A Geography of Blood (9 page)

The Métis did not number among the rich and powerful. They were ordinary
Jeans et Jeannes,
simple people with few material possessions and limited options for earning a living. When one of the
hivernants
acquired a cookstove, complete with tea kettle and frying pans, he instantly became a Big Man. My heart goes out to the young Métis hunter, aged twenty-five and with a family to support, who explained in the mid-1860s that he couldn't stop running buffalo, no matter what the consequences. “I must take my part,” he said, “with all the other people who . . . [are] killing buffalo and getting rich.”
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Faced with our own failure to respond to climate change and an extinction crisis that now threatens twenty percent of all amphibians, mammals, and birds, we have little reason to believe that we would have chosen differently or better.

Once the buffalo had been extirpated from the Canadian prairies, the Métis scattered. Some rode south to the Judith Basin of central Montana, where all the buffalo hunters in the world were closing in on the last surviving herds. By 1883, those herds had also been finished, and the buffalo ecosystem was gone. With their way of life shattered, the Métis became peddlers or teamsters or trappers or ranchers or farmers or all of the above, around places like Medicine Hat, Pincher Creek, Edmonton, and Round Prairie. Some dispersed up the North Saskatchewan River, and many—as I was stunned to learn from my reading—made their way to the Peace River Country, the place where my father's family would settle and where, one day, I would be born. Could it be that those far-distant places and seemingly unconnected events were caught in the web of the same forsaken narrative?

{seven} Modern Times

It wasn't the end of the world . . . but you could see it from there.

JAMES WELCH,
The Death of Jim Loney,
1979

What had started
as a playful adventure was gradually ratcheting up from whimsy to engagement to full-on obsession. I'd wake in the morning amid the flotsam and jetsam of anxious dreams, wondering what that plane crash or flooded house or lost child was trying to tell me about the Cypress Hills and its ragged histories. What do you want from me? I'd ask the view outside my window. I come from the Peace River Country eight hundred miles from here. Why is it so important for me to listen to all your sad, old, moldy, half-forgotten stories? But in my heart of hearts, I already knew the answer. The stories the hills have to tell are bigger than their pinpoint settings, larger than “X marks the spot” on a map. At different times, in different ways, what happened here also happened everywhere else across the North American plains, from the Llano Estacado to the Grande Prairie. The Cypress Hills are a landscape that connects all the dots and offers its teachings to even the most fretful and unwitting of pilgrims.

Meanwhile, back at Chimney Coulee, nothing much is happening because, these days, nothing ever does. For a place that is so richly endowed with stories, the site has astonishingly little to show for it. If it weren't for the text on the signboards, you would never guess that people had lived here, and died here, in the recent past. Their graves lie unmarked and undetected; their chapel has been lost. Even the stone chimneys, which stood guard over the abandoned Métis village until 1915, when the last one tumbled down, have entirely disappeared. They were carried away, stone by stone and load after heavy load, by incoming settlers, who (so the local-history book says) used them to pave their patios and to buttress the earthworks of an irrigation dam at Cypress Lake, an hour's drive to the west.

But the land has never forgotten. When archaeologists conducted test excavations at the site in the mid-1990s (with the assistance of an enthusiastic cadre of local volunteers), they uncovered evidence, in the form of stone tools and fire-cracked rocks, to show that people had frequented Chimney Coulee long before the pemmican trade pushed in. Layered above those early and as-yet-undated occupations lie charred timbers from Cowie's trading post—just inches below the grass—together with a generous scattering of seed beads, tea wrappers, bone shards, and fragments of fine china. The excavation also yielded a number of fish scales, reminders of a remarkable lake that once lay in the valley, a quarter of a mile downslope, which sent its waters both north to Hudson Bay and south toward the Gulf of Mexico. Now reduced to a coarse hatching of marsh plants, the lake was drained in 1907 during the pioneer-era frenzy of railway construction.

