That, one would think, was war as bloody and colorful as any in The Last of the Mohicans, and from the hints of the terrain it must have happened at the east end of the Hills, within a few miles of our home. Did it affect us? Perhaps our lives, not in the least our imaginations. We lived in the very middle of what had been for generations a bloody Indian battleground and what in the late ‘70’s and ’80’s became the refuge of the last Plains hostiles. Big Bear, Wandering Spirit, Poundmaker, and Piapot hunted those coulees; Sitting Bull and his Sioux spent five years of exile between the Hills and Wood Mountain after the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, informed by the grapevine that tells hunted animals where they are safe, was headed for the same country with his heroic and battered band when General Nelson A. Miles cornered him in the Bearpaws.
It would all have been news to us. We knew as little of our intense and recent past as if it had been a geological stratum hidden underground. On some frontiers such as Texas, local history and local pride were nurtured together. On ours there was an un crossable discontinuity. Yet the frontier processes demonstrated by Schulz’s Blackfoot, the very Plains Indian culture that limped to its end in Wood Mountain and the Cypress Hills, fulfilled a pattern of which it would have paid us to be aware. The white man literally created the culture of the Plains Indians by bringing them the horse and the gun; and just as surely, by conquest, disease, trade rum, and the destruction of the buffalo, he doomed what he had created.
One indispensable part of the typical nomadic Plains culture began when the first Apache, probably in New Mexico and probably around the year 1630, laid hands on the first escaped Spanish horse. Another part, just as indispensable, became inevitable in 1668, when the ship Nonsuch anchored at the mouth of the Rupert River, in James Bay, and Médart Chouart Groseilliers built the first post for the Governor and Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay. He called the post first for King Charles; it was later known as Rupert’s House. At it and at the later York Factory post, the Cree traded beaver for guns; and as Company middlemen charged with going into the wilderness and bringing back the furs, they spread the need of the gun, if not its possession, all along the canoe routes and out into the Plains and eventually clear into the Mackenzie Basin. But always jealously and penuriously, always in the awareness that any Cree who traded a gun to a rival tribe reduced Cree dominance. Not until the aggressive North-West Company challenged Hudson’s Bay Company power by sending white traders into the backlands did a hunter from any of the western tribes have much chance of laying his hands on a musket or on the powder and lead to feed it.
Horse and gun thus moved toward one another from sources almost as remote as the continent could provide. In the Southwest the Spanish controlled the Indian trade so rigidly that few guns fell into Indian hands. But horses were another matter. By war, theft, escape, and trade, the horse spread northward through the Plains until by the middle of the 18th century only the north ernmost tribes were still unmounted. The Cree, made powerful by their guns and by Company favor, were still pedestrian; so were the Piegans, Bloods, and Blackfoot of the Blackfoot Confederacy, at that time allies of the Cree. Sometime about 1736-40, according to a story told to Alexander Henry the Younger by a Cree-Blackfoot named Saukamappee, the Blackfoot and their allies for the first time succeeded in defeating the aggressive mounted Snake to the south. The reason was not an equality in horses, but a handful of Cree guns among the Blackfoot bows and warclubs.
That was a significant battle, a turning point. By the second decade of the 19th century the Blackfoot Confederacy had profited from the Hudson’s Bay-Nor‘westers rivalry to acquire an adequate supply of guns and ammunition. It had also assimilated the horse and the entire military complex that came with it, even to quilted leather armor jackets and shields that had been adapted many miles, many years, and many tribes back from the equipment of Spanish cavalrymen.
