the Indian tribes and the condition of law and order in the West.

  Butler’s journey, though by no means the first, was as rugged as any, for he made most of it in the dead of winter. It took him clear to British Columbia and back again, and the book he made of his wanderings is one of the best. Being a sort of magistrate-in-transit, he was concerned primarily with the trading posts and the beginning settlements, and so he followed the route of the fur trade along the Saskatchewan instead of cutting across through new territory, and he never came within two hundred miles of the Cypress Hills, which at the time of his journey had been visited only by Father Lestanc, Captain Palliser, and the métis winterers. He witnessed plenty of lawlessness, but he never got into the border region where it was most uncontrolled, the Blackfoot country recently invaded by the whiskey traders from Fort Benton—a town which the historian John Peter Turner characterizes in somewhat Canadian terms as being inhabited mainly by “frontier heroes, fortune-hunting outcasts of both sexes, expungers of the law, side-armed sheriffs, desperadoes, murderers, and degenerates.” Granting that the Fort Benton population was not quite that bad, there was plenty of justification for the recommendations Butler made for the establishment of civil law to replace the by now officially abdicated power of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

  Butler’s report, dated from Red River in March, 1871, shortly after his return, closely follows suggestions that Sir John MacDonald had made in April of the year before, and anticipates suggestions that another investigator, Col. P. Robertson-Ross of the Canadian Militia, would make a year later. It contained three specific recommendations: 1) The appointment of a Civil Magistrate or Commissioner, after the model established in Ireland and India, who would reside on the upper Saskatchewan and make semi-annual tours of his territory; 2) the establishment of two government stations, one near Edmonton and one below Fort Carlton, and the extinction of the Indian title so that both banks of the river from Edmonton to Victoria, a distance of 80 miles, would be opened for settlement; and 3) the organization of “a well-equipped force of from 100 to 150 men, one-third to be mounted, specially recruited and engaged for service in the Saskatchewan; enlisting for two or three years’ service, and at the expiration of that period to become military settlers, receiving grants of land, but still remaining a reserve force should their services be required.”

  This modest proposal—fantastically modest considering that the border from Lake of the Woods to the Rockies was 900 miles long, and that the region to be pacified was 300,000 square miles in extent and contained perhaps 30,000 of the most warlike Indians on the continent in addition to some of the toughest white border men—still seemed extravagant to many Canadians unused to the problems of an expanding continental hegemony. The implementing of Butler’s suggestions took a little time, but not an excessive amount, for events in the West moved too fast for politicians to delay action. British Columbia entered the Canadian federation two months after Butler wrote his report, and the terms of its coming in made immediate and pressing the need for a transcontinental rail link. It was not alone Upper and Lower Canada, Quebec and Ontario, with their fatal hereditary schism, that confronted Ottawa lawmakers now, but two thirds of a tremendous continent in all stages of occupation: the settled East, then hundreds of miles of forest wilderness threaded only by canoe tracks and the Dawson Road, then the Red River settlements, then the vast emptiness of the Plains, then the Rockies, and then the remote Pacific province.

  While Butler’s report was being digested, Col. Robertson-Ross was on a reconnaissance that confirmed it. Robertson-Ross recommended troops—at least a regiment of 550 mounted riflemen, a customhouse on the Belly River to control the whiskey traders, and a chain of seven army posts for the protection of those who would be building the Pacific Railway. He was strong in his insistence that their coats be scarlet, for Indians who had seen Wolseley’s militia at Fort Garry had asked him suspiciously who were the soldiers in the dark clothes. In their experience, the friendly ones wore red.

  For the pacification of Rupert’s Land and the North-West, added to Canada by Imperial proclamation on July 15, 1870, and the source of multiplying troubles from the moment the transfer began to be discussed, Sir John Macdonald in April, 1873, gave notice to Commons of a police bill based on the recommendations of Butler and Robertson-Ross, but with the numbers compromised at 300. The bill was in debate when word came eastward, roundabout through the United States, of the bloody skirmish in the Cypress Hills. Popular sentiment and anti-American hysteria swept the bill through Parliament, though in deference to American anxieties about a Canadian armed force along the border, Sir John scratched out the words “Mounted Rifles” and substituted “Mounted Police.” That was on May 23, 1873, when the smell of human carrion still poisoned the air on Battle Creek, and when the Joint Boundary Commission, having closed the link between Lake of the Woods and the Red River, was assembling at Fort Dufferin, on the west bank of the Red, to start its 800-mile traverse across the Plains.

  There are several histories of the Royal North-West Mounted Police; this is not the place for another. Their beginnings may be put in briefest summary. Macdonald’s order in council organizing the first three troops of fifty men each came at the end of August (the three troops were later doubled). The first three were sworn in at Fort Garry on November 3, and all six troops had gathered at Fort Dufferin, the Boundary Commission’s base, by June 19, 1874. On July 8 they started, a spectacular cavalcade two miles long led by A Troop on dark bay horses, followed by B Troop on dark browns, C Troop on chestnuts, D Troop on grays and buckskins, E Troop on blacks, and F Troop on bright bays. They went, in spite of Sir John Macdonald’s desire to have a force with as little “gold lace, fuss and feathers, as possible,” with the pomp and circumstance at which the British have few equals: a stream of scarlet tunics, white helmets, white dragoon gauntlets, gleaming metal, polished leather, 275 picked officers and men on picked horses, the most brilliant procession that ever crossed those yellowing plains. Behind them lumbered the great freight wagons, 73 of them, and behind those 114 squealing Red River carts with métis drivers, and two g-pounder field guns, and two brass mortars, and field kitchens, and portable forges, and mowing machines for making hay en route, and nearly a hundred cattle destined for slaughter before they reached the buffalo herds.

  Out across the sun-beaten plains past the dying sloughs, through the clouds of mosquitoes and horseflies, into hailstorms of locusts, they rode like the Six Hundred at Balaklava.
Much of the prairie had already been swept by fires, and forage was scarce. They had their trials from the first. On the second day out, the commander of F Troop, Inspector Theodore Richer, was sent back to Dufferin under arrest for gross insubordination. On Pembina Mountain they had word of white men murdered by Sioux five miles south. Their gallant procession sagged and drooped and strung out, the oxen were slow, the eastern horses refused the prairie water and grew weak on prairie grass. Some died, some were left behind, the heat was stifling though the wind blew hard, the air was thick with dust. Many of the men were sick with diarrhea. Before they had been out two weeks their track began to be marked every day by broken-down carts and wagons and by dead or abandoned animals. The sky was hot brass, the alkali dust burned in every sweaty crevice of the skin.