A few feet of altitude will do as well as the presence or absence of cobalt in the soil. It is a fact that Denmark’s highest hill, about 600 feet high, is called Himmelberg, Heaven Mountain, a name that suggests the people near it must have been strongly influenced by it, though the mountain-bred Norwegians scorn it as a hole in the ground. In Saskatchewan, too, a little height can give distinction. The Cypress Hills, low as they are, are the highest point in Canada between Labrador and the Rockies. Everything about them is special, and everything special about them is explained by the accident of elevation. Their topography, their climate, their plants and animals, their peculiar geographical and zoological lags and survivals, even their human history, are what they are because this uplift has been pushed a thousand to fifteen hundred feet above the plains that apron it. The highest point is at Head of the Mountain, over in Alberta, at 4800 feet; the average of the North Bench, the long narrow plain along the summit, is a little under 4000. The Plains southward are about 3000, those to the north slightly lower. The difference of a thousand feet is at that latitude enough to make the Hills a different world.
If political boundaries were established by topography and logic rather than by expedient and compromise, the North Bench would carry the international boundary, and the lower fifty miles of Saskatchewan would be politically what they are geographically—an uninterrupted part of the American High Plains, separated by the Cypress Hills from Prince Rupert’s Land proper, which Charles II’s grant of 1670 defined as all the country draining into Hudson Bay.
But the Hills are more than the northern edge of the Missouri watershed. Geologically they are an anomaly, and display in their higher strata rocks that were elsewhere planed away by the ice. Biologically they preserve Rocky Mountain plants and animals far out into the Plains, and southern species far into the north. Wild West longer than anywhere else, last home of buffalo and grizzlies, last sanctuary for the Plains hostiles, last survival of the open-range cattle industry, booby prize in a belated homestead rush, this country saved each stage of the Plains frontier long past its appointed time, and carried 19th-century patterns of culture well into the 20th. All because the Hills are a thousand feet higher than the rest of Saskatchewan.
Being hills, and having been hills since late Eocene or early Oligocene times, they have diverted around themselves various kinds of drainage, beginning with the ice.
In glacial times the climate here was wet and not extraordinarily cold. The ice which blanketed the northern Plains was formed even farther north. It flowed around the Hills and crossed them in what is now called the Gap, where Oxarart Creek comes down to join the Frenchman, but it never entirely covered them. An island eighty or ninety miles square stuck up above the ice sheet, diverted and split the slow flow from the north, and became an Ararat.
Before the ice sheet, many of the flowers, shrubs, and trees that we know as characteristically Rocky Mountain species must have stretched more or less uninterruptedly eastward. The ice plowed between the high points of the mountains and the Cypress Hills and scraped bare a two-hundred-mile interval. But along the ridge of the Hills, spruce and pine and aspen and creeping cedar, wolf willow and mountain orchids, were left as a biological island. They are still there, preserved by their altitude in the first instance and by greater rainfall and a cooler climate since. Possessing wood and water, the Hills made a home for the fur-bearing woods animals, including beaver, and for woods game animals such as elk and bear, and ultimately for the men who pursued the woodland way of life in contradistinction to the Plains life based on the buffalo. This was a woodland biome within the vast Great Plains biome.
And full of survivors of various kinds. To the bench, as the ice came down, the creatures of the country retreated for refuge, stayed treed on the plateau while the ice groaned and ground around the flanks, and crept down again after the ice retreated. That is one explanation, though not necessarily the correct one, why there are now in the Saskatchewan-Montana country scorpions whose nearest relatives are hundreds of miles to the southwest, and homed toads, solpugids, and hog-nosed vipers with no parallels nearer than six hundred miles away in Utah and Nevada.
As if trying to be a laboratory of the unbroken life history of the region, the Hills saved even their fossils when most of the High Plains lost them. In the formations near the summit of the bench lie the petrified bones of saber-toothed cats, camels, titanotheres each of whose great chopping teeth was nearly as big as a teacup, and among them impressions of cinnamon and walnut and redwood leaves, fossilized fruit resembling figs, something like coconuts. These all lie in the Cypress Hills formation of the Oligocene. Two layers below, in the Frenchman formation of the Cretaceous, streams and run-off coulees have exposed the Age of Reptiles, and fossils of Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops record another ancient ecology, meat-eater and grass-eater, hunter and hunted.
