Of Gabriel Dumont the world has never heard enough. Skilled, strong, brave, gentle to weakness, durable as rawhide, inflexibly faithful to his people and to Riel, whom he worshiped, he not only saw more plainly than most the desperate situation of the métis, but he was their most capable leader and their most redoubtable champion. It was Dumont who rode a round trip of 700 miles from the North Saskatchewan to Fort Benton to visit Riel and ask his aid in the fight against Ottawa’s implacable stupidities. It was Dumont who, as commander-in-chief of the métis sharpshooters, harassed Commissioner Irvine and his Mounted Police and General Middleton and his militia, beat the Mounties at Duck Lake, forced the abandonment of Fort Carlton, whipped Middleton’s column at Fish Creek, disabled the steamer Northcote that was coming downriver to the aid of the militia be sieging Batoche, and finally, against heavy odds and the overwhelming firepower of repeating rifles, 7-pounders, and one of the new Gatling guns graciously donated on a test basis by the United States, was driven out of Batoche and into hiding in the Birch Hills.
Riel, mentally ill and in despair, surrendered, but the search for Dumont threshed all the bushes along the North Saskatchewan in vain. He made his way out of the very middle of them and rode southward, striking far around through the shelter of the Cypress Hills and so into Montana to safety. His career in exile was bizarre, rather sad. A few years after his escape from Batoche he was riding a bronc in the show ring of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and shooting glass balls out of the air for the gratification and astonishment of crowds in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany. When he finally took advantage of amnesty and returned to the North Saskatchewan, the grass-grown rifle pits and the mounds and tilted headboards above his dead companions at Batoche must have seemed to him to mark the grave of his race. As for Riel, the unstable and brilliant Moses of this people, a vindictive volunteer hangman had adjusted the noose around his neck in Regina on November 16, 1885, ending forever the hope of an ethnic or national identity for the métis. They buried the last memory of that hope when they carried Gabriel Dumont to his grave in Batoche, a ragged and shuffling remnant, muttering, “Gabriel Dumont est mort. Pauvre Gabriel!”
Pauvre Gabriel. Pauvres métis. But none of this had happened, the end was nearly twenty years off, when they first turned their shrieking, dry-axled Red River carts up the slopes of the Montagne aux Cypres, and in those years after 1868 they were no shuffling remnant. They were as colorful a crowd as ever hit the Plains—and the Plains, perhaps because of their own tawny monotony, have specialized in colorful people.
Their invention and their trademark was the Red River cart, which did for the Plains what the York boats and canoes did for the river routes of the fur trade. In 1801 Alexander Henry the Younger wrote in his journal, “Men now go again for meat, with small carts, the wheels of which are one solid piece, sawed off the ends of trees whose diameter is three feet,” and in 1803 he remarked that “This invention is worth four horses to us, as it would require five horses to carry as much on their backs as one will drag in each of these large carts.” The saving in horses became proportionately greater as the design of the carts improved. The later models, with dished spoked wheels instead of sections of trees, would carry a load of five hundred pounds, and a single pony could haul one fifty miles a day. They were generally hooped like a covered wagon, and covered with canvas or summer bearskins. The wheels were so large in the developed form of the cart that even in a runaway the thing could hardly tip over; a photograph taken of some métis traders by the Boundary Survey party in 1874 shows the wheels as high as a man’s head, the rims even at that late date still bound with shrunken rawhide. It was in every way a triumph of adaptation to the conditions of the Plains. It was light, strong, durable, and being made entirely of wood and skins, could be easily mended and even made by men a long way from civilization. When there was a river to be crossed, the wheels could be taken off and lashed under the box and the whole thing floated or towed. In a very real way it was a symbol of the métis’ ingenuity in utilizing whatever they needed from two cultures. To the Indian travois they added the Quebec cart, and without losing mobility, gained carrying capacity.
