Wolf Willow

  I wish somebody had told us how the tough Irishman Walsh, friendly to Indians but a realist, a good policeman and absolutely without nerves, rode in upon the camp of the first 3000 hostiles on Wood Mountain. With twelve men he rode through a fringe of warriors some of whom carried carbines wrenched from the hands of Custer’s dying cavalrymen, past a horse herd many of whose horses and mules wore the United States Army brand, among lodges where American scalps still hung drying in the smoke, and in a meeting with White Eagle, Black Moon, Spotted Eagle, Little Knife, Long Dog, and their surly warriors, he told them how they would behave if they wanted to stay in the Great Mother’s country. They said they were tired of war and wanted peace. Fine. They would do no injury to man, woman, or child; they would steal nothing, not so much as a horse; they would not fight, either among themselves or with the Canadian Indians; they would not hide behind the Medicine Line for the winter and then go raiding down south as soon as the prairies dried; they would not ever hunt beyond the Medicine Line, and they would smuggle no ammunition over it to their friends.

  How bold a speech, how sublime a faith in the rightness of the Canadian occupation and the strength of Canadian law, considering that these Indians had hardly cooled from a bloodletting of white soldiers unmatched since Braddock’s defeat, and that the police, outnumbered thirty or forty to one, had no chance of help nearer than several hundred miles. He told them the rules and they said they would obey: White Eagle, the Sisseton, had told them that the White Forehead Chief was a man of his word. They asked, almost humbly, for ammunition to hunt the buffalo, which they were forced now to lasso or to kill with lances made of knives bound to poles. Almost as if he possessed the power he assumed, Walsh granted to Jean Louis Legaré, the Wood Mountain trader destined to escort Sitting Bull back to captivity five years later, the right to sell the Sioux ammunition they could have taken by force any time they chose.

  Later in the spring of 1877 Walsh repeated his lecture to fifty-seven lodges of Tetons under Four Horns, whom he intercepted just as they moved into Canada along the Frenchman. The Tetons were not as amenable as the first camp. One of their number persuaded them that Walsh could not be trusted, and they held him and his scouts in camp until messengers could be sent to confer with the Yanktons down at Burnt Timber. Next morning Medicine Bear and Black Horn and two hundred warriors painted for war poured across the Line and up to the Mud House Ford ready to revenge upon their own people any harm that might have come to Walsh. The nameless Teton who had called Walsh a Long Knife spy slid away in the excitement of the speech-making, and so saved his scalp.

  Not too many days after that, Walsh repeated his lecture for the third time, this time to Sitting Bull himself, who had encamped with his band of Tetons near Pinto Horse Butte, between Wood Mountain and the Cypress Hills. He got from Sitting Bull the same answer he had had from Spotted Eagle and Four Horns and Long Dog. They were tired of war, they wanted to make their homes in the Great Mother’s country, they would keep the peace.

  Having clamped the lid on the kettle before it had a chance to boil, Walsh and later his replacement, Inspector L. N. F. Crozier, had to keep it on. The Sioux were not the only American Indians wandering north of the Line in 1877. Two months after Sitting Bull crossed over, there came a big encampment of South Assiniboin under Crow’s Dance. They announced their arrival by roughing up a small camp of Canadian Saulteaux and demanding that the Saulteaux join them and submit to their hunting rules. Instead, the Saulteaux chief Little Child went to Walsh, and Walsh with seventeen men went directly to the camp of Crow’s Dance. Arriving early in the morning, he left the surgeon and three men to build a barricade on which the others could fall back if a fight started. Then he and the other thirteen went into camp, entered the lodges, came out with twenty-two chiefs as prisoners, and bluffed their way out to the barricade, from which they stood off the Assiniboin frenzy without firing a shot. Crow’s Dance and Crooked Arm, the head men, spent some months in a Mounted Police jail. The rest learned what the Sioux had had the wit to accept early: the law applied to everybody.

