A Geography of Blood (11 page)

“He listened attentively to my tragic story and must have sensed the bitterness within my soul. I felt certain that, with his experience as an officer of the North-West Mounted Police Force stationed at Fort Walsh and closely associated with the work of maintaining law and order in the West, he should be qualified to know the answer.

“ ‘Do you know who those buffalo killers were?' he asked and then told me that the ‘Play-ku-tay' were sent out by the U.S. Government to starve the Indians into submission.”

Staring at the burned floor of Farwell's fort, I knew that whatever the merits of Aspdin's claim, he had glossed over an even more uncomfortable truth. Yes, governments on both sides of the border had been determined to vanquish the buffalo people, to sweep them out of the way. But what had engaged the general population in this project was not a covert conspiracy but the irresistible, amoral pull of what we now call market forces. For the whiskey traders, wolfers, and hide hunters who conducted their business at Farwell's post, the call to destruction had been banal: another day, another dollar, and the gaudy seductions of “civilization.”

{eight} Fort Walsh

“Le plus terrible dans ce monde, c'est que chacun à ses raisons.”
“The most terrible thing about this world is that everyone has his reasons.”

JEAN RENOIR,
La Règle du jeu
, 1939

Imagine that we're
sitting together on the hillside above Fort Walsh. With every breath, we draw in the winy scent of wild roses, the smoky sweetness of sage, the sheen and shimmer of a perfect summer day. Down below, tourists in shorts and suntops are legging it along the road from the visitors' center to the fort's main gate or climbing aboard the bright yellow bus in front of the stockade. Since the site is only open from the May long weekend until early fall, these days it's always summer at Fort Walsh. If ever there was a place to offer healing and distract us from troubling thoughts, here it is spread out in front of us. In the foreground, a soft screen of wolf willows; in the distance, a rollicking sweep of hills; and in between, on the flats below, a historic site managed exclusively for our edification and pleasure.

It's been years now since Keith and I made our first tour of the fort, and I'm surprised by how much of that visit I can still recall. But then, who could forget the portly gent in full North-West Mounted Police regalia who greets us at the entrance with his knee-high boots polished to a fine luster, his scarlet coat buttoned to the chin, and a white pith helmet affixed to the top of his cranium? The original intention of this uniform had been to mark the mounted police as British, in contrast to the blue-coated Americans, and, in the years when that distinction truly mattered, it had served its purpose well. In deference to this historical significance, our guide bears his domed, beknobbled headgear with all the dignity he can muster.

Despite his cheerfully ridiculous accoutrements, our man knows his stuff, and he quickly fills us in on the basics about Fort Walsh. Although the present-day buildings date from the 1940s, he explains that the original construction was undertaken in 1875 by the thirty-man squad of “B” Division of the North-West Mounted Police, assisted by a crew of Métis sawyers. The commander of the operation was a flamboyant, hot-tempered officer named Inspector (or as he preferred to have it, “Major”) James M. Walsh, the man who lent his name to the outpost and whose picture—perhaps we'd noticed?—is featured on the cover of the fort's brochure. Walsh was known to some of his Aboriginal clients as White Forehead Chief, so he must sometimes have worn his pith helmet in the course of his official duties. For this portrait, however, he has replaced his regulation issue with a slouch-brimmed Western hat, which he's garlanded with a scarf and set on his head at a rakish tilt. Done up in fringes and buckskin, with a sword dangling from his belt, Major Walsh exudes a kind of steamy swashbuckling charisma.

It has sometimes been suggested, our guide tells us with a wink and a nod, that Walsh and his men chose this valley on account of the McKays, a prominent Métis family who had settled here several years earlier and who had three marriageable daughters. But the police doubtless had other, more workaday reasons for choosing this location as well—an abundance of flowing water, a ready supply of wood, the promise of shelter from blizzards, and, above all, ready access to evildoers. Despite the atrocities of 1873, whiskey traders were still active in the Cypress Hills, and the police had been sent to put an end to their dirty business.

