Wolf Willow

  At Les Roches Percées part of A Troop, scheduled for permanent duty at Edmonton, broke off northward toward the Saskatchewan. The others, after a rest on good water in the valley of the Souris, slogged on. The rest was not enough; the eastern horses continued to fade under the hard riding and thin provender, and they stampeded at lightning and at hailstorms and at the rockets that the command sent up after dark to guide hunters back to camp. By now the riders were dismounting every hour to lead their horses, and even so they wore them out. They had swung north of the Boundary Commission road after crossing the west fork of the Souris, and were passing through country little known even to Pierre Léveillé and the other métis guides. The weather turned cooler, then turned rainy and cold, they were out of wood. Just after they crossed the Coteau of the Missouri a violent night storm blew all their tents down and soaked them to the shivering hide. They sent a party after supplies and oats down toward the Boundary Commission depot at Willow Bunch, and groaned on. On the night of August 6, after 26 exhausting miles uphill, they camped on top of the Dirt Hills and saw along the south the flames of a great prairie fire—set, the métis said, by Indians wanting to impede the march.

  Their first tapping of Boundary Commission supplies brought them 4700 pounds of pemmican and dried meat. Their second, sent down from Old Wives Lake, got them 15,000 pounds of immediate oats, and a promise of more. They met and powwowed with a camp of Sisseton Sioux on a branch of Old Wives Creek, and a little further on encountered Père Lestanc, the missionary to the métis villages and the coadjutor of Bishop Taché during the Red River troubles of 1869-70. They also strengthened themselves, immediately and for the future, by persuading Louis Léveillé, the brother of their guide, to join them with his two sons. He would be one of the most valuable men in their service all during the pacifying of the border. He said now that in the Cypress Hills, which he had just left, there were plenty of grizzly bears and some Indians, but that the outlaws and ruffians and whiskey traders, hearing of the approach of the police, had pulled out. Commissioner George Arthur French, in command of the force, ordered his men to sleep in their clothes anyway, for now along the south they saw the rolling shoulders of the Hills that were claimed by all and owned by none, and the possibility of encountering Blackfoot was enough to make them anxious when their horses were so gaunt and exhausted. In the last two or three days, nine of them had died.

  By the time they reached Swift Current Creek they could plainly see the timber in the folds of the Hills. They had plenty of ducks, they met the antelope in numbers, and for the first time they saw buffalo. The day after they ate their first hump ribs, Assistant Commissioner Macleod came in with another supply of oats, picked up this time from the Boundary Commission depot on the Frenchman below the 49th parallel. But oats could hardly bring back the lagging and ribby stock. A detachment of cripples had already been set up, following more slowly in the rear; to protect it, and impress any Indians with notions of horse-stealing, they also created a troop of twenty lancers. The only guide who knew the country, a Benton métis named Morriseau, led them on westward until they grew suspicious that he was a spy for the whiskey traders. But their confusion was only a matter of a few days long, and they were never more than a day’s journey too far north. They made their immediate destination, the junction of the Belly and Bow Rivers, on September 11. Robertson-Ross’s report had said that at the junction of the Bow and the Belly (South Saskatchewan) they would find the wicked Fort Whoop-Up. All they found, sitting their bonerack mounts and looking around with the eyes of men awakening from a laborious dream, was a little cluster of abandoned hivernant shanties. There was not a soul, Indian, white, or in between, in sight.

  Bewildered, lost, suffering in the equinoctial blizzards, and in serious danger of losing the pitiful remnant of their stock, they retreated southward to the Three Buttes, or Sweetgrass Hills, and on September 19 they fell thankfully into bivouac in good grass on a louse-infested but otherwise deserted Indian campground 849 miles and 74 days out from Dufferin.

  But they had not come out this far simply to rest, and their rest now was of the shortest. Within a few days, D and E Troops, which were scheduled to winter far back at the headquarters post that had been building at Swan River, near Fort Pelly on the Assiniboine, had started eastward again along the Boundary Commission trail. They had little enough time for traveling before winter set in, and it did not appear that they were needed here to suppress any borderers. Commissioner French, on a quick trip to Fort Benton, arranged for emergency supplies and found out where Fort Whoop-Up actually was. It was at the forks of the Bow and St. Mary’s Rivers, south of the modem town of Lethbridge. He also picked up some information on the participants in the Cypress Hills Massacre, a matter that he was bound to investigate.

