A Geography of Blood (14 page)

A few months later, Chief Spotted Eagle and his followers left their camp near the East End police post and headed across the line, where they surrendered their guns, their horses, and their freedom. Sitting Bull held on for one final winter, but by July of 1881, he too had given up, and he and his people turned themselves over to American authorities at Fort Buford. A number of families chose to remain at Wood Mountain, still hoping for a reserve, and their request would be granted, in a token way, after a wait of forty-nine years.

If the Lakota refugees were on their way down and out, Canada's treaty Indians were supposed to be on their way up, on a fast track toward prosperity and independence. Yet, in the spring of 1881, when Indian Affairs had sent a chief from the Qu'Appelle Valley to Fort Walsh on a mission to persuade people who were receiving rations there to head east and settle on their reserves, things had not gone as planned. Instead of staying on message, the chief had spoken urgently about sickness and hunger in the Qu'Appelle and told everyone to stay where they were. The tension had continued to intensify throughout the summer, as twelve hundred people from the Saskatchewan River country deserted their reserves and fled to the Cypress Hills. The nights throbbed with drum songs, and the atmosphere crackled with bitter stories about shoddy farm equipment, wild oxen, stringy cattle, incompetent instructors, inedible rations—hunger, always hunger—and the blatant inadequacy of the treaties.

The official response was unsympathetic. Yes, there may have been a few glitches, the authorities admitted, but that was no excuse for getting all riled up. Just go home, get back to work, and stop “exciting sedition.”
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Indians were such awful complainers; you just couldn't satisfy them. Meanwhile, emergency updates and instructions were crisscrossing the continent in frantic telegrams—Fort Walsh to Dewdney in Winnipeg, Winnipeg to head office, Ottawa to Winnipeg to Fort Walsh—their meaning carefully enshrouded in a secret code. In the absence of an all-Canadian telegraph system, the messages had to be sent by mail to Fort Assinniboine and east via the United States. If the Americans found out what was happening or, worse yet, if the Canadian newspapers were to catch on, there would be no end of hell to pay in Ottawa. Better to keep the trouble hush-hush.

Telegram, Dewdney to Ottawa, July 16, 1881
[reporting from Fort Walsh]: abridge suspicious decayed Jeweler incommoded propitiously Moral Persuasion about explaining Incommoded relax transaction inertness Granulate nutmeg fornication resumes redeemable overturned abrogating Walsh amulet fornication abridged Fergus ottoman unconscionable transaction Inertness zenith be left there to their own resources thwarting articulately nowadays Shears transaction surgery from our pursuing such a course
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Translation, scribbled in pencil, between the lines
[reporting from Fort Walsh]: A sumptuous dance is in progress. Moral Persuasion about exhausted in regards to Indians going north for reservations. Recommend our abandoning Walsh altogether for a year or two. The Indians would be left there to their own resources. There are no settlers to suffer from our pursuing such a course.

In the government's codebook, “Inertness” stood for “Indians,” to be pruned back by “settlers,” or “Shears.” An “unconscionable transaction” remained as unconscionable as ever.

The tension that had been simmering all summer came to a boil that August 1881. By then, there were about 3,300 treaty people congregated in the hills, against a garrison at Fort Walsh of 97 police. The balance tipped even further when Chiefs Little Pine and Lucky Man, with all their followers, came in from the south to receive their annual treaty payments. (The treaties provided for a yearly dispersal of $5 per person, $15 for a councilor, and $25 for a chief, as a reaffirmation of goodwill and the terms for a lasting peace.) As members of the Cree camps in Montana, the newcomers had spent most of the previous two years struggling to support themselves. Now, they joined the struggle to hold the Canadian authorities accountable for their errors and omissions. My people and I will not accept our payments, Little Pine declared, unless our relatives whom the government describes as “half-breeds” are added to the treaty lists and allowed to share in the meager benefits.