The result was double. The previously dominant Snake, the first of the northerly tribes to acquire the horse, now found themselves pinched between the new Blackfoot power on the north and the united mountain tribes, by that time likewise mounted and armed with guns. And the Blackfoot, as they became a major power, began to have differences with the Cree and Assiniboin who had once been their allies against the Snake. A generation after Lewis and Clark passed through the southern borders of their range, the Blackfoot were at war or on bad terms with nearly everybody: with Snake, Gros Ventre, Sioux, Crow, Nez Percé, Salish, and Assiniboin, with both Plains and Woodland Cree, and with at least the American whites. With the coming of the full horse-and-gun culture to the high northern Plains, the excessive advantage that one tribe could achieve by means of either horse or gun was largely nullified. Every tribe had won and could hold a share of the buffalo country. An approximate equality of arms and mobility, plus a balance of power achieved by alliance, brought the shock waves that had begun two centuries before finally jarring to a halt. The stalemate was broken by incessant raiding, and it would last only so long as the buffalo lasted—that is, uneasily, for about a generation and a half. And the place where horse and gun came together, the place where the various forces most clearly canceled one another, was the Cypress Hills, the place truly spoken of by the Gros Ventre as “the divide.”
No traders had ever properly “occupied” the Blackfoot country between the Cypress Hills and the Rockies. The North-West Company had established Chesterfield House and Old Bow Fort, but found them too hard to hold; they were abandoned after the North-West-Hudson’s Bay merger in 1821. Their closing left the Blackfoot with no fixed trading posts. They had to trade either at Forts Benton, Brule, or Lewis on the Missouri, or at Edmonton or Rocky Mountain House far to the north. Not until the 1860’s did free traders, mainly from the Fort Benton area, “open” the Blackfoot country. Throughout the first half of the century, rich in horses and powerful in numbers and fighting qualities, the Blackfoot braced back upon the Rocky Mountains and from their heartland raided a long way, mainly east and south. From the east, both Plains and Woodland Cree, stanch friends of the Company that had made them great, pressed with increasing insistence as the buffalo were cleared from the eastern Plains. Along with them came their allies the Assiniboin and a whole new tribe of French-Indian halfbreeds, the métis. From the south, taking long chances and dealing primarily in the cut alcohol that made murderous the Blackfoot whom Henday and Cocking in the 18th century had found kindly and well disposed, came the free traders of the Missouri.
The forces were powerful enough sooner or later to overrun any divide, but for a long time power flowed around the flanks of the Cypress Hills as once ice had. But once history touched the hills, once the stalemate was broken, the stages of the Plains frontier would go through them like fire through prairie grass. As late as 1868, when the American frontier was in its very last phase, it had hardly begun here. The fur trade, already by that year a fading memory south of the border, was just reaching out to this remote tumble of high land. The tribes lay in precarious balance. The métis who with luck might have made a mixed-blood nation, a sort of Mexico, in the Canadian West, had not yet made their first rebellious move on the Red River, and their hivernant skirmishers had barely felt their way into the dangerous divide.
Within little more than a decade, fur traders, métis, and Indians would find their whole world collapsing under them, the buffalo would be all but gone, and law and order in a red coat would be patrolling the coulees where a few years before hardly any man, red or white or halfway between, would have dared go.
4
Half World: the Métis
To give us any understanding of how our remote place of home was brought within the bounds of the semi-civilized world, someone would have had to tell us about the métis, the “Frenchmen” from whom our river took one of its names. No one ever did. Our education, that is, did not perform its proper function of giving us distance and understanding by focusing on our life from outside. Instead, it focused on the outside f
rom inside, and we never so much as heard the word métis. Nevertheless there were two kinds of them around us. Some of the “Indians” who camped in the willows undoubtedly bore names such as LaBarge, Quesnelle, or Laveillé. And some of the children I played with during our earliest years in the town, boys whom I knew, and who knew themselves, as Henry and Midge and Jewell, had been christened Henri and Michel and Jules. No serious prejudice affected them. Certainly we ourselves made no distinctions, and our mothers did not forbid or discourage our playing with those dark and lank-haired and toughly competent kids: they only combed us out somewhat fiercely with fine-combs when we came inside. But to all intents and purposes the families of Henri and Michel and Jules had gone white, as the campers in the west bend had gone Indian. As a race, a tribe, a possibility, the métis had ceased to exist.
