Big Bear (5 page)

About the time that Big Bear was chosen chief, far away in the east the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences were beginning to shape the colonial provinces of British
North America into the nation of Canada. Big Bear could not know that John A. Macdonald, one of the leaders of that Confederation movement, would soon become the most powerful person in deciding the destiny of all prairie People.

The summer after Big Bear became a chief, the northern prairie tribes faced something more ominous than distant White politics or the wars and hunger and disease they continually struggled with. That summer they found that the Iron Stone was gone.

Reverend Robert Rundle, who listed 592 Cree in his Baptism Book by the Christian names he gave them, left Edmonton in 1848, and a new Methodist missionary came from Upper Canada (Ontario) to build a log church on the North Saskatchewan River halfway between Fort Pitt and Edmonton. He called the place Victoria after the Great Mother he was always talking about. This George McDougall with his son John ripped up large plots of earth for potatoes—very good food, bigger and sweeter than wild turnips—and every spring they hunted buffalo on the prairie with Cree bands led by Chiefs Maskepetoon and Pakan. They were powerful God-men both in talking and acting; it was said they intended to build another church on the Bow River, where even the Company had never had a
trading post for more than a year before the Blackfoot burned it down. In 1869, George McDougall wrote to his mission director in Toronto:

“August 23, Iron Creek: This beautiful stream derives its name from a strange formation said to be pure iron. The piece weighs 300 pounds.… Tradition says that it has lain out on the hill ever since the place was first visited by Na-ne-boo-sho after the flood had retired. For ages the tribes of the Blackfoot and Cree have gathered their clans to pay homage to this wonderful manitoo. Three years ago [1866] one of our people put the idol in his cart and brought it to [our settlement] Victoria.”

In July 1874, he mentioned the stone again (apparently it had gained weight):

“I have sent on to Red River a meteoric stone weighing 400 pounds, the great memento of the plains, and requested Brother Young to forward it to your address. I intended it for Victoria College [Cobourg, Ontario].…”

Since before time, the sacred Iron Stone had rested on its solitary, pointed hill near the Battle River, overlooking the
long ravines of Iron Creek. From beside it the Plains People could see the complete circle of Earth, could look west and north and east to the endless forests, and south over the scattered coppice of aspen fading into the light of the prairie where they found their daily food. The Blackfoot had dedicated the stone to Old Man Buffalo, guardian spirit of buffalo and protector of everyone who came to pray, and when the Cree moved onto the plains, they too worshipped there, chanting prayers and songs, leaving thank offerings for the gifts given, for the continuing hope of life for themselves and their children.

Now the Iron Stone was gone. Sweetgrass said bitterly, It’s lying beside McDougall’s church in Victoria. Our Father Lacombe would never have done that.

Big Bear answered nothing. He loved the older chief as he had loved his father, but he was concerned that Sweetgrass had let Lacombe baptize him. Big Bear could not quite trust any God-man. Until now they had done no real harm and were friendly enough to People, but they were always arguing with one another about an incomprehensible White “God” who was forever enraged about something. Big Bear had no feeling, no intuition, no dream that he should listen to any of them. And this inexplicable theft confirmed his refusal. Here was more proof that Whites respected only their own ways of
honouring the Creator: the Methodists, who had baptized Maskepetoon and continued to help him promote peace, seemingly felt no shame in stealing the Stone.

People were stunned by the theft, and the Elders foresaw certain disaster. Disease, starvation, more bitter war must follow such a desecration. Cree Chief Pakan, whose band grew acres of Methodist potatoes east of Victoria, had nothing to say; his People could not live without buffalo either. And for several years the buffalo did continue to come north, though sometimes the tribes were forced to hunt so closely together that several men might be wounded or even killed before the chiefs could negotiate a mutual withdrawal. All the beautiful Young Men, so quick to be shamed and hot-blooded on their swift horses and longing for vengeance, were always so hard to hold in check.

