On Canada's frontier : sketches of history, sport, and adventure, and of the Indians, missionaries, fur-traders, and newer settlers of western Canada

Front matter

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LIBRARY^F^N^REsa

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Preface

If all those into whose hands this book may fall were as well informed upon the Dominion of Canada as are the people of the United States, there would not be needed a word of explanation of the title of this volume. Yet to those who might otherwise infer that what is here related applies equally to all parts of Canada, it is necessary to explain that the work deals solely with scenes and phases of life in the newer, and mainly the western, parts of that country. The great English colony which stirs the pages of more than two centuries of history has for its capitals such proud and notable cities as Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, Halifax, and many others, to distinguish the progressive civilization of the region east of Lake Huron — the older provinces. But the Canada of the geographies of to-day is a land of greater area than the United States ; it is, in fact, the " British America " of old. A great trans-Canadian railway has joined the ambitious province of the Pacific slope to the provinces of old .Canada with stitches of steel across the Plains. There the same mixed surplusage of Europe that settled our own West is elbowing the fur-trader and the Indian out of the way, and is laying out farms far north, in the smiling Peace River district, where it was only a little while ago supposed that there were but two seasons, winter and late spring. It is with that new part of Canada, between the ancient and well-populated provinces and the sturdy new cities of the Pacific Coast, that this book deals. Some references to the North are added in those chapters that treat of hunting and fishing and fur-trading.

The chapters that compose this book originally formed a series of vi PREFACE

papers which recorded journeys and studies made in Canada during the past three years. The first one to be published was that which describes a settler's colony in which a few titled foreigners took the lead ; the others were written so recently that they should possess the same interest and value as if they here first met the public eye. What that interest and value amount to is for the reader to judge, the author's position being such that he may only call attention to the fact that he had access to private papers and documents when he prepared the sketches of the Hudson Bay Company, and that, in pursuing information about the great province of British Columbia, he was not able to learn that a serious and extended study of its resources had ever been made. The principal studies and sketches were prepared for and published in Harper's Magazine. The spirit in which they were written was solely that of one who loves the open air and his fellow-men of every condition and color, and who has had the good-fortune to witness in newer Canada something of the old and almost departed life of the plainsmen and woodsmen, and of the newer forces of nation-building on our continent.

Contents

PAGE

I. Titled Pioneers i

II. Chartering a Nation ii

II

HOW it came about that we chartered the Blackfoot nation for two days had better not be told in straisfhtforward fashion. There is more that is interesting in going around about the subject, just as in reality we did go around and about the neighborhood of the Indians before we determined to visit them.

In the first place, the most interesting Indian I ever saw — among many kinds and many thousands — was the late Chief Crowfoot, of the Blackfoot people. More like a king than a chief he looked, as he strode upon the plains, in a magnificent robe of white bead-work as rich as ermine, with a gorgeous pattern illuminating its edges, a glorious sun worked into the front of it, and many artistic and chromatic figures sewed in gaudy beads upon its back. He wore an old white chimney-pot hat, bound around with eagle feathers, a splendid pair of chaperajos, all worked with beads at the bottoms and fringed along the sides, and bead-worked moccasins, for which any lover of the Indian or collector of his paraphernalia would have exchanged a new Winchester rifle without a second's hesitation. But though Crowfoot was so royally clothed, it was in himself that the kingly quality was most apparent. His face was extraordinarily like what portraits we have of Julius Ccesar, with the difference that Crowfoot had the complexion of an Egyptian mummy. The high forehead, the great aquiHne nose, the thin Hps, usually closed, the small, round, protruding chin, the strong jawbones, and the keen gray eyes composed a face in which every feature was finely moulded, and in which the warrior, the commander, and the counsellor were strongly suggested. And in each of these roles he played the highest part among the Indians of Canada from the moment that the whites and the red men contested the dominion of the plains until he died, a short time ago.