They might have developed into a people and a nation, with a life and land of their own. Or they might, if American annexation ists had had their way, have become a vast northern extension of the United States. There was a time in 1869 and 1870 when a sober gambler betting on eventual annexation of western Canada by the United States would not have demanded very long odds. The cards fell otherwise. What turned up for the halfbreeds was neither independence nor domination from the south, but domination from the east. The infant Dominion of Canada, whose first Parliament did not meet until November 7, 1867, in the next twenty years generated enough force to take over and hold Rupert’s Land and the North-West Territories, bring British Columbia and Prince Edward Island into the federation, and drive a railroad from sea to sea and so consolidate itself as a continental nation. In doing so, it suppressed the métis twice: once in 1870, on the Red River, and again in 1885, on the North Saskatchewan. In effect, Sir John Macdonald, Col. Garnet Wolseley, the Royal North-West Mounted Police, and the Canadian militia completed what General Wolfe had died for on the Plains of Abraham. The métis, allied to the French by faith and language, and to the Indians by the character of their economic and social life, were double losers, for they lost not only their chance of independence but their chance of identity. Like the Plains Indian culture, the métis were a white creation; ethnically and culturally they were the product of the meeting of white and Indian, the spark struck out by the contact between industrial civilization and the stone age. And like the Plains culture, they were obliterated eventually by what had made them.
In March, 1869, Hudson’s Bay Company and Canadian delegates agreed on the terms of the transfer of Rupert’s Land to Canada. Canadian authority would take over when the pact had been formally signed and the Queen had approved the transfer in a royal proclamation. Sir John Macdonald hoped the proclamation would come by December 1, so that Canada could take over control from the company. But in July William MacDougall, as Minister of Public Works, ordered Col. John Stoughton Dennis to “proceed without delay to Fort Garry, Red River, for the purpose ... of selecting the most suitable localities for the survey of townships for immediate settlement ... The American system of survey is that which appears best suited to the country, except as to the area of the section. The first emigrants, and the most desirable, will probably go from Canada, and it will therefore be advisable to offer them lots of a size to which they have become accustomed. This will require you to make the section 800 acres instead of 640, as on the American plan.”
There were a number of things wrong with those orders. For one thing, Rupert’s Land had not yet been transferred, and was still in effect a foreign country where no Canadian surveyor had any business. For another, MacDougall was both arrogant and politically obtuse in assuming that the “most desirable” settlers would come from Canada. By Canada he meant Ontario, clearly, since only in Ontario had settlers become accustomed to the rectangular surveys he described. And Ontario was strongly Protestant and Anglo-Saxon. In giving preference to settlers of that persuasion, MacDougall was gratuitously insulting the people already resident in the Red River settlements, of whom there were twelve thousand and of whom only about fifteen hundred were of unmixed white blood. MacDougall’s orders, that is, derived from the same attitude of contempt that had moved Colin Robertson to refer to the métis as “blacks,” and helped bring on the Seven Oaks Massacre in 1816, when the métis temporarily drove Lord Selkirk’s farmers from the Red River settlements.
Almost as exasperating as MacDougall’s arrogance was his disregard of the rights of the existing settlers. The rectangular surveys he ordered would cut across the little farms that the métis had established on the Assiniboine, the Red, and the other rivers: long strip farms, each with a frontage on the river which gave not only a canoe landing but an access to water for the irrigation of gardens. The strips ran far back and were combined in common pastures like the ejidos of Spanish New Mexico, and on these pastures the métis’ stock could run freely while people were off on the annual hunts. That is to say, the processes of adaptation to Plains life and to the uncertain rainfall had led the métis to an economy not unlike that of the Apache after the acquisition of the horse. They were half horticultural, half nomadic, and their system of land division was appropriate to their life. As a matter of fact, it was far better adapted to the arid and semi-arid Plains than the rectangular surveys were, but nobody in Canada or the United States understood that. North Americans would not understand the inadequacy of the rectangular surveys to arid land until deep in the 20th century, and the Canadian government was so far from understanding the reasons for the métis’ objections that it imposed the same rigid grid on them again in 1885, and brought on a second rebellion.