  It kept the Mounties busy applying it. Time after time a handful of constables and scouts had to pluck horse thieves or stolen horses out of the midst of threatening clots of warriors. The daughter of the trader at Wood Mountain had the experience of being held with a knife at her throat while her Sioux captors demanded flour from her father, and her father stood with a pistol at the head of a powder keg threatening to blow them all up if the Sioux moved. Who made the move, finally, was a group of Mounties and ex-Mounties who burst in and threw the Sioux out—a procedure for which Walsh himself had set a precedent when he once threw Sitting Bull out the door, seizing the great man of the Sioux nation by the scruff and the seat and pitching him out in the dirt and then defying the furious stir of rage and threats until it subsided.

  Through the almost five years of the Sioux visitation, from the end of 1876 to the summer of 1881, the Mounted Police kept the lid on, throttled the whiskey traffic, rode thousands of miles on patrol, noted in their patrol books the passage of every stray Indian or white or métis, every stray horse, every unfamiliar brand. When, in August, 1877, word came that the Nez Percé were headed for the Line pursued by General Howard and General Gibbon, Walsh had warning speeches to make to the aroused councils of the Sioux with all the war chiefs present. They were hot to start south to help the Nez Percé and have another go at the American cavalry. Walsh reminded them that if they went they would not be back; under those circumstances they would find the red coats hunting them as the blue coats hunted them now. The Sioux stayed. But when the refugees from Chief Joseph’s long-running battle limped in, wounded, exhausted, stripped of everything but horse and gun, there was more need for Walsh’s iron hand. He again calmed the angry Sioux, and he gave the Nez Percé sanctuary and his lecture on Canadian law. They were White Bird and ninety-eight men, fifty women, and about fifty children, the battered remnant of a tribe that their conqueror General Miles called “the boldest men and the best marksmen” he had ever known. They had been friends of the whites since Lewis and Clark first met them under their other name of Chopunnish. Half Americanized, some of them Christians, house-dwellers, farmers, they had been cheated and abused until they made one of the last, the most desperate, and certainly one of the most heroic of the Indian revolts against the system that was destroying their life.

  The heartbreaking Nez Percé refugees were not likely in themselves to add to the police burden. They were simply, like the Sioux and Gros Ventre and Assiniboin that kept drifting in, part of the ethnic junk heap that was piling up between Wood Mountain and the Cypress Hills as the Plains frontier worked toward the end of its first phase. But their condition so infuriated the Sioux, who were still powerful and capable of war, that there was constant fighting talk, and when Walsh brought word that General Alfred Terry and an American commission wanted to confer with the Sioux at Fort Walsh, it took all the prestige Walsh had, and all his argumentative persistence, to persuade Sitting Bull to attend. He would come only on the assurance that he had the protection of the Mounted Police, and he would promise nothing.

  With twenty chiefs, Walsh left the camp near Pinto Horse Butte, and midway between there and Fort Walsh, probably near the bends where the Frenchman eased out of the Hills and where my town would later stand, they met Commissioner Macleod coming from the west, and they camped and feasted together. I know how that October river bottom would have looked and smelled with the skin lodges and the willow fires and the roasting meat—the smells of autumn and the muddy banks, the Indian Summer pungency of drying leaves and rose hips, the special and secret smell of wolf willow, the glint of yellow and red leaves shaking down over the camp in a chilly night wind. It is an actual pleasure to think that their boots and moccasins printed the gray silt of those bottoms where my bare feet would kick up dust years later. I like the thought of them camping there, great men of their time and kind, bent upon an errand that would bring other great men from below th
e 49th parallel, including correspondents from the New York Herald and the Chicago Times. Except for Henri Julien, who had accompanied the Mounties on their march west in 1874 as artist and correspondent for the Canadian Illustrated News, those were almost the only newspapermen who were ever lured to our Hills by anything.