As if these weren't enough stories for one little clearing to tell, Chimney Coulee guards another source of buried treasure. In 1877, three years after
les hivernants
took up seasonal residence here, the fabled red coats of the North-West Mounted Police established an outpost a few steps up the hill. A photo taken a couple of years after their arrival features, from back to front, a sky hazed with smoke from a blur of Métis chimneys, a fringe of spruce trees pushing up from the ravine, three low-slung log buildings, and six gents and a dog strung in a rough line across the foreground. Two of the men appear to be hunters, with rifles over their shoulders and small game in hand, but the other four are in full Mountie regalia, complete with either pillbox or Dudley Do-Right hat. (As for the dog, I can only say that it looks like a border collie type, black with a white chest, and shows every sign of being affectionate.)

Although the police were here on and off for the next three years, with a garrison of up to ten men, every surface trace of their presence has vanished. Not far underground, however, the archaeologists found the remains of a log structure where the police post had once stood and, as one might perhaps expect of a bachelor roost, an inordinate number and variety of lost buttons.

To understand what on earth the North-West Mounted Police were doing in a coulee in the middle of nowhere, we have to shift the scene about an hour's drive to the west, to a site on the West Block, or western upland, of the three plateaus that form the Cypress Hills. Ever since Keith and I first arrived in Eastend, the National Historic Site at Fort Walsh had been on our must-see list, though complications involving tow trucks had at first prevented us from making the trip. With reliable transport, however, the ninety-minute journey proved to be a breeze, as we spun west through Robsart and Consul (reversing the route that had brought us here from Cody way back when) and then headed north, on gravel, through a weirdly silent world.

At first, the land sloped away into nothingness, as open as the sea, but then tawny swells rose up on either side of the road and ushered us into a well-watered valley of surpassing beauty. Are we there yet? we wondered. But no, apparently not, because a sign directed us left, up and around a crazy set of switchbacks and through a dark enclosure of trees, before spitting us out on top in wide open country. We rolled on for another few minutes, marbles on a tabletop, and then tumbled over the edge of the world into a valley that, until the last moment, was completely hidden from sight.

By now, we were well and truly in the outback, yet here was a parking lot with space for tour buses, an elegant visitors' center, and a paved path that drew the eye to the top of a grassy knoll.

“Come on,” I said, grabbing Keith by the arm. “This is going to be fun.” A few steps up the path, we found ourselves looking out and over a spectacular sunlit valley framed on the far side by a rise of hills scrawled with stands of spruce. In the center of the scene, with those dark slopes as a backdrop, stood an array of white-roofed buildings surrounded by a tall palisade and defended by a circular guard house. Finally, we had made it to Fort Walsh. Although the original establishment is long gone—it was dismantled in 1883, as I subsequently found out—early photos still exist, and I can report that, feature for feature, it looked quite a bit like this. Now, with a Red Ensign fluttering over the barracks and the Canadian maple leaf flying high above the open gates, the fort seemed to be encouraging us to take a sunny walk into the past. What harm could there possibly be in that?

But first, a brief stop at the visitors' center and a slight change of plans. Fort Walsh could wait, or so said the guy in a Parks Canada uniform who met us at the door, but the bus to a more distant part of the site was ready to go. All aboard. With a wave of the hand, he directed us onto a school bus, and off we went, goodness knew where.

A gravel track led us down into the valley that we had overlooked a few minutes earlier, our bright yellow bug heading directly toward the wooden fortress. “We'll have you back here in about half an hour, and you can tour the place then,” the driver called out, as he swung past the palisade, across what he called the parade ground, and up a slope on the other side.

“See those ruts?” he said, pointing out his side window as the bus growled up the hill. “That's what's left of the old trail from Fort Benton, down in Montana. Everything had to be hauled in that way—oxen, you know, covered wagons, ten miles a day. Even the mail—instructions from Ottawa—used to come in through the States.”

Dutifully, I peer out the window at the faint, grassed-over tracks that snake across the side hill. And then, with a cough and a shudder, the bus heaves itself onto the summit of a flat-topped ridge where the land is sweet with wild roses and softened by a shining wind and dimpled by a multitude of round depressions. In the valley behind us, old Fort Walsh lies rectangular and abrupt. Here, everything is lyrical and connected. I nudge Keith in the seat beside me: Where had the driver said we were going? Something about a massacre? It was hard to believe that this road could lead to anything sinister.

I'm gazing out the window, watching the light play in the grass, when the bus wheezes to a stop and the driver proceeds to answer one of my unasked questions. “Buffalo wallows,” he says, with a broad wave of his hand. “Those hollows in the grass there, they were made by buffalo rolling in the dirt. Protected them from bugs. Must have been a lot of them. Buffalo, I mean.” He pauses and then continues, deadpan. “Bugs, too, come to think of it.”

