Apparition Trail, The (49 page)

Authors: Lisa Smedman

BOOK: Apparition Trail, The

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Wandering Spirit led the band to Fort Pitt, a NWMP fort commanded by Francis Dickens, son of the famous novelist. There, a gunfight with three NWMP scouts who blundered into the Indian camp left one Mountie dead, and another wounded. Dickens decided to abandon the indefensible fort; the Indians let the police retreat, but took more settlers hostage.

The Frog Lake murders and the forced surrender of Fort Pitt came at a time when the Metis (settlers who were half Indian, half French) were staging an uprising. Just a few days earlier, the Metis had traded shots with the North-West Mounted Police at Duck Lake, killing three Mounties. The actions of Big Bear’s band were seen as part of a general uprising and the Canadian government responded proportionally.

As chief of his band, Big Bear, who had tried to stop the killing at Frog Lake, was held personally responsible for the murders there. A column of several hundred militia and NWMP pursued the band relentlessly for the next two months, attacking them twice. The “spring of blood” that Big Bear had seen in a prophetic dream several years earlier had come to pass.

Around the same time, Chief Poundmaker traveled north to Battleford to profess his loyalty to the Queen and the Canadian government. He found the town empty, the settlers having fled to the safety of the nearby NWMP fort in the belief that the Indians were coming to attack. Poundmaker’s band looted the town, carrying away food and other supplies and burning a church and a judge’s house.

Poundmaker’s band was also pursued by a column of militia and NWMP, which attacked the Indians at their camp near Cutknife Creek. The Indians were outnumbered nearly two to one and were low on ammunition, but they held a strategically superior position on a hill overlooking a ravine. They also had advance warning of attack, through a man named Kohsakahtigant who was warned in a dream by a sacred manitouassini, Old Man Stone, that danger was approaching. After a tense battle which saw eight militia and NWMP killed and fourteen wounded — and six Indians killed and three wounded — the NWMP and militia were forced to retreat.

Big Bear and Poundmaker ultimately surrendered to the NWMP and received jail sentences. Both died shortly after their release from prison.

Wandering Spirit, and seven other Indians who had killed white settlers, were sentenced to death, and were hung en masse in Battleford in front of local Indians who were forced to watch this example of Canadian frontier justice. Some of the condemned men urged their people to capitulate to the settlers; others urged them to fight on and sang their death songs proudly.

It is reported that, in the days while Big Bear’s band was fleeing with its hostages, Wandering Spirit’s hair turned completely grey. Before his hanging, he unsuccessfully tried to take his own life by stabbing himself in the chest with a knife while being held captive in a prison cell.

While the majority of The Apparition Trail is fictional, one event is drawn from history: the story of the Manitou Stone. This large boulder, situated on a hill near the Battle River, was held sacred by the Indians. According to an ancient prophesy, if ever the stone were moved, war, disease, and famine would follow.

In 1868, Methodist Missionary John McDougall stole the Manitou Stone, removing it by wagon to his church at Victoria Mission. According to McDougall, this “raised the ire of their (Indian) conjurers.” The stone was ultimately shipped to a Methodist church in eastern Canada.

McDougall and his family did not disappear, as they do in The Apparition Trail. McDougall lived until 1917, and during the Metis rebellion of 1885 served as a scout and translator for the Canadian militia.

The majority of the NWMP officers and men described in The Apparition Trail are drawn from history. Sam Steele was an exceptional officer who joined the NWMP at its inception in 1873, and he commanded “Steele’s Scouts” during the Metis rebellion of 1885. He later went on to serve in the Klondike during the gold rush, and in the Boer War in South Africa.

The larger-than-life character of scout Jerry Potts is also drawn from life. It would be difficult to create a more fascinating character than this hard-bitten frontiersman: Potts really did wear the skin of a black cat as his personal protective charm, and he was as tough a fighter and skilled scout as they come.

Sergeant Brock Wilde is also a historic figure — although he met his death as a result of a bullet, rather than through Indian magic. He died in 1896 after being shot by Charcoal, an Indian accused of murder whom Wilde had been pursuing. According to NWMP lore, Wilde’s body was guarded by one of his faithful hounds, which police were forced to shoot after it refused to back down from its vigil.

The American gambler Four Finger Pete is described in the memoirs of NWMP Inspector Francis Dickens, who discovered Four Finger Pete’s body after the gambler had been shot by his Peigan wife. Dickens sympathized with the woman, whose name is not recorded; he had seen the results of the beatings that Four Finger Pete gave her. Dickens covered up the death, reporting to his superiors that Four Finger Pete had simply disappeared.

Arthur Chambers is entirely fictional, although the Society for Psychical Research is an actual organization, founded in 1882. The theories of magic and the ethereal plane have their root in the beliefs of Theosophy, a mystical philosophical system that arose in 1875.

Details

The Apparition Trail

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by

Edge Science Fiction
and Fantasy Publishing

An Imprint of

HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.

P.O. Box 1714,
Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7,
Canada

Cover design by James Beveridge
e Book ISBN: 978-1-894817-70-7

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EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing and Hades Publications, Inc. acknowledges the ongoing support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.