They also gained something else: noise. The axles were unpeeled poplar or cottonwood logs, and the wheels could not be greased because grease would have collected dust and frozen the hubs to the axles. The shriek of a single Red River cart was enough to set tenderfoot visitors writing home: it was an experience of an excruciating kind. But when they went out a hundred or two hundred at a time, as they did on the annual Red River buffalo hunts, the uproar was beyond imagination. They came like ten thousand devils filing saws, like the Gadarene swine in their frenzy, like the shrieking damned; and they came accompanied by barking dogs, yelling riders, youths shooting off guns—a crawling caravan with a busy cloud of extra horses, oxen, riders swinging wide to stay out of the dust. This was what carried supplies from St. Paul and Pembina to the more northerly posts; this was what went out after robes and pemmican, year by year following the herds farther west. As Howard says, “The Red River cart brigades never sneaked up on anybody. On a still day you could hear them coming for miles, and see the great cloud of yellow dust they raised; and if the buffalo of the plains did finally flee into holes in the ground as the Indians believed—well, it was no wonder.”
They were the noisiest and most efficient thing on the prairies for more than three quarters of a century, from their first introduction sometime around 1800 to the coming of the railroads and the ending of the buffalo, the two events that did them in. Every year, as the brigade made its ear-splitting way back toward the District of Assiniboia, loaded with robes and meat and hundred-pound skin sacks of pemmican, some of the métis stayed behind and scattered in small bands or family groups like Woods Indians, to spend the winter trapping and hunting. High ground, with its wood and water, was essential to them, and as the whole economy was pulled westward by the diminishing buffalo, métis winterers made themselves at home in Turtle Mountain, the wooded banks of the Qu‘Appelle Fork, the Touchwood Hills, Wood Mountain, the Cypress Hills, the Sweetgrass Hills, the Bearpaws and Little Rockies.
These hivernants were the most Indian of the métis; unlike their settled compatriots in Assiniboia, they were unlikely to settle in permanent cabins, grow gardens, or in other ways temper their nomadism. Their villages in the remote hills were only semi-settlements, trading posts dealing mainly in whiskey. The communities that formed in autumn disintegrated, as often as not, in spring. It was probably just as well, for a cabin, being immovable, collected more dirt and more vermin than a skin lodge whose location frequently changed. The hivernant villages were undoubtedly crawling and filthy, and the moral excesses of a people with few social restrictions were likely to sadden the traveling priests who went as missionaries along the remote frontier, doing their best to bring these savage ones back to civilization by solemnizing marriages, baptizing children, and burning tallow dips for the dead. Drunkenness, whenever there was whiskey to be had, was universal, and from all accounts often appalling in its violence. The more Indian the métis, the more insatiable their desire for drink. On the other hand, there were amenities: they were a dancing and singing people, generally gay and volatile. In any gathering there was likely to be a fiddler. Unwashed and barbarous and infested as it was, this was the germ of a culture that could have come to something in its own special terms if history had been kind.
There is no telling exactly where the first village of métis in the Cypress Hills was located, except that it was somewhere along the Whitemud, which the winterers called the Rivière Blanche. Unless this earliest village occupied the Chimney Coulee site that later buildings pre-empted, there is not a trace of it except the reports of Father Lestanc, a missionary priest, to his Bishop in St. Boniface, eight hundred miles back toward civilization on the Red River. The winterers evidently came in 1868, fifteen families of them, and they seem to have been the first. Their settlement, unless its foundation stones are mingled wi
th later foundations on Chimney Coulee, was hardly more permanent than the camps of the war parties in the Hills.
But once they began coming, they came in increasing numbers, and after 1870 they were reinforced by political refugees from the Red River. The least Indian of the métis were likely to settle in communities along the North Saskatchewan, reconstituting, far from Canadian interference, the kinds of farms and villages they had had on the Assiniboine and the Red. The more Indian ones; became winterers and whiskey traders. In the Cypress Hills they found a sanctuary nearly idyllic. Game was as plentiful as any had ever seen it—more plentiful than any would ever see it again. As late as 1873 a party spent seven days, riding twenty to thirty miles a day, south of the Hills, and all that time they were riding through one placidly grazing buffalo herd. A Mountie the next year estimated eighty thousand animals in a single group as he rode from the Hills to Fort Benton, and that same year a member of the American Boundary Commission looked around him from a hill and could not see the end of the herd in any direction. The coulees of the Hills themselves were opulent with elk and bear, the antelope moved across the aprons of the hills like cloud shadows, the Rivière Blanche and the smaller streams were full of unhunted beaver, mink, otter, ermine, and muskrat.