He was born and lived a wild Indian, and though the orood fathers of the nearest Roman Catholic mission believe that he died a Christian, I am constrained to see in the reason for their thinking so only another proof of the consummate shrewdness of Crowfoot's life-long policy. The old -king lay on his death-bed in his great wig-a-wam, with twenty-seven of his medicine-men around him, and never once did he pretend that he despised or doubted their magic. When it was evident that he was about to die, the conjurers ceased their long-continued, exhausting formula of howling, drumming, and all the rest, and, Indian-like, left Death to take his own. Then it was that one of the watchful, zealous priests, whose lives have indeed been like those of fathers to the wild Indians, slipped into the great tepee and administered the last sacrament to the old pagan.

" Do you believe T' the priest inquired.

" Yes, I believe," old Crowfoot grunted. Then he whispered, " But don't tell my people."

Among the last words of great men, those of Saponaxitaw (his Indian name) may never be recorded, but to the student of the American aborigine they betray more that is characteristic of the habitual attitude of mind of the wild red man towards civilizin<r influences than any words I ever knew one to utter.

As the old chief crushed the bunch-2:rass beneath his gaudy moccasins at the time I saw him, and as his lesser chiefs and headmen strode behind him, we who looked on knew what a great part he was bearing and had taken in Canada. He had been chief of the most powerful and savage tribe in the North, and of several allied tribes as well, from the time when the region west of the Mississippi was terra incognita to all except a few fur traders and priests. His warriors ruled the Canadian wilderness, keeping the Ojibbeways and Crees in the forests to the east and north, routinor the Crows, the Stonies, and the Bio-- Bellies whenever they pleased, and yielding to no tribe they met except the Sioux to the southward in our territory. The first white man Crowfoot ever knew intimately was Father Lacombe, the noble old missionary, whose fame is now world-wide among scholars. The peaceful priest and the warrior chief became fast friends, and from the day when the white men first broke down the border and swarmed upon the plains, until at the last they ran what Crowfoot called their "fire-wagons" (locomotives) through his land, he followed the priest's counselling in most im-^ portant matters. He treated with the authorities, and thereafter hindered his braves from murder, massacre, and warfare. Better than that, during the

Riel rebellion he more than any other man, or twenty men, kept the red man of the plains at peace when the French half-breeds, led by their mentally irresponsible disturber, rebelled against the Dominion authorities.

When Crowfoot talked, he made laws. While he spoke, his nation listened in silence. He had killed as many men as any Indian warrior alive ; he was a mighty buffalo-slayer; he was torn, scarred, and mangled in skin, limb, and bone. He never would learn English or pretend to discard his religion. He was an Indian after the pattern of his ancestors. At eighty odd years of age there lived no red -skin who dared answer him back when he spoke his mind. But he was a shrewd man and an archdiplomatist. Because he had no quarrel with the whites, and because a grand old priest was his truest friend, he gave orders that his body should be buried in a coffin. Christian fashion, and as I rode over the plains in the summer of 1890 I saw his burial-place on top of a high hill, and knew that his bones were guarded night and day by watchers from among his people. Two or three days before he died his best horse was slaughtered for burial with him. He heard of it. " That was wrong," he said ; " there was no sense in doing that ; and besides, the horse was worth good money." But he was always at least as far as that. in advance of his people, and it was natural that not only his horse, but his gun and blankets, his rich robes, and plenty of food to last him to the happy hunting-grounds, should have been buried with him.

There are different ways of judging which is the best Indian, but from the stand-point of him who would examine that distinct product of nature, the Indian as the white man found him, the Canadian Blackfeet are among if not quite the best. They are almost as primitive and natural as any, nearly the most prosperous, physically very fine, the most free from white men's vices. They are the most reasonable in their attitude towards the whites of any who hold to the true Indian philosophy. The sum of that philosophy is that civilization gets men a great many comforts, but bundles them up with so many rules and responsibilities and so much hard work that, after all, the wild Indian has the greatest amount of pleasure and the least share of care that men can hope for. That man is the fairest judge of the red -skins who considers them as children, governed mainly by emotion, and acting upon undisciplined impulse ; and I know of no more hearty, natural children than the careless, improvident, impulsive boys and girls of from five to eighty years of age whom Crowfoot turned over to the care of Three Bulls, his brother.