Once this background has been imparted, our guide indicates with a nod of his helmet that it's time for the tour to begin. What a brutal life it must have been for the men who were stationed here, sleeping on straw-filled pallets in this frigid bunkhouse (there were no winter closures back then), subsisting on an unvarying diet of stew and starches, mucking out a Stygian stable that provided quarters for as many as forty horses. Reveille sounded at 6:30 each morning, announcing a day of rifle drills, artillery drills, riding drills, inspections, patrols, and fatigues that extended until sundown and sometimes beyond. All this for $1 a day for a constable, less for the lower ranks. Small wonder, then, that the site of the enlisted men's barracks has yielded an archaeological treasure trove of bottles that once held beer and various high-alcohol-content patent medicines. Even the higher-ups in the force indulged in illicit drink, though they tried to hide their consumption by tossing the empties down the privy. Like the old joke says, the Mounties had been sent west to keep down alcohol and they sure as heck did their best to fulfill their mission.

By the time we've imbibed all this good-humored scandal, we've made our way three-quarters of the way around the enclosed yard and are sauntering back toward the front gate. Across the lawn, a red-coated guide is shouting commands to a troop of pint-sized police recruits, each outfitted in a tiny scarlet jacket and jaunty pillbox cap. Quick March. Halt. Atten-shun! Nearby, a young sub-constable has nabbed her father and is dragging him off to a mock court, where he is doomed to stand trial for some historical misdemeanor. On all sides, Fort Walsh appears to be delivering on its promise to serve up the past as wholesome family fun. And the grand finale is yet to come.

With a wave of his red-coated arm, our guide directs us through the door of an unassuming log building just to the right of the exit, in the shelter of the stockade. The commissioner's residence, he tells us, and it was here, he says, that the great Lakota chief Sitting Bull—who with his people had taken refuge in Canada following the Battle of the Greasy Grass—once met an official delegation from the United States and sent them home empty-handed. From somewhere, the guide has now produced a sheaf of papers and he's scanning the faces of the visitors who are gathered in the house, looking for volunteers. Who would like to read the words of the American General Terry, as he tries to induce the Lakota to return to the States and settle on their reservations? Who would like to be Sitting Bull and tell the Ugly Americans to beat it?

Most of us hang back shyly, but a couple of brave souls step forward to accept the challenge. Looks like we're in for a touch of drama.

Let's say that you and I are sitting on the hill overlooking Fort Walsh, only it isn't summer now. It is October 16, 1877, around sundown. Below us, the cluster of whitewashed buildings that house the police glows faintly through the dusk; and to the north of the palisade, where a scraggly village has sprung up out of nowhere over the past couple of years, lamps are being lit in the pool hall, the laundry, the restaurant. Somewhere a dog is barking; somewhere a coyote sings its eerie, quavering song. In the distance, a low rumble of hooves and the creaking of wagons announce the imminent arrival of travelers coming in from the south, along the Benton Trail. And then, here they are, breasting the rim of the valley, pausing to take in the view, and proceeding briskly down the slope and across the parade ground toward the fort.

At the head of the procession, two men ride abreast: Colonel James F. Macleod, the commissioner of the mounted police, in his scarlet tunic and gleaming white helmet, and beside him, U.S. Army Brigadier General Alfred H. Terry, resplendent in a blue uniform tinseled with gold braid. These dignitaries are followed by an honor guard of twenty-eight police lancers, their red-and-white pennants fluttering cheerily overhead, and a straggling train of supply wagons, drawn by mules and staffed by a company of American infantrymen. Ordinarily, the U.S. infantry would have been stopped at the border (where three complete companies of cavalry are now waiting to see Terry and his commission safely home) but an exception has been made for the supply train on this special occasion.

No one seems surprised that the Americans have arrived with armed force, while the mounted police get by on chutzpah and an unspoken promise of good governance. Long live the Great White Mother, Victoria Regina, and her worldwide reign of peace and justice.