  Within another few days, Assistant Commissioner Macleod had started for Whoop-Up with B, C, and F Troops and the remainder of A, and Commissioner French had started back east in a buckboard. He caught up with D and E Troops at Wild Horse Lake, seventy miles east of the Sweetgrass Hills, and they picked up the party of cripples, which had been detached at Old Wives Lake, just west of the Frenchman. And at the crossing of the Frenchman they found their first real evidence that their presence in the West was required: first a camp of twenty-nine lodges of Sioux, apparently friendly but unquestionably American Indians who presented a problem; and then in the river bottom a dead and naked métis tied to a tree. He had been tied there to die of exposure, the tree branches cut a good way up to let the sun have full play on him, and the river in plain sight, dimpling between its willows, to aggravate his thirst.

  By the first week of November, when Indian Summer had faded and chilled and the wind from the northwest began to sing through the stiff prairie grass, the Mounted Police had taken possession of most of their oceanic range. Commissioner French was back at Dufferin with two troops and part of a third, keeping an eye on the Red River area. There was part of a troop at Swan River, the badly located, badly built, badly supplied, and short-lived headquarters post which had been intended as winter quarters for half the command. Hundreds of miles to the north- west, the bulk of A Troop was snugging into winter quarters at Edmonton, and three hundred miles south of Edmonton Macleod and his two and a half troops had a good start on the building of Fort Macleod in a horseshoe bend of the Old Man River. On his way in, he had paid calls on Forts Whoop-Up and Slide-Out, which the police had come west expecting to have to squash. They were both sleeping nearly deserted under the mild October sun. From his new post, Macleod proposed to see that they stayed that way. He was completely out of communication with the outside; his nearest sources of supplies or assistance were 200 miles away at Fort Benton or Fort Shaw, both in Montana; he was in the midst of a semi-outlaw element of unknown strength, and among thousands of demoralized and suspicious Indians.

  What he did was characteristically prompt and decisive. He threw out patrols which very soon caught a whiskey trading party coming up the Whoop-Up Trail; Macleod confiscated the whiskey and threw the traders in his new log jail. Within weeks he held a conference with the Blackfoot for fear of whom the Mounties had slept in their clothes, coming past the Cypress Hills, and the conference resulted in a lasting pact of friendship with Crowfoot, greatest of the Blackfoot chiefs. Before the winter was over Macleod had not only stopped the drunken and murderous orgies that the liquor traffic had been promoting among the Blackfoot, but he had converted some of the traders, who turned out to be not so villainous as painted, to more legal pursuits. A village with three trading posts, a log billiard room, a blacksmith shop, and some other of the appurtenances of civilization grew up around Macleod’s police barracks. The whiskey traders who were not amenable to reform were fined or jailed or run out.

  Uncontrolled from 1868 to 1874, the whiskey traffic on the Whoop-Up Trail had gone a long way toward demoralizing Blood, Piegan, and Blackfoot, had brought on riots and murders, had pauperized families and made drunks out of hunters and squalid drabs out of hunters
’ wives. Left to run its course, it could hardly have avoided stirring up in the Alberta country a racial war as vengeful as the Minnesota Massacres of 1861-62, and it would as certainly have brought defeat and tribal collapse to the Blackfoot. The pattern had been repeated many times south of the Line. It was by no means out of the question that the Blackfoot might choose at any time to take the risk and wipe the little force of a hundred and fifty Mounties out. If the police had worn blue coats instead of red, the Blackfoot might well have tried. Instead of that, and within a month of his coming, Macleod made a firm peace with the confederation which had never submitted and never did submit to the United States. As combined magistrate and peace officer, he would have his patrol duties, and occasional incidents of violence or illegality to handle, but to all intents and purposes he took care of the critical Whoop-Up problem the first winter. He took care of it, one might say, simply by being there. Altogether, his was a remarkable demonstration that law, when strictly and equitably enforced, is incomparably stronger than the random or violent powers ranged against it. Rechtssicherheit proved a quicker and surer way to peace with the Blackfoot than carbines and promises.