Along this wooded, coulee-cut plateau the clouds scrape their bottoms and give up rain. An average of four inches more falls here than falls on the surrounding arid Plains—the luck of elevation, and out of elevation a special economy. The coulees of the high ground have always been an orchard of wild fruit—choice-cherries, pin cherries, saskatoons, high bush cranberries, raspberries, gooseberries, buffalo berries, currants both red and black. In the days before settlement the berry patches were a happy hunting ground for bears; and the antelope and on occasion the buffalo, chased in by drouth, fires, or hunters from the Plains, found the benches a perennial hayfield, while the wooded coulees provided winter shelter in the blizzards that came down straight and undeflected from the Pole.
The elevation which created this game sanctuary with its amenities of rainfall, living streams, grass, shelter, berries, and timber served also, partly by a historical freak and partly because it was a visible barrier across otherwise characterless country, to mark a boundary between tribes and kinds of men. It lay between the Canadian fur trade along the Saskatchewan and the American fur trade on the Missouri. It likewise lay between the Cree and Assiniboin pressing west and south from the routes of that trade, and the Piegan, Blood, and Blackfoot of the Blackfoot Confederacy raiding south and east from the foot of the Rockies. Before too long, as the drama of the Plains Indians worked toward its climax, it would be looked upon as a sanctuary by Sioux, Crow, Gros Ventre, and Nez Percé falling back northward before American cavalry, miners, and especially the hide hunters who were systematically destroying the buffalo. Humanity, like the ice and the water, flowed around the edges of this uplift. Technically, in the view of Alexander Henry and others of the fur traders, it was Assiniboin country. Actually it was No Man’s Land.
The Cypress Hills came into the knowledge of English topographers in 1859, when Captain John Palliser reported to the Royal Geographical Society on the progress of his British North American Exploring Expedition of 1857-58. But Palliser and his associates were much more interested in passes through the Canadian Rockies than in the arid country that much later would become known as “Palliser’s Triangle,” which he held to be—with some justice—unfit for settlement. There is only one mention of the Hills: “Although my journey to the western extremity of the boundary line was necessarily a rapid one, I determined on a visit to the ‘Cypress Hills.’ I was anxious to see this part of the country, in consequence of having heard many reports of its wonderful timber and fine rich soil. I found great tracts of splendid timber wasted by fire; there still remain, however, many valuable pines, and the land is rich, and capable of producing several grain crops in succession without manure.”
That is all, from Palliser’s quick look in 1858. Henry Youle Hind, who conducted the Canadian Red River Exploring Expedition of 1857 and the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition of 1858, did not visit the Hills nor approach near them, though his map, published in 1860, puts them by name in approximately their correct place. The map published with Captain Butler’s Great Lone Land in 1873 vaguely marks but does not name them, perhaps because Butler too, in his strenuous and ofte
n heroic journeyings, missed them by several hundred miles. To most of the Hudson’s Bay and Northwest Company traders, as to the mapmakers, they remained for a long time hardly more exact than a rumor, for the fur trade flowed far to the north along the North Saskatchewan, where the Plains and the Northern Woodlands met, and the beaver were plentiful and the Indians interested in hunting them.
Says Isaac Cowie, the first Hudson’s Bay trader to come into them, “As far back as the memory and traditions of the Crees then living extended, these Cypress Hills-‘me-nach-tah-kak’ in Cree—had been neutral ground between many warring tribes, south of the now marked international boundary, as well as the Crees and Blackfeet and their friends. No Indian for hunting purposes ever set foot on those hills, whose wooded coulees and ravines became the undisturbed haunt of all kinds of game, and especially abounded in grizzly bears and the beautifully antlered and magnificent was-cay-sou, known variously by the English as red deer and elk. Only wary and watchful war parties of any tribe ever visited the hills, and so dangerous was it to camp in them that it was customary for such parties to put up barricades about the spots on which they stayed overnight.”