  The conference for which Sioux, red coats, and American officers assembled at Fort Walsh on October 17, 1877, was one of the briefest and least productive in history. There was one meeting. General Terry offered the Sioux amnesty, reservations, cattle, and allotments, and suggested that they had better come on home. The Sioux rose one by one and said that the Americans were liars, that they had never kept a promise, and that the Sioux would be fools to believe them now after having been cheated and deceived so often. They ironically introduced the squaw of Bear That Scatters, a move that in itself was an insult, since women did not sit on Indian councils. The wife of Bear That Scatters had been coached in a short speech. The Long Knives, she complained, were not giving her time to breed. She would like to stay here and have some children. The chiefs, for their part, said many times that they would not go back, that they wanted to be Canadian Indians. They shook hands many times with Macleod and Walsh, and wrapped their robes around them when it might have been time to shake hands with General Terry or his commissioners. So the commissioners gave it up and went home, and the Sioux stayed around Fort Walsh and made themselves sick on plum pudding and other items that Macleod had brought over for the occasion.

  But the Sioux were not, whatever their desire, Canadian Indians, and Walsh and Macleod had to tell them so. They were not entitled to payments under any of the seven treaties which Canada had made with the tribes, and when others came in for treaty money the Sioux were left out. In 1877 there were still plenty of buffalo along the Frenchman, but by 1879 they were almost gone, and when starvation began to look in the lodge flaps of all the Indians on that border, it looked longest and most hungrily in on Sioux and Nez Percé. By persistent tactics of never dealing with Sitting Bull as head chief, but undercutting his power by consulting others, Walsh and Crozier whittled the great magician of the Tetons down to smaller and smaller size, and by 1880 had whittled away more than twelve hundred of his followers and persuaded them to return to agencies south of the Line. On July 11, 1881, Sitting Bull and his last supporters, quar reling over a few bags of flour and bitter at what they had been brought to, started out from Willow Bunch with Louis Legaré, and made their scarecrow march southward through the whitened buffalo bones. A week later they met Captain Clifford at the place now called Plentywood, Montana. The day after that, the gates of Fort Buford closed behind them and their guns were stacked in the yard and the Plains Indians were done.

  Fort Walsh was almost done, too. It had never been a healthful site. Unexplained fevers swept it and its satellite village; the water from Battle Creek, polluted by buffalo and horse carcasses in the swamps above, brought typhoid into their tin cups and canteens. And two great movements of history, one just closing and one about to begin, united in persuading the police that another headquarters would serve them better, and that even as a post Fort Walsh should not be maintained. After the starving winters it became clear that reservations farther north, in the fertile belt along the North Saskatchewan, would provide more chance for farming and Indian self-sufficiency. More than that, the Hills were too close to the border. However successfully the police might deal with Sitting Bull’s exiles, they were never able to control the horse-stealing that went on in both directions across the Line, and it seemed sound policy to move the Canadian Indians far enough north so that they would neither be tempted to raid, nor be tempting objects of raids from the American side. Finally, the Canadian Pacific was building very rapidly west, and one of the major police jobs of the new era would be protecting the men who were doing the building. By the winter of 1882, headquarters had been moved to Wascana or Pile o’ Bones Creek, on the CPR main line, and the city that was being built there and called Regina after the queen. In May, 1883, Fort Walsh was dismantled and as much of its building material as could be salvaged was hauled to Maple Creek, on the railroad, to be used in building detachment posts there and in Medicine Hat, farther west on the South Saskatchewan. From the Maple Creek post, patrols could still ride the trail south to Kennedy’s Crossing, or east to Eastend, Pinto Horse Butte, and Wood Mountain.