And more stories arrived from the east. It was said that four or five White tribes had made a treaty and now had one Big Chief and one giant country called Canada. Big Bear rolled the word around in his mouth. In Cree it echoed the word
kanâta,
meaning “the place that is clean,” though he doubted it was. The chief’s name, Macdonald, sounded Methodist.

In 1870, smallpox found the Cree again. The previous fall Blackfoot had unwittingly stolen infected blankets from a Missouri riverboat, and throughout the winter the disease
spread terror among them. As soon as he heard, Big Bear moved farther north, his band scattering beyond the North Saskatchewan, and so James Simpson with his horses to trade did not find him until late summer.

The Elders foretold this, Big Bear said sadly. Four years after Methodists stole Old Man Buffalo, we have smallpox.

Simpson said, Maybe it won’t attack your band if you stay north of the river.

Maybe we can stay long enough—if your good horses help us fish.

That evening they drank tea and smoked and remembered Chief Maskepetoon, who that spring had again ridden to the Blackfoot to make peace. In the camp of his Blackfoot father he had been greeted with ceremony and joy. But before they could talk, a Blackfoot named Big Swan, who had fought with Cree near Edmonton just days before, fired a shot and knocked the old man from his horse. In a frenzy of hatred, over the shouts of consternation and grief from the Elders, the warriors dragged Maskepetoon’s body out onto the prairie, hacked it up, and left the pieces to the dogs.

Big Bear said, He was our peace chief. There can only be more war.

Simpson murmured, Perhaps war with the Whites too.

Big Bear looked up. Why would we fight Whites?

Red River, Simpson said. Just this spring Canada marched in a thousand soldiers and chased Louis Riel across the border into the States. Half those soldiers are still there.

The Métis know what wars they want to fight. We are People.

Haven’t you heard? The Métis made Riel chief of Red River because they heard the Hudson’s Bay Company had sold the land to Canada.

Sold? What land?

Simpson said, All the land, everything around Red River, and even here where you live.

The Company has no land, just the spots where People once agreed they could build posts to trade with us.

They say Canada bought the whole land from them, everything north of the border to the mountains.

After a long pause of incomprehension, Big Bear asked, Did your father say that? That the Company
owns
our land?

Simpson snorted. Huh! My father thought he owned everything he stepped on. He doesn’t matter, but Macdonald in Ottawa matters. He says he’s bought all the land.

How can anyone “buy” or “own” land?

The question Big Bear would ask many times in the coming years. And no one would give him any more comfort than James Simpson:

I think maybe Whites can do more than we can dream of.

The trader was surprised at how many horses Big Bear’s band bartered for despite its poverty. The chief did not tell him that they were planning war. Their Assiniboine allies had begun it by sending a tobacco message: The Blackfoot are ravaged by smallpox; come, now is the time to destroy them. We will avenge your peace chief Maskepetoon, and we will have the prairie and buffalo to ourselves.

More than twenty Cree bands, including those of Big Bear and his close friend Little Pine, smoked the tobacco, and though Sweetgrass was too old for battle, most of his Young Men came as well. In early October 1870, the Cree met the Assiniboine in the Vermillion Hills and more than six hundred warriors rode west together, the largest force they had ever assembled.

They finally reached the Little Bow River and sent out scouts. They readied their Bay muzzle-loaders and rifles, their bows and arrows, spears, war clubs, and knives, but one day in council, Assiniboine Chief Piapot told them he had dreamed a dream. He had seen a buffalo with iron horns charging through camp, goring, tossing warriors aside in bloody pieces; clearly, his guardian spirit was warning him not to commit war. But the other leaders did not agree: they were eight days into Blackfoot territory and still had not met one single enemy! So
next day, while Piapot and some followers turned back, almost six hundred warriors continued south to the Oldman River, where the scouts had discovered a Blood camp within sight of the mountains. They attacked before dawn.