The officials at the fort dismissed this idea out of hand, arguing that the Métis had been dealt with back in the 1870s when, after the Riel Rebellion, each adult male had been granted either a half-section of land or an equivalent in “half-breed scrip.” Not so, Chief Little Pine said. These people in the hills had never been given land, and anyone could see that they were in a bad way now. Admit them to the treaties, Little Pine said, or—

Well aware of their precarious position, the police wasted no time in responding to the unspoken threat. A fatigue was immediately ordered to clear out the bastions (which had been used for storing oats) and to build emplacements for the four seven-pound cannons. A field gun soon stared vacantly in each direction, armed and dangerous. Meanwhile, the constables were issued with extra Winchesters and confined to the fort, ready for action at a moment's notice.

And then the whole protest fizzled even faster than it had blown up. If there is a force stronger than the call of justice, it is the call of clothing, shelter, and food. Buffalo had been sighted just east of the hills.
Otapanihowin:
Livelihood. In their relief, the hunters set aside their grievances, collected their treaty payments, and prepared to set out for the plains. Drums pounded in jubilation and brightly dressed riders galloped around the parade ground, performing precision maneuvers, swinging under their horses' necks as if, for the moment, life was worth celebrating again. But the Canadian government was in no mood for partying.

By the end of the summer, the Great Mother had snapped. As embodied by bureaucrats like Edgar Dewdney, she was officially fed up with trying to keep control of the “large numbers of Worthless and lazy Indians” who had been drawn to the Cypress Hills.
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If only the Indians had done as they were told, Dewdney argued, if they had stayed on their reserves and put in an honest day's work, they would not now be in such a fractious and perilous condition. As for suggestions that the government might be partly to blame for the failure of its Indian policies—well, honestly, such statements hardly deserved a response. Let me tell you, the bureaucrats blustered, what the real problem is: Indians are too primitive and childlike to know what is good for them. It is time for a firm hand to take over, in loco parentis.

What the situation demanded, Dewdney decided, was a complete clear-out of the Cypress Hills. Fort Walsh would be closed at the earliest possible juncture, not just for a year or two but permanently. The farm on Maple Creek would be abandoned—too bad, since it alone of the government's efforts had proven a success—and past commitments regarding reserves in the hills were hereby suspended. From now on, all efforts were to focus on “persuading” the Indians to accept reserves in the Battleford district or the Qu'Appelle, in accordance with the government's sense of their tribal affiliations and homelands. To encourage compliance, rations would be withheld from anyone who lingered, except in the most dire of circumstances, when agents were allowed to provide just enough aid to keep people from starving to death. If anyone suffered under these directives, it would be their own fault. “The longer they continue to act against the wishes of the Government,” Dewdney wrote, “the more wretched will they become.”
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These orders were in violation of the oral and written texts of the treaties, which had promised freedom of movement, an equal say in reserve selection, and kindness in times of urgent need. But what did those flowery old promises matter when Macdonald's railway was finally a-building and the long-anticipated inrush of settlers was about to be unleashed. The Indians had to be brought into line, whatever the means.

It was under this draconian rule that a hunger camp began to assemble on the shores of Cypress Lake. Piapot and his people were among the first to arrive, in December of 1881, in the twilight of
pawacakinasisi-pisîm,
the Blizzard Moon. Fortunately, fish could be drawn up from under the ice, and pathetic clusters of bachelor bulls still sometimes wandered by, providing the camp with the means to survive. Every couple of weeks, someone would walk to Fort Walsh and ask for a handful of cartridges, a few fish hooks, or a small ration of flour. “The Indians are certainly doing their best to hunt and gain their own living,” the Indian agent observed.
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Still, when he tried to get them to do chores around the fort in return for his assistance (since it was universally agreed that charity without a return of work would cause irreparable moral harm), he noticed that they were sometimes reluctant to comply. “As a great many had no moccasins and all were poorly clad, it was difficult to get them to go out in the cold,” he reported.
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When spring came, the camp at the lake was enlarged by several hundred additional souls, as the people who had been hunting in Montana again began fleeing north. The American military, tired of playing its lethal game of cat-and-mouse with the “British” intruders, had finally resorted to a full-out assault to get rid of the “foreigners.” Little Pine and Lucky Man arrived at the lake in early April—
ayik-pisîm,
the Frog Moon—to the dismaying news that they were also being evicted from the Cypress Hills. To compound the injury, the Great Mother, with whom the two returning chiefs had smoked the pipe in treaty less than three years before, was now threatening to starve them into obeying her orders.