On one side of the border lies danger; on the other, hope. At least, that's what the Lakota have concluded. And it has been hope, a hope born of desperation, that has drawn some four thousand Lakota refugees across the border into the Great Mother's country in recent months. Behind them lies a bloody saga of mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. government—promises broken, treaty lands stolen (including the sacred Black Hills, “the heart of the people”
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), peaceful camps attacked. Altogether, it is a record of such iniquity that, in December of 1876, a congressional commission had declared it to be “dishonorable to the nation and disgraceful to those who originated it.”
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But that stinging assessment has gone unnoticed in the national outrage over the events of 26/6/76, the day the Lakota put paid to the 7th Cavalry and its golden-haired commander. Since then, the American military has engaged its superior firepower with redoubled ferocity (even invoking the black-velvet-clad showmanship of Buffalo Bill), forcing some of the Lakota to surrender and accept internment on reservations, while others have fled to sanctuary across the border.

Since their arrival on British soil, the refugees have devoted themselves to hunting buffalo and caring for their children. (“I came here to hunt, nothing bad,” Sitting Bull has told the police. “I came to see the English, where we are going to raise a new life.”
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) A few bands have settled temporarily in the remaining buffalo country in and around the Cypress Hills with camps at, among other places, the Head of the Mountain in the west and along the Frenchman River in the east. In response, the police have recently established a small detachment at Chimney Coulee, which they call the East End post, both to surveil the new arrivals and to serve as a stopover on the 120-mile journey from Fort Walsh east to Wood Mountain, where the majority of the refugees have congregated.

That's where Inspector Walsh has had to travel to ask the Lakota if they will come and meet the Americans. The chiefs have agreed with great reluctance. It doesn't help that General Terry was the overall commander of the American forces during the war against the Sioux. It doesn't help that, a day before the Lakota delegation is scheduled to leave for Fort Walsh, a party of around a hundred Nez Perce men, women, and children had struggled into camp, wounded and bleeding, after a calamitous encounter with the American army at the Battle of Bear Paw. These are people who have done everything the white man demanded—accepted the Christian religion, taken up farming, settled in permanent homes—yet in the end they have been evicted from their treaty lands and harried across the country all the way from Oregon.

Even with this painful evidence before them, the Lakota have eventually allowed themselves to be persuaded to attend the parley at Fort Walsh. By the time the general and his entourage enter the stockade, the Lakota delegation is camped nearby. All the leading chiefs are present: Bear's Head; Spotted Eagle; Flying Bird; Whirlwind Bear; Medicine Turns Around; Iron Dog; The Man That Scatters the Bear, with his wife (whose name the clerks at tomorrow's meeting will not bother to note); Little Knife; The Crow; Yellow Dog; and, of course, Sitting Bull. They have come not out of any respect for the Americans or even friendship with the police but in the hope that the Great Mother will see their good intentions and take pity on them. After all, the Dominion government has recently granted a small reserve to Sioux who fled across the border as refugees after the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. Are not the more recent arrivals equally deserving of consideration?

The meeting convenes at 3 PM on October 17. (For the record, it is held in the orderly room, not the commissioner's house, which won't be built for several months.) Through an interpreter, General Terry lays out the terms of the proposed repatriation: the Lakota will surrender their arms and horses and proceed to the Indian agencies on the Missouri River, where a herd of 650 cattle has been purchased for their use. “From these cows,” Terry explains stiffly, “you will be able to raise herds, which will support you and your children . . . long after the game upon which you now depend for subsistence shall have disappeared.” In return for accepting this offer and agreeing to live in peace, the general pledges that “what is past shall be forgotten, and . . . you shall be received in the friendly spirit in which the other Indians who have been engaged in hostilities against the United States and have surrendered to its military forces have been received . . . It is time that bloodshed should cease.”
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Thˇathˇáŋka Íyotake, Sitting Bull, is the first to stand and deliver his rebuke. “I was born and raised in this country with the Red River Half-breeds,” he tells the assembly, “and I intend to stop with them . . . You have got ears, and you have got eyes to see with them, and you see how I live with these people. You see me? Here I am!” He pauses to shake hands with Macleod and then with Walsh, before turning back to face the American delegation. “If you think I am a fool, you are a bigger fool than I am. This house is a medicine-house. You come here to tell us lies, but we don't want to hear them . . . Don't you say two more words. Go back home where you came from. This country is mine, and I intend to stay here, and to raise this country full of grown people.”
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