That second one came later, after the Dominion had consolidated its power, and it was as desperate for the métis as for the Cree of Big Bear and Wandering Spirit who joined them. But the one in 1869 had a chance. When MacDougall, newly appointed Governor of the North-West Territories, arrived at the international border at Pembina, he was met by a métis note forbidding him to cross. His lieutenants were turned back and his orders disregarded, and the so-called “Red River Rebellion” was on.
It was a strange rebellion, for though it protested Canadian political action, Canada had as yet no jurisdiction in Rupert’s Land. The Hudson’s Bay Company, which did, was not a government, and many of its employees were sympathetic to the métis. An nexationists and Fenians below the border watched with a wolfish and acquisitive gleam in their eyes as Louis Riel, a métis educated as a priest, established the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land and ran up its flag, a gold fleur-de-lis on a white ground.
It flew ten months. Then Col. Wolseley and twelve hundred Imperial and Canadian troops floundered through from Toronto along the impossible woods and quagmires of the Dawson Road, and Riel elected not to fight them. He fled, Fort Garry capitulated without a fight, some métis were hunted down and killed in reprisal for Riel’s execution of the rabid Orangeman Thomas Scott, and the first act was over.
Joseph Kinsey Howard, in by far the best book on the métis as a cultural and political possibility, speaks of playing métis rebel in cops-and-robbers games when he was a boy in Alberta. Those were the same years when I was a boy in Saskatchewan, but nobody had told me enough to induce in me any such loyalties or inspire any such play. I had heard of Louis Riel, as a sort of booger-man, but that was all. Yet he and his rebellious nation came closer to my life, probably, than to Howard’s. The first non-Indian hunters in the Cypress Hills were métis winterers; after the collapse of Riel’s Provisional Government in Fort Garry in 1870, many of the more settled métis moved west, some of them as authentic refugees, and during the last decade of the buffalo, Wood Mountain and the Cypress Hills were bases from which the hunts went out. It was the vanishing of the buffalo, in conjunction with renewed political squabbling with Ottawa, that brought them to their final desperate outbreak in 1885.
They were a Plains tribe, but a very special one, for they combined the adaptive virtues of two races and they did not lose their woods skills when they crossed into the Plains. According to Howard, there were halfbreeds, pr
oduct of Quebec Frenchmen and Huron or Algonquin women, around Sault Ste. Marie as early as 1654, and they made a rendezvous at Mackinac before 1670. The fur trade encouraged racial mixture: the sons of engagés and Indian women were literally born into the company, and bound to it as no European would ever be. After the mid-18th century they increased rapidly, and a hundred years after the fall of New France in 1763 there were at least thirty thousand of them west of the Great Lakes on both sides of the border.
They were the wanderers of the wilderness—the best boatmen, best guides, hunters, trappers and traders. They devised a system of freight transport for the Plains which established a new industry and made St. Paul the capital of Minnesota and the commercial center of the Northwestern frontier. Their knowledge of the country—much of it instinctive and thus inexplicable to white men—made them indispensable in development of the West, as did the fact that most of the Indians welcomed them as relatives and friends.
Heirs to the horse-and-gun culture based on the buffalo as well as to the Woodlands culture based on beaver, they were a more formidable people, man for man, than any of the tribes with which they traded, and probably than most whites. Though some lapsed into an Indianism as savage as that of the most unregen erate Blackfoot, many could draw strength from both sides of their inheritance. Multilingual and bi-cultural, they formed an indispensable buffer race, often as traders and middlemen, sometimes as peacemakers, sometimes as fighters, generally on the white side. When they turned their guns against the Canadians in 1885, a scattered and half-organized handful under Gabriel Dumont made even the splendidly disciplined Mounted Police look bad, and might have hurt them a great deal worse if Riel’s hysterical vacillation had not tied Dumont’s hands.