The Blackfeet of Canada number about two thousand men, women, and children. They dwell upon a reserve of nearly five hundred square miles of plains land, watered by the beautiful Bow River, and almost within sight of the Rocky Mountains. It is in the province of Alberta, north of our Montana. There were three thousand and more of these Indians when the Canadian Pacific Railway was built across their hunting-ground, seven or eight years ago, but they are losing numbers at the rate of two hundred and fifty a year, roughly speaking. Their neighbors, the tribes called the Bloods and the Piegans, are of the same nation. The Sarcis, once a great tribe, became weakened by disease and war, and many years ago begged to be taken into the confederation. These tribes all have separate reserves near to one another, but all have heretofore acknowledged each Blackfoot chief as their supreme ruler. Their old men can remember when they used to roam as far south as Utah, and be gone twelve months on the war-path and on their foraging excursions for horses. They chased the Crees as far north as the Crees would run, and that was close to the arctic circle. They lived in their war-paint and by the chase. Now they are caged. They live unnaturally and die as unnaturally, precisely like other wild animals shut up in our parks. Within their park each gets a pound of meat with half a pound of flour every day. Not much comes to them besides, except now and then a little game, tobacco, and new blankets. They are so poorly lodged and so scantily fed that they are not fit to confront a Canadian winter, and lung troubles prey among them.

It is a harsh way to put it (but it is true of our own government also) to say that one who has looked the subject over is apt to decide that the policy of the Canadian Government has been to make treaties with the dangerous tribes, and to let the peaceful ones starve. The latter do not need to starve in Canada, fortunately; they trust to the Hudson Bay Company for food and care, and not in vain. Having treated

CHARTERING A NATION I7

with the wilder Indians, the rest of the policy is to send the brightest of their boys to trade-schools, and to try to induce the men to till the soil. Those who do so are then treated more generously than the others. I have my own ideas with which to meet those who find nothing admirable in any except a dead Indian, and with which to discuss the treatment and policy the live Indian endures, but this is not the place for the discussion. Sufiice it that it is not to be denied that between one hundred and fifty and two hundred Blackfeet are learning to maintain several plots of farming land planted with oats and potatoes. This they are doing with success, and with the further result of setting a good example to the rest. But most of the bucks are either sullenly or stupidly clinging to the shadow and the memory of the life that is gone.

It was a recollection of that life which they portrayed for us. And they did so with a fervor, an abundance of detail and memento, and with a splendor few men have seen equalled in recent years — or ever may hope to witness again.

We left the cars at Gleichen, a little border town which depends almost wholly upon the Blackfeet and their visitors for its maintenance. It has two stores — one where the Indians get credit and high prices (and at which the red men deal), and one at which they may buy at low rates for cash, wherefore they seldom go there. It has two hotels and a half-dozen railway men's dwellings, and, finally, it boasts a tiny little station or barracks of the North-west Mounted Police, wherein the lower of the two rooms is fitted with a desk, and hung with pistols, guns, handcuffs, and cartridge belts, while the upper room contains the cots for the men at night.

We went to the store that the Indians favor — just such a store as you see at any cross-roads you drive past in a summer's outing in the country — and there were half a dozen Indians beautifying the door-way and the interior, like magnified majolica-ware in a crockery-shop. They were standing or sitting about with thoughtful expressions, as Indians always do when they go shopping; for your true Indian generates such a contemplative mood when he is about to spend a quarter that one would fancy he must be the most prudent and deliberate of men, instead of what he really is — the greatest prodigal alive except the negro. These bucks might easily have been mistaken for waxworks. Unnaturally erect, with arms folded beneath their blankets, they stood or sat without moving a limb or muscle. Only when a new-comer entered did they stir. Then they turned their heads deliberately and looked at the visitor fixedly, as eagles look at you from out their cages. They were strapping fine fellows, each bundled up in a colored blanket, flapping cloth leg-gear, and yellow moccasins. Each had the front locks of his hair tied in an upright bunch, like a natural plume, and several wore little brass rings, like baby finger-rings, around certain side locks down beside their ears.