  The wild and dangerous frontier had gone out like a blown match. Instead of taming wild men in wild places, the Mounted Police would increasingly find themselves protecting civilized men in places rapidly becoming tame. As for the Cypress Hills, only a little more than a decade after Cowie moved cautiously into them they lay all but empty from Medicine Lodge Coulee to Eastend, cleared of their grizzlies and elk, their flanks swept clean of buffalo, their ravines and valleys emptied of Indians. Only a few transitional figures remained. Abe Farwell, now ranching on a tributary of the Frenchman near where it flows out of Cypress Lake, was one; several Mounted Policemen who had served their terms and taken their allotments of land, certain métis who had squatted along the creeks, certain hide hunters who had seen the handwriting on the wall, made a thin and scattered population. Little by little, in the next twenty-five years, cattle would replace the buffalo, some of them whiteface and “shorthorn”—meaning anything not a longhorn—and some of them ringy old longhorns driven all the way up from the Rio Grande to stock the northern ranges. There would be room in the history of the Hills for one cowboy generation, and like its earlier counterpart it would be made up of many kinds: drifters from the American Plains all the way from Texas to Montana, Irish immigrant boys, venturesome English youths with too little self-control or too many elder brothers, made-over Mounties, French aristocrats, métis squatters, reformed whiskey traders. They would have this kingly range to themselves until 1906, long after nesters, barbed wire, and weather had pinched off the open-range running of cattle in the States.

  I wish I had known some of this. Then, sunk solitary as a bear in a spider-webby, sweaty, fruit-smelling saskatoon patch in Chimney Coulee on a hot afternoon, I might have felt as companionship and reassurance the presence of the traders, métis, Indians, and Mounties whose old cabins were rectangles of foundation stones under the long grass, and whose chimneys crumbled a little lower every year. Kicking up an arrowhead at the Lazy-S ford, I might have peopled my imagination with a camp among the bends of the Whitemud and had the company of Sitting Bull, Long Dog, Spotted Eagle, Walsh, Macleod, Léveillé—some Indian Summer evening when smoke lay in fragrant scarves along the willows and the swallows were twittering to their holes in the clay cutbanks and a muskrat came pushing a dark-silver wedge of water upstream. I knew the swallows and the muskrats, and was at ease with them; we were all members of the timeless natural world. But Time, which man invented, I did not know. I was an unpeopled and unhistoried wilderness, I possessed hardly any of the associations with which human tradition defines and enriches itself.

  I have sat many times all alone just inside the edge of one of the aspen coulees that tongued down from the North Bench, and heard the soft puffs of summer wind rattle the leaves, and felt how sun and shadow scattered and returned like disturbed sage-hen chicks; and in some way of ignorance and innocence and pure perception I have bent my entire consciousness upon white anemones among the white aspen boles. They were rare and beautiful to me, and they grew only there in the dapple of the woods—flowers whose name I did not know and could not possibly have found out and would not have asked, because I thought that only I knew about them and I wanted no one else to know.

  Those are most peaceful images in my mind. I don’t know why, remembering them, I think of Marmaduke Graburn. Perhaps because his grave lies under the same sky, with the same big light and the same quiet over it; perhaps because he died in such a coulee as this, and died young.

  In 1879 he was nineteen years old, a rookie sub-constable recently recruited in Ottawa, a boy with an itch for adventure and a name that might have come out of a Vic
torian novel. Graburn Coulee, back of Fort Walsh a few miles, is the name the maps now give to the draw where he rode alone after an axe he had left behind, and was followed and shot in the back of the head by Star Child, a Blood Indian with a grudge. He died alone and uselessly, the victim of brainless spite. Métis trackers led by Jerry Potts and Louis Léveillé found first the tracks of his shod horse where they were joined by two barefoot Indian ponies; then his pillbox forage cap beside the trail; then his body, dumped into a ravine. He was not the first Mountie to die on the job. Others had died of fever, or gone under in the quicksand of rivers, but he was the first to die by violence. In their first five years, from the beginning of the march from Fort Dufferin to the time when Star Child raised his sawed-off fusee behind the unsuspecting boy in an aspen-whispering coulee in 1879, the Mounted Police had neither killed nor been killed. Merely by the unusualness of his death, young Graburn demonstrated the quality of the force to which he belonged. They had come to the Cypress Hills in 1875 to smother a hornet’s nest. In 1883 they left the Hills pacified and safe, almost as peaceful as when I wandered through the coulees with a .22 and found nothing more dangerous than cottontails and anemones, or a lynx that might have been the product of my yearning imagination.

  III

  THE WHITEMUD RIVER RANGE

  To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth—disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.