Beaver heaven, elk heaven, bear heaven, buffalo heaven. Yet the coming of the winterers was the beginning of something ominous and inescapable, for within hardly more than a decade of their arrival these Hills, surviving wilderness, last refuge, would be stripped like the rest of the West, and a way of life would be over. The métis themselves would help destroy the world that nourished them. Their bequest to the future would be death and emptiness; they would clear the grasslands and coulees for another sowing.
5
Company of Adventurers
In my boyhood the Hudson’s Bay Company meant to me hardly more than a mail-order catalogue—one less commonly used than the T. Eaton and Sears Roebuck catalogs—and the somewhat obscure source of the red point blankets that I slept under. Somebody might have enlarged me by putting in my hands a book called Company of Adventurers, by a man named Isaac Cowie.
The son of the Hudson’s Bay Company agent in the Shetland Islands, he landed at York Factory for a tour of duty as a junior clerk on August 12, 1867. The ancient and bloody rivalry with the North-West Company was almost two generations past, having been healed by merger in 1821. The Company’s unchallenged position in the northwest was also over: since the expiration of its monopoly license in 1859, free trade, in theory at least, had flourished on the Red River and out along the two branches of the Saskatchewan. And on November 19, 1869, when Cowie was at Fort Qu‘Appelle, the Company signed the deed of surrender in which it gave up to the new Dominion of Canada the complete legislative, judicial, and executive power it had exercised over Rupert’s Land since 1670.
The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay had built their two-hundred-year empire with a slim organization of young Scots and Orkneymen for their clerks and factors, and with so-called “English halfbreeds,” possessing varying mixtures of Scot and Swampy Cree blood, as menials. Isaac Cowie, though he served in the late twilight of the Company’s great period, was of the authentic Orkney breed.
He was intelligent, resolute, made of rock or iron. Dispatched to the prairie post at Fort Qu‘Appelle, he demonstrated that he was capable of facing down a bunch of drunk and murderous Indians, and of controlling the independent métis traders who undercut the Company’s no-liquor policy, and of keeping the loyalty of an isolated and polyglot band of Company servants. During the smallpox epidemic which began in 1869, Cowie took lymph from the arm of a recently vaccinated daughter of Pascal Breland, one of the métis leaders, and from it made vaccine that stopped the disease in its tracks around Swan River, though elsewhere on the Plains, that year and the next, it so decimated and demoralized the tribes, especially the Blackfoot, that they never fully regained their power to make war. Trader, doctor, soldier, judge, explorer, he fulfilled his function as a Company agent, and was one of those who steered the Saskatchewan country through the transition years from wild to half tamed. Also he was nearly the beginning of recorded knowledge with respect to the Cypress Hills. Except for the brief notices of Palliser and Hind, and the letters of Father Lestanc to the Bishop of St. Boniface, Cowie’s information about the Hills was the first. In many ways it was not encouraging.
On an October day, such a day as that in 1871 when Cowie and his party came across from Fort Qu‘Appelle to establish a winter post, the Hills would have been visible from far out on the prairie, a humped arch across the west mellow with autumn. Even from the Big Sandy Hills, twenty miles to the northeast, where they camped next to a big Indian gathering, they should have been able to see dark blotches of timber on the bench, the jackpine that the métis called cypre. They might have seen still unshaken tatters of golden aspen tonguing down the coulees. The smells on that October prairie, once one got upwind from the Indian encampment, would have been the smell of curly grass cured on the stem, of smoke from bois de vache fires, the ammoniac odor of horse herds. The sky would have been brassy, the wind clean. If it was from the west, which it should have been, Cowie’s men might have imagined on it the tang of autumnal berry patches and the coolness of living streams.