But, unknown to them, several much larger bands of Peigan and Blood were camped nearby, and before the Cree and Assiniboine could completely destroy the smaller camp, they were in turn attacked. These Blackfoot were armed with the latest Winchester repeater rifles and Colt revolvers traded from the Americans, and they drove the invaders back over the open prairie and into the Oldman River coulees where a few years later Whites would dig the coal mines of Lethbridge. There, after four more hours of ferocious fighting, forty Blackfoot were killed and fifty wounded, while the Cree allies escaped total annihilation only by leaving three hundred of their dead on the cliffs and in the coulees and river valley when they retreated. They were so outgunned that Jerry Potts, a half-Blood warrior who later became a guide for the North West Mounted Police, said, “You could shut your eyes and still be sure to kill a Cree.” The Blackfoot named that place Assini-etomochi, Where They Slaughtered the Cree.

Chief’s Son’s Hand protected Big Bear in the disastrous battle on the Oldman River; he wore the paw around his neck and was unharmed. His sons Twin Wolverine and Imasees also returned home not badly wounded. But the bodies of so many warriors from so many bands were left behind to be shamefully mutilated by the enemy that Cree mourning continued all winter. And in the nights when Big Bear lay sleepless under his buffalo robes, he slowly came to realize that the unbelievable stories they had heard about the Americans fighting among themselves—how in their battles uncountable thousands of men were destroyed in a single day, and almost as many horses—were true. Such White wars actually happened. The Blood and Peigan had shown them how American guns could kill.

Through the winter nights, with all his relations breathing around him, Big Bear remembered again and again riding south in darkness with the crunch of frosted grass under his horse’s hooves, and then, along the crest of the plain, the
jagged wall of snow-covered mountains slowly rising into light before him. The Cree warriors charged screaming with him into the Blood camp, the lodge-hide split at the stab of his knife, a child’s eyes stared up at him—and then the sudden, terrifying revelation of blazing mountains, like a stampede of white buffalo charging up over him, trampling all the Cree among the Blood lodges. He had thought it had been revealed only to Piapot, but gradually he knew he had to think differently. He began to understand something he could never have comprehended without that little child’s eyes and the mountains of white buffalo vision when they attacked the Blood and had been attacked in turn by repeater rifles and revolvers, beaten back into the coulees, retreat upon desperate retreat, until they fell from the cliffs into the Oldman River. He finally understood what he should have recognized in the dawn light: that the honourable battles of hand-to-hand combat with an enemy you knew by name were gone. Brutal, faceless killing war had come, war fought at such long range you could barely see a body nor find a breath between the unending bullets. Never on Earth would there be enough People to survive such capability for slaughter.

So, think different. For People to live, they must try to think like Whites too.

That winter, Sweetgrass, Big Bear, Little Pine, and all the chiefs along the river from Carlton to Rocky Mountain House agreed: war among the Plains People must end. Sweetgrass negotiated a peace treaty with the Blackfoot so that the Cree could safely visit Chief Factor William Christie of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Edmonton. On April 13, 1871, Christie sent a long letter to Lieutenant-Governor Archibald at Red River that declared: “The buffalo will soon be exterminated.… The establishment of law and order in the Saskatchewan District is of most vital importance to the interest of Canada.…” And to his letter he attached messages from the Cree:

“The Chief Sweet Grass, the Chief of the country:

“Great Father—I shake hands with you, and bid you welcome. We heard our lands were sold and we did not like it; we don’t want to sell our lands; it is our property, and no one has a right to sell them.

“Our country is getting ruined of fur-bearing animals, hitherto our sole support, and now we are poor and want help—we want you to pity us. We want cattle, tools, agricultural implements, and assistance in everything when we come to settle—our country is no longer able to support us.

“Make provision for us against years of starvation. We have had great starvation the past winter, the small-pox took away many of our people, the old, young, and children.

“We want you to stop the Americans from coming to trade on our lands, and giving firewater, ammunition and arms to our enemies, the Blackfeet.

“We made a peace this winter with the Blackfeet. Our young men are foolish, it may not last long.

“We invite you to come and see us and speak with us. If you can’t come yourself, send some one in your place.

“We send these words by our Master, Mr. Christie, in whom we have every confidence. That is all.”