  Thus the Whoop-Up danger dissolved when confronted. But in the other area which the police had their eye on there had been as yet no confrontation. That came when Superintendent J. M. Walsh with thirty men of B Troop rode the 160 miles eastward from Fort Macleod to the Cypress Hills, and almost precisely two years after the Cypress Hills Massacre, and within two miles of the spot where it had occurred, began to build Fort Walsh.

  9

  Capital of an Unremembered Past

  The Cypress Hills discovered that they had a history when the Old Timers’ Association of Maple Creek planted some historical markers in 1942. In coming first to Fort Walsh they acknowledged that this was the true capital of the first stage of that frontier. In the old post cemetery, where the police graves were identifiable but the civilian ones a scramble of unmarked mounds, they erected crosses, and where they knew, they placed the appropriate names: Clark, Dumont, LaBarge, Quesnelle, McKay, Chief Little Bird—white, métis, Scotch halfbreed, Indian. From the graveyard they moved on to plant a cement monument where Abe Farwell’s post had stood, and another where the wolfers and the Assiniboin had fought across Battle Creek. The foundations of Farwell’s post were still faintly discernible after nearly seventy years, but the battlefield they could locate only through the memory of an old métis who as a boy of eighteen, in 1880, had kicked up human bones while herding the police beef herd on that ground.

  Once discovered, history is not likely to be lost. But the first generation of children to grow up in a newly settled country do not ordinarily discover their history, and so they are the prime sufferers from discontinuity. If I, for instance, wanted a past to which I could be tribally and emotionally committed, I had to fall back on the American Civil War (my grandfather, whom I had never seen, had fought in it), or upon Norway (my maternal grandfather and grandmother had emigrated from it). Being a mama’s boy, I chose Norway, which made a real hash of my affiliations. All through my childhood I signed my most personal and private books and documents with the Norwegian name that my grandfather had given up on coming to America. It seems to me now an absurdity that I should have felt it necessary to go as far as the Hardanger Fjord for a sense of belonging. I might have had —and any child who grows up in the Cypress Hills now can have —Fort Walsh, and all that story of buffalo hunter, Indian and halfbreed, Mounted Policeman and wolfer, which came to its climax just here.

  The very richness of that past as I discover it now makes me irritable to have been cheated of it then. I wish I could have known it early, that it could have come to me with the smell of life about it instead of the smell of books, for there was the stuff of an epic there, and still is for anyone who knows it right—per—haps for some métis or Cree, a descendant of Gabriel Dumont or Big Bear or Wandering Spirit, who can see the last years of the Plains frontier with the distance of history and with the passion of personal loss and defeat. Often as it has been summarized, no one has properly told the story of the defeat of the Plains people, a people of many tribes but one culture. Fort Walsh saw its last years. This was where some of the last hopes flickered out and the irreconcilables gathered in hope of a last stand: Canadian Indians and American Indians, Cree and Assiniboin and Blackfoot who belonged, and Sioux and Nez Percé and Gros Ventre who fled here because of the Medicine Line and because here were the last of the buffalo. A way of life extremely rich in human satisfactions both physical and spiritual came to an end here. From their headquarters at Fort Walsh, a little over a hundred red-coated men patrolled its final agonies. A few years after it was essentially over for the Indians, the métis who lived by the same skills and were shaped to a similar habit of life broke out in their own final desperation, drawing with them some of their Indian relatives, and that could be another epic.

  All of it was legitimately mine, I walked that earth, but none of it was known to me. I wish our homes or schools had given us stereopticon slides of Fort Walsh’s old log stockade with its inward-facing buildings, its officers’ and non-coms’ quarters, its powder magazine, its blacksmith and carpenter shop, its thirty-horse stable, its kitchen, bakery, guardroom, quartermaster’s store —all of it whitewashed clean and shining in the valley under the jackpine hills. I wish I had seen the Union Jack obeying the prairie wind from its tall pole, and heard the commands of drill and parade in that compound, and seen how competition among the troops brought out the spit and polish. They made full-dress parades in red coats, white helmets, pipe-clayed buckskin breeches, glittering boots. Sometimes, when a man was immaculately prepared for competition, his comrades carried him across the parade ground for fear he would get a wrinkle or a fleck of dust on him.