Or the odor of death. For out of this big camp of Cree and Saulteaux and Assiniboin that had been called together for a sun dance and for the purpose of letting the unmolested buffalo herds find their way back to the eastward without being harassed by small bands of hunters, a vainglorious crowd of sixty young Cree had on the day before gone over to the Hills to collect spruce gum. They wanted to please their girls, they wanted to show off their courage on the edge of the Blackfoot country; and their confidence was increased by the fact that the Blackfoot had been so damaged by the smallpox for the past two winters that they had lost the heart for war. Still, there was the adventurous chance that some might be around. Because the Cree did not have even yet as many horses as the Blackfoot, they did not go to war mounted, though, as Cowie says, they hoped to return that way. Now they went afoot to the Hills for their spruce gum, half hoping that there might be a war party of the enemy around that could be induced to start something.
They got both their gum and their wish. Eyes watched them as they stripped pitch from the trees, eyes watched them as they started back across the plain toward the big camp. And when they were well out on the prairie, totally exposed, with not even burnouts for cover, they looked back and saw the boiling dust of a great Blackfoot war party racing to intercept and surround them. The Cree did not run, like the Gros Ventre and the Crow of Rising Wolfs story, who had been shot and clubbed from their horses only a few miles south. Being afoot, the Cree could not have run if they had chosen to. They fought it out in a dust-hazed circle of death, and they lay out there now, all sixty of them, scalped and mutilated and quilled with arrows, victims of a historical process of displacement, and a testimonial to the truth that for Plains warfare an adequate supply of horses might overpower an adequate supply of guns, but that an adequate supply of both was incomparably better than either. The main Cree camp when Cowie’s men came into it was loud with the wailing of relatives, with threats of vengeance against the Blackfoot, and with mutterings of discontent against the British, who according to the Indian view subsisted entirely on pemmican and thus forced poor Indians out into territory where they had to risk death from their enemies in order to kill the buffalo demanded by insatiable British appetites.
It was the hope of bringing together the Blackfoot from the west and the Cree, Saulteaux, and Assiniboin from the east and south, and of pacifying them through the mutual benefits of trade, that had brought Cowie to the Montagne aux Cypre. If a post in the Cypress Hills proved successful—and the first métis villages, plus the taming effect of the smallpox, seemed to suggest that it might—the Company proposed to build a permanent post somewhere on the upper South Saskatchewan specifically for the Blackfoot
trade, thus restoring the situation that had obtained when the Nor‘westers had Chesterfield House and Old Bow Fort on the flank of the Rockies. The Blackfoot gave Cowie an object lesson in the difficulties of his task before he ever arrived.
Nevertheless, he built his post on a shelf at the east end of the Hills, overlooking the sweep of prairie where the sixty Cree had died; he was right above the little pond which sent its rills to two oceans. Below the single line of the post buildings was a second line of cabins put up by freemen and independent métis traders. Together, they were a strong enough party so that they did not bother to fortify or build a stockade, though the wooded coulee to the north and the high timbered bench to the west provided cover from which they knew they were often watched.
Their efforts to woo the suspicious Blackfoot got nowhere, but the trade, during that winter when frequent chinooks kept the snow melted off the hills and their horses grew fat on the curly grass, was tremendous. Many hands were against Cowie; the independents, some of them armed with the whiskey which Company policy forbade him to dispense, cut heavily into his operations. Yet his share of the trade for that one winter included 750 grizzly bear skins and 1500 elk hides, plus hundreds of the smaller and more valuable furs. He estimated that the independents got as many more. Many of the bear skins, some as big as thirteen feet from nose to tail, were unprime summer hides got when Indians or métis caught bears out on the flats and killed them in a running fight from horseback. This, presumably, was sport. It is a reliable index to the life they lived. If riding in on a bear that stands a dozen feet high on his hind legs, with claws five or six inches long and arms that can break the neck of a horse or the back of a man with one cuff, can be called sport, the serious business of life has a wonderfully rugged sound. Those summer hides were not even worth much. The men who risked their lives to get them usually used them as cart covers.