There they stood, motionless and speechless, waiting until the impulse should move them to buy what they wanted, with the same deliberation with which they had waited for the original impulse w^hich sent

CHARTERING A NATION I9

them to the store. If Mr. Frenchman, who kept the store, had come from behind his counter, EngHsh fashion, and had said : " Come, come ; what d'you want ? Speak up now, and be quick about it. No lounging here. Buy or get out." If he had said that, or anything hke it, those Indians would have stalked out of his place, not to enter it again for a very long time, if ever. Bartering is a serious and complex performance to an Indian, and you might as well try to hurry an elephant up a gang-plank as try to quicken an Indian's procedure in trading.

We purchased of the Frenchman a chest of tea, a great bag of lump sugar, and a small case of plug tobacco for orifts to the chief. Then we hired a buck-board wagon, and made ready for the journey to the reserve.

The road to the reserve lay several miles over the plains, and commanded a view of rolling grass land, like a brown sea whose waves were petrified, with here and there a group of sickly wind-blown trees to break the resemblance. The road was a mere wagon track and horse-trail through the grass, but it was criss-crossed with the once deep ruts that had been worn by countless herds of buffalo seeking water.

Presently, as we journeyed, a little line of sand-hills came into view. They formed the Blackfoot ceme- i/ tery. We saw the " tepees of the dead " here and there on the knolls, some new and perfect, some old and weather-stained, some showing mere tatters of cotton flapping on the poles, and still others only skeleton tents, the poles remaining and the cotton covering gone completely. We knew what we would see if we looked into those " dead tepees " (being careful to approach from the windward side). We would see, lying on the ground or raised upon a framework, a bundle that would be narrow at top and bottom, and broad in the middle — an Indian's body rolled up in a sheet of cotton, with his best bead-work and blanket and gun in the bundle, and near by a kettle and some dried meat and corn-meal against his feeling hungry on his long journey to the hereafter. As one or two of the tepees were new, we expected to see some family in mourning ; and, sure enough, when we reached the great sheer-sided gutter which the Bow River has dug for its course through the plains, we halted our horse and looked down upon a lonely trio of tepees, with children playing around them and women squatted by the entrances. Three families had lost members, and were sequestered there in abject surrender to grief.

Those tents of the mourners were at our feet as we rode southward, down in the river gully, where the grass was green and the trees were leafy and thriving; but when we turned our faces to the eastward, where the river bent around a great promontory, what a sight met our gaze ! There stood a city of tepees, hundreds of them, showing white and yellow and brown and red against the clear blue sky. A silent and lifeless city it seemed, for we were too far off to see the people or to hear their noises. The great huddle of little pyramids rose abruptly from the level bare grass against the flawless sky, not like one of those melancholy new treeless towns that white men are building all over the prairie, but rather like a mosquito fleet becalmed at sea. There are two camps on the Blackfoot Reserve, the North Camp and the South Camp, and this town of tents was between the two, and was composed of more households than both together; for this was the assembling for the sun-dance, their greatest religious festival, and hither had come Bloods, Piegans, and Sarcis as well as Blackfeet. Only the mourners kept away ; for here were to be echoed the greatest ceremonials of that dead past, wherein lives dedicated to war and to the chase inspired the deeds of valor which each would now celebrate anew in speech or song. This was to be the anniversary of the festival at which the young men fastened themselves by a strip of flesh in their chests to a sort of Maypole rope, and tore their flesh apart to demonstrate their fitness to be considered braves. At this feast husbands had the right to confess their women, and to cut their noses off if they had been untrue, and if they yet preferred life to the death they richly merited. At this gala-time sacrifices of fingers were made by brave men to the sun. Then every warrior boasted of his prowess, and the young beaus feasted their eyes on gayly-clad maidens the while they calculated for what number of horses they could be purchased of their parents. And at each recurrence of this wonderful holidaytime every night was spent in feasting, gorging, and gambling. In short, it was the great event of the Indian year, and so it remains. Even now you may see the young braves undergo the torture ; and if you may not see the faithless wives disciplined, you may at least perceive a score who have been, as well as hear the mighty boasting, and witness the dancing, garni ngi and carousing.