By the time Big Bear came into camp a few weeks later, the program of removals was already well advanced. Cowessess and The Man Who Took the Coat were among the first to leave, though both were “very loath to go.”
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Piapot and his people followed in midsummer. Their six-week journey east to the Qu'Appelle was marred by unfit rations, sickness, and several deaths. One old man was so distressed by the death of his granddaughter that he killed himself en route by thrusting a sharp stick down his esophagus.

At Cypress Lake, meanwhile, the last holdouts from the government's plans were getting by as best they could. A collective appeal to the fort for help accomplished nothing—the police just rolled out their cannons again—and tangling with the American forces was now out of the question. Perhaps the best option would be to bow to the Great Mother's wishes, as the other leaders had done. Weeks dragged into months without easy answers, and the children became so exhausted by hunger that they could no longer even cry. Surely, life on one of the government's reserves could not be worse than this misery. Then, in
kaskatinow-pisîm,
the Freezing-up Moon of October, Piapot and The Man Who Took the Coat, with their people, straggled back into camp with stories of their horrific experience in the Qu'Appelle, where the ground was littered with the bones of people who had died of smallpox years before. The government had sent them to a place called the Skull Mountainettes to sicken and starve in the land of the dead.

What they wanted, the returnees told the authorities, was what they had always wanted and what had once been promised to them. They wanted to select their reserves and settle in the Cypress Hills. Speaking for the Nakoda, The Man Who Took the Coat explained that he and his people had been brought up in this country and that, for them, the land was filled with stories and ceremony. It held them close to their ancestors, including the relatives and friends who had been lost to the white man's anger ten years earlier. This was the first time he had refused to do what the Queen wanted, the chief said, but he loved the hills and hoped that the government would not be angry with him. The officers at the fort nodded as if they understood, but they insisted that the government knew best. The people would have to leave the hills or face the consequences.

As another winter closed in, two officials from the North-West Mounted Police—a visiting bureaucrat named Frederick White and the police physician, Dr. Augustus Jukes—were sent out to assess conditions in the Indian camps. White was an old hand in the civil service, with an insider's knowledge of government ways and means. Although he recognized human extremity when he saw it—“a more wretched half starved camp could not be imagined,” he wrote—he also knew that Mr. Dewdney would receive this news with a measure of satisfaction.
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“Of course they have asked again to have reservations here,” White reported, “and say they may as well starve to death here as on the reservations North and East, but . . . limited rations, absence of game, scarcity of clothing, and the suffering they must endure this winter...will I hope bring them to their senses by next spring.”

Dr. Jukes, by contrast, was stricken by what he observed. “There are now encamped in the immediate vicinity of Fort Walsh, about two thousand Indians,” he informed his superiors, all “literally in a starving condition and destitute of the commonest necessaries of life.

“The disappearance of the Buffalo,” he continued, “has left them not only without food but also without Robes, mocassins and adequate Tents or ‘Teppees' to shield them from the inclemency of the impending winter. Few of their lodges are of Buffalo hide, the majority being of cotton only, many of these in the most rotten and dilapidated condition, a few consisting only of branches laid upon the lodge poles, a terribly insufficient protection against the wind, frost and snow of the severe winter of this exposed region.

“The absence of . . . an adequate number of lodges to cover so large a number has rendered great overcrowding of these wretched tenements necessary and in all visited by me today the extreme scarcity of robes, blankets or indeed of any other covering for the wretched inmates at night was painfully apparent. Their clothing for the most part was miserable and scanty in the extreme. I saw little children at this inclement season, snow having already fallen, who had scarcely rags to cover them. Of food they possessed little or none.” (The daily ration had fallen to four ounces of flour and two ounces of dried meat, per person, and was grudgingly dispensed.)