  We were not informed in school that the graces of imported civilization first appeared here at Fort Walsh: amateur theatricals, pets, music, sports. Saskatchewan’s first play, Dick Turpin, was acted by constables who had been out on patrol to pick up an offender called Four Jack Bob, and who barely had time to throw Bob in the guardhouse and get into their costumes before the curtain. The pets were young antelope, baby buffalo, a Canada goose who sat on a rock and alerted the guard when men sneaked in late from a pass, and who finally made the mistake of chasing an Indian dog, which killed him. The music was provided by men from F Troop, transferred from Calgary after Fort Walsh was made the headquarters of the force in 1878. The band died a riotous death, and one oddly incongruous with the traditional discipline of the Mounties, when its members, celebrating a British victory in Afghanistan, were betrayed by Commissioner Macleod’s special issue of grog, and began beaning one another with the instruments.

  The games, like the parades, often had the ceremonial full-dress quality that is reputed to keep men British in a far land. It must have been a rather remarkable sight to see cricketers and tennis players in white flannels walking across the compound, or bare-kneed constables and sub-constables lining up for a scrum at rugger. Sometimes they enlisted métis and Indians in their games, and educated them in how to take a rough body block or a kick in the shins without going for a knife. Sometimes they went out to meet the inhabitants, and raced horses against them outside the stockade. They kept an eye on sun dances where youths who had made a vow tore themselves from boyhood into manhood by hurling themselves against rawhide thongs threaded under their breast muscles. At Christmas or New Year there might be a banquet, even a dance. Outside the walls a village of three hundred families, mainly métis, had assembled by the late 1870’s. It boasted a hotel, a restaurant, a log pool hall, a barber shop, and even a photographer’s shop, for whose presence any historian has reason to give thanks. In the valley ringed by its timbered hills there might be at any time several hundred Indians. As the buffalo grew scarcer and hunger came as an unwelcome guest in the lodges, the hundreds grew into thousands, for whatever the Indians had coming to them by treaty was distributed here, and if new treaties were co
ntemplated, this was where they would be discussed, and if non-treaty Indians wanted to beg a share of the dole, this was the place one begged in.

  They were of many tribes, and their simultaneous presence might mean trouble either because of hereditary hostilities, or because of competition for the remaining game, or even because of the never quite quiet threat that they might ally in hostility against the whites. From Fort Walsh the Mounties patrolled south as far as Kennedy’s Crossing on the Milk River, near the present hamlet of Wild Horse; and east through a chain of detachment posts to Wood Mountain. Disregarding Isaac Cowie’s burned Hudson’s Bay Company post, my home town dates from 1879, when Sitting Bull and his Teton Sioux made their winter camp on its site among the bends of the Whitemud. They were the first recorded inhabitants. That same winter, Walsh established a detachment post on the site of Cowie’s cabins. Later we saw the chimneys of the police cabins sticking up through the grass and chokecherry bushes near the other line of chimneys from the old métis village when we went berrying in Chimney Coulee. It would have offended our Fenimore-Cooper-trained sensibilities to know that they were the relics not of savagery but of law.

  Still, I wish we had known it. I wish we had heard of the coming of the Sioux, when they rode northward after annihilating Cus ter’s five troops on the Little Big Horn, a whole nation moving north, driving the buffalo before them, and with the soldiers from every army post between Canada and Texas on their track. In December, 1876, there were three thousand Ogalalas, Minnecon- jous, Hunkpapas, Sans Arcs, and Two Kettles camped near White Eagle’s hundred and fifty lodges of Canadian Sissetons on Wood Mountain, and these were not all. Sitting Bull was reported to be on the Red Water, south of the Line, with a large band of Tetons, and there was a big band of agency Sioux, Yanktons under Medicine Bear and Black Horn, at a place called Burnt Timber, below where the Frenchman crossed the 49th parallel. These agency Indians too, though technically responsible to the authorities at Fort Peck, on the Missouri, had made sounds of wanting to cross the Line.