That was standard opinion in 1871, and Cowie’s experiences during his one winter in the Hills amply corroborated everything the Cree had told him, but that story belongs in a later chapter.
3
Horse and Gun
Indians were a part of our boyhood fantasy, but our image of them was as mixed as our image of most things. Our Indians certainly did not come from life, and we were a little early to get them from the movies. We got them from books, and we did not discriminate among the books from which we got them.
One of our principal sources was Fenimore Cooper, and no Mark Twain had as yet broken in upon us with raucous horse laughs to destroy our faith in Cooper’s delicate arts of the forest. We were masters of the lore of the broken twig; we trod the willow bottoms silently, single file, pigeon-toed, like Tuscaroras or Mohicans. Much of our Indian play demonstrated the stubborn persistence of inherited notions, for the Indians we played came mainly out of novels written eighty years before and two thousand miles away, out of the French and Indian wars, out of the darkness of the deep deciduous forests, out of the Noble Savage sentimentalities of Chateaubriand and Thomas Campbell. They came more or less from where our unnaturalized history came from, where our poetry and geography came from—where even our prejudices came from, including the prejudices against real Indians that lay so unconformably upon our literary and sentimental attitudes.
Real Indians we saw perhaps once a year, when a family or two in a rickety democrat wagon came down from somewhere and camped for a few days in the river brush. Probably they were Cree; undoubtedly they came from some reservation, though it never occurred to us to inquire where it was; probably they were off the reservation without permission. We responded to them as to an invasion or a gypsy visitation. Our fathers sent us out to gather up every tool that had been left lying around, they double padlocked chickencoops and sheds, they imposed a harsh curfew that haled us in from midsummer twilight unsatisfied and complaining. Their behavior was an explicit reflection of local attitude: that an Indian was a thieving, treacherous, lousy, unreliable, gut-eating vagabond, and that if anything a halfbreed was worse. Most of the townspeople were immigrants from sections of the United States and Canada where Indians were part of a lurid past; they had had hardly more personal contact with them than had the Scandinavians and the Englishmen among us, but they brought fully developed prejudices with them which we inherited without question or thought.
I can remember packs of us hanging wary as coyotes, just out of what we imagined was gunshot, around Indian camps, spying on the dark children, the shapeless women, the heavy-featured men with braids and (we felt) a shiftless mixture of white and Indian clothes. Their ponies were scrawny broomtails and their dogs gaunt and noisy. We watched the whole outfit as we would have watched ugly and perhaps dangerous animals from a blind. The moment an adult emerged from one of the brush shanties we edged back, prepared to scatter. Sometimes we yelled catcalls in their direction, half in derision and half speculatively, to see what would happen. Nothing ever did. With what I now recognize was either helplessness or dignity they ignored us, and any temptation we might have had to go on into the camps and hobnob with their kids was discouraged by the dogs, by our mothers’ warnings, and by the smells. We told ourselves we could smell one of those camps a mile away with a clothespin on our noses. When they talked the butcher out of the entrails of a slaughtered beef we knew we could, for they hung their shanties with the red and white guts to dry them in the sun.
Our inherited, irrelevant, ineradicable Indian lore was not modified in the slightest, any more than our humanity was aroused, by these contacts with the real demoralized Cree. We did not pause to reflect that if any Indians had made romantic signal smokes from the chimneys on Chimney Coulee, they would have been the grandfathers, or the mortal enemies of the grandfathers, of these people drying guts down in the western bend. Even the elements of our reading which might have tended to correct or amplify or bring distinctions into our view of Indian life remained separate and encysted. Somehow, when we read Zane Grey, it was The Spirit of the Border, with its skulking and bloody war in the hardwood forests of Pennsylvania and Ohio, that took our imaginations. That book reinforced our prefabricated notions; other Zane Grey books, including those about the Southwest, somehow entertained us without persuading us that they reflected anything real, and without inciting our imitation.