We turned our backs towards the tented field, for we had not vet introduced ourselves to Mr. Masrnus Begg, the Indian agent in charge of the reserve. We were soon within his of^cial enclosure, where a pretty frame house, an of^ce no bigger than a freight car, and a roomy barn and stable were all overtopped by a central fiag-staff, and shaded by flourishing trees. Mr. Begg was at home, and, with his accomplished wife, welcomed us in such a hearty manner as one could hardly have expected, even where white folks were so "mighty unsartin " to appear as they are on the plains. The agent's house without is like any pretty village home in the East ; and within, the only distinctive features are a number of ornamental mounted wild-beast's heads and a room whose walls are lined about with rare' and beautiful Blackfoot curios in skin and stone and bead-work. But, to our joy, we found seated in that room the famous chief Old Sun. He is the husband of the most remarkable Indian squaw in America, and he would have been Crowfoot's successor were it not that he was eightyseven years of age when the Blackfoot Caesar died. As chief of the North Blackfeet, Old Sun boasts the largest personal following on the Canadian plains, having earned his popularity by his fighting record, his commanding manner, his eloquence, and by that generosity which leads him to give away his rations and his presents. No man north of Mexico can dress more gorgeously than he upon occasion, for he still owns a buckskin outfit beaded to the value of a Worth gown. Moreover, he owns a red coat, such as the Government used to give only to great chiefs. The old fellow had lost his vigor when we saw him, and as he sat wrapped in his blanket he looked like a half-emptied meal bag flung on a chair. He despises English, but in that marvellous VolapUk of the plains called the sign language he told us that his teeth were gone, his hearing was bad, his eyes were weak, and his flesh was spare. He told his age also, and much else besides, and there is no one who reads this but could have readily understood his every statement and sentiment, conveyed solely by means of his hands and fingers. I noticed that he looked like an old woman, and it is a fact that old Indian men frequently look so. Yet no one ever saw a young brave whose face suggested a woman's, though their beardless countenances and long hair might easily create that appearance.

Mr. Remington was anxious to paint Old Sun and his squaw, particularly the latter, and he easily obtained permission, although when the time for the mysterious ordeal arrived next day the old chief was greatly troubled in his superstitious old brain lest some mischief would befall him through the medium of the painting. To the Indian mind the sun, which they worship, has magical, even devilish, powers, and Old Sun developed a fear that the orb of day might " work on his picture " and cause him to die. Fortunately I found in Mr. L'Hereux, the interpreter, a person who had undergone the process without dire consequences, was willing to undergo it again, and who added that his father and mother had submitted to the operation, and yet had lived to a yellow old age. When Old Sun brought his wife to sit for her portrait I put all etiquette to shame in staring at her, as you will all the more readily believe when you know something of her history.

Old Sun's wife sits in the council of her nation — the only woman, white, red, or black, of whom I have ever heard who enjoys such a prerogative on this continent. She earned her peculiar privileges, if any one ever earned anything. Forty or more years ago she was a Piegan maiden known only in her tribe, and there for nothing more than her good origin, her comeliness, and her consequent value in horses. She met with outrageous fortune, but she turned it to such good account that she was speedily ennobled. She was at home in a little camp on the plains one day, and had wandered away from the tents, when she was kidnapped. It was in this wise : other camps were scattered near there. On the night before the day of her adventure a band of Crows stole a number of horses from a camp of the Gros Ventres, and very artfully trailed their plunder towards and close to the Piegan camp before they turned and made their way to their own lodges. When the Gros Ventres discovered their loss, and followed the trail that seemed to lead to the Piegan camp, the girl and her father, an aged chief, were at a distance from their tepees, unarmed and unsuspecting. Down swooped the Gros Ventres. They killed and scalped the old man, and then their chief swung the young girl upon his horse behind him, and binding her to him with thongs of buckskin, dashed off triumphantly for his own village. That has happened to many another Indian maiden, most of whom have behaved as would a plaster image, saving a few days of weeping. Not such was Old Sun's wife. When she and her captor were in sight of the Gros Ventre village, she reached forward and stole the chief's scalpingknife out of its sheath at his side. With it, still wet with her father's blood, she cut him in the back through to the heart. Then she freed his body from hers, and tossed him from the horse's back. Leaping to the ground beside his body, she not only scalped him, but cut off his right arm and picked up his gun, and rode madly back to her people, chased most of the way, but bringing safely with her the three greatest trophies a warrior can wrest from a vanquished enemy. Two of them would have distinguished any brave, but this mere village maiden came with all three. From that day she has boasted the right to wear three eagle feathers.

Old Sun was a young man then, and when he heard of this feat he came and hitched the requisite number of horses to her mother's travois poles beside her tent. I do not recall how many steeds she was valued at, but I have heard of very highpriced Indian girls who had nothing except their feminine qualities to recommend them. In one case I knew that a young man, who had been casting what are called " sheep's eyes " at a maiden, went one day and tied four horses to her father's tent. Then he stood around and waited, but there was no sign from the tent. Next day he took four more, and so he went on until he had tied sixteen horses to the tepee. At the least they were worth $20, perhaps $30, apiece. At that the maiden and her people came out, and received the young man so graciously that he knew he was " the young woman's choice," as we say in civilized circles, sometimes under very similar circumstances.

At all events. Old Sun was rich and powerful, and easily got the savage heroine for his wife. She was admitted to the Blackfoot council without a protest, and has since proven that her valor was not sporadic, for she has taken the war-path upon occasion, and other scalps have gone to her credit.

After a while we drove over to where the field lay littered with tepees. There seemed to be no order in the arrangement of the tents as we looked at the scene from a distance. Gradually the symptoms of a great stir and activity were observable, and we saw men and horses running about at one side of the nomad settlement, as well as hundreds of human figures moving in the camp. Then a nearer view brought out the fact that the tepees, which were of many sizes, were apt to be white at the base, reddish half-way up, and dark brown at the top. The smoke of the fires within, and the rain and sun without, paint all the cotton or canvas tepees like that, and very pretty is the effect. When closer still, we saw that each tepee was capped with a rude crown formed of pole ends — the ends of the ribs of each structure ; that some of the tents were gayly ornamented with great geometric patterns in red, black, and yellow around the bottoms; and that others bore upon their sides rude but highly colored figures of animals — the clan sign of the family within. Against very many of the frail dwellings leaned a travois, the triangle of poles which forms the wagon of the Indians. There were three or four very large tents, the headquarters of the chiefs of the soldier bands and of the head chief of the nation ; and there was one spotless new tent, with a pretty border painted around its base, and the figure of an animal on cither side. It was the new establishment of a bride and groom. A hubbub filled the air as we drew still nearer; not any noise occasioned by our approach, but the ordinary uproar of the camp— the barking of dogs, the shouts of frolicking children, the yells of young men racing on horseback and of others driving in their ponies. When we drove between the first two tents we saw that the camp had been systematically arranged in the form of a rude circle, with the tents in bunches around a great central space, as large as Madison Square if its corners were rounded off.