About the historical Indians of our own region we were not, actually, totally ignorant. We read, and passed eagerly from family to family, The American Boy, and in the years between 1914 and 1919 The American Boy ran a series of stories by James Wil lard Schulz, an ex-whiskey trader who had lived with the Blackfoot for a considerable time from the 1870’s on, and who spoke with some authority on the life of the northern Plains tribes. We could have answered fairly detailed questions on Blackfoot costume, weapons, beliefs, habits in war and hunting and horse thievery. We could have counted coup on an enemy without too much violating the Blackfoot proprieties, and we would have felt ourselves competent to lead a war party. But what we read did not take root in our play or, really, in our understanding, because we had no comprehension that this Indian lore was local to us. We did not adapt it to ourselves; it occurred to none of us that just such Blackfoot war parties as Schulz wrote of had many times forded the Whitemud, perhaps at the shallows just below the Lazy-S ranch house, and sneaked up the Swift River hill to fall upon an enemy band berrying or hunting or gathering spruce gum in Chimney Coulee.
We might have read, and perhaps did, stories in which Schulz brought the warfare of the Plains to our very doorstep. In his autobiographical My Life as an Indian, for example, there is a story told by Rising Wolf:
... The Gros Ventre—then at war with the Blackfeet tribes—concluded a treaty with the Crows, and there was a great gathering of them all on the lower Milk River, to celebrate the event. A party of young Gros Ventres returning from a raid against the Cree brought word that they had seen the Piegan camp in the Divide—, or, as the whites called them,—Cypress Hills. This was great news ... What could the Piegans do against their combined forces? Nothing. They would kill off the men, capture the women, seize the rich and varied property of the camp. So sure were they of success, that they had their women accompany them to sort out and care for the prospective plunder.
From a distant butte the war party had seen the Piegan camp, but had not discovered that just over a hill to the west of it, not half a mile further, the Bloods were encamped in force, some five thousand of them, or in all about one thousand fighting men ... One morning the Crows and Gros Ventres came trailing leisurely over the Plain toward the Piegan camp all decked out in their war costumes, the plumes of their war bonnets and the eagle fringe of their shields fluttering gaily in the wind. And with them came their women happily chattering, already rejoicing over the vas
t store of plunder they were going to possess that day. An early hunter from the Piegan camp, going with his woman after some meat he had killed the previous day, discovered the enemy while they were still a mile and more away, and hurried back to give the alarm, sending one of his women on to call out the Bloods. There was a great rush for horses, for weapons; some even managed to put on a war shirt or war bonnet. Luckily it was early in the morning and most of the horse herds, having been driven in to water, were feeding nearby. If a man did not at once see his own band, he roped and mounted the first good animal he came to. And thus it happened that when the attacking party came tearing over the little rise of ground just east of the camp they were met by such an overwhelming force of determined and well-mounted men that they turned and fled, firing but few shots. They were utterly panic-stricken; their only thought was to escape. Better mounted than their women, they left these defenseless ones to the mercy of the enemy, seeking only to escape themselves.
From the point of meeting a fearful slaughter began. Big Lake, Little Dog, Three Suns, and other chiefs kept shouting to their men to spare the women, but a few were killed before they could make their commands known. There was no mercy shown to the fleeing men, however; they were overtaken and shot, or brained with war clubs. So sudden had been the call that many men had found no time to select a swift horse, mounting anything they could rope, and these soon dropped out of the race; but others kept on and on, mile after mile, killing all the men they overtook until their horses could run no more and their clubarms were well-nigh paralyzed from striking so long and frequently. Few of the fleeing party made any resistance whatever, never turned to look backward, but bent forward in the saddle and plied the quirt until they were shot or clubbed from their seats. For miles the trail was strewn with the dead and dying, through which fled their women, shrieking with terror ... “Let them go,” cried Big Lake, laughing. “Let them gol We will do as did the Old Man with the rabbits, leave a few for to breed so that their kind may not become wholly extinct ”