“And down below—” He gestures toward the front window, and I'm startled to discover that we're perched on the edge of what looks like a precipice. “Down below there, well, this is a school bus jump, so watch out for the pile of broken buses and bus parts at the bottom.”
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Now that he has our attention, and without missing a beat, he begins to prepare us for what we are about to see. “You have to tell it the way you hear it,” he says, “and this is what I've heard.” The story begins in the winter of 1873 (the same year the Métis first settled at Chimney Coulee, I note) when a band of Nakoda people in the Saskatchewan River country were struck by famine. The buffalo had been scarce that winter; by February, none could be found, and the distant refuge of the Cypress Hills seemed to offer the only hope of survival.

The trek across the snow-deep plains was terrible and long. The travelers ate their horses, their dogs and parfleches, made broth from bones dug out of the drifts. No buffalo, no buffalo. A least thirty members of the party died en route of starvation and cold. It wasn't until the survivors reached the hills that the buffalo reappeared, and a young hunter named Cuwiknak eyaku, or The Man Who Took the Coat, had the honor of making the first kill. Spring found the band camped in the valley down below us, at the confluence of Whitemud Coulee and Battle Creek, recovering their strength, visiting with friends who had shown up to join them, and doing a little trading.

There were two traders in the valley that winter, our driver continued, all trace of jocularity now banished from his voice. Two Americans, Abe Farwell and Moses Solomon, both operating out of Fort Benton and both offering a wide array of goods. “Anything the Indians wanted,” that was their stock in trade: kettles, axes, ammunition, textiles, beads, and, of course, booze. “Whiskey wasn't the largest part of the trade, but it was the most profitable.” There was money to be made in the illegal sale of firewater.

Liquor had always been part of the fur trade, the matter-of-fact voice went on, though traditionally it had been used in moderation. In the long run, the enterprise had nothing to gain from murder and mayhem. By the 1870s, however, the long run had run out. There was only now, with no tomorrow, and the prospect of a quick buck. This was the situation on May 31, 1873, when a party of wolfers—roughnecks who made their living by lacing buffalo meat with strychnine and skinning the wolves that came to the poisoned bait—rode up to Farwell's post. They'd been on their way from the aptly named Fort Whoop-up (a center of the whiskey trade in what is now southern Alberta) to Fort Benton, to cash in on their winter's take of around ten thousand pelts when someone made off with their herd of horses. Had Abe Farwell seen or heard anything about those no-good, horse-thieving Injuns?

Farwell couldn't help them, but why didn't the wolfers spend the night, come in and raise a glass? That night and the next morning, almost everybody fell to drinking: the Nakodas, the new arrivals, the two traders and their employees, even some of the Métis teamsters who had been hired to pack out Farwell's winter trade. The whole place was tipsy, teetering; tempers were on edge. Nothing good could come of this.

Having brought his tale to this point of crisis, our driver falls silent, revs the engine, and rolls the bus over the brink, onto what turns out to be a steep but perfectly serviceable road into the valley. At the bottom, I climb out of the vehicle with trepidation, unsure what to expect, only to find myself beside a crystalline brook, encircled by sunlit hills, in the most benign and picturesque setting one could imagine. Our guide, meanwhile, is intent on continuing his story by showing us the lay of the land. See that willow-fringed meadow, bordered by an arc of the stream? That's where the Nakodas were camped in their buffalo-hide tipis. The two log buildings on the site, one nearby and the other partially visible through the bushes across the creek, represent the whiskey posts where Messrs. Solomon and Farwell, respectively, conducted their business. And so the scene was set for terror.

The trouble began around noon on June 1, 1873, when one of Farwell's men got in a drunken tizzy about a “stolen” horse. Although the animal was quickly recovered—it had just wandered off—voices were raised, shots were fired, and things flared from bad to worse. While some of the traders looked on in horror, others (led by two hard-case wolfers, John Evans and Tom Hardwick, who later became a Montana sheriff) rushed out with their repeating rifles to take cover in the bushes and fire into the Nakoda camp. Undone by adulterated drink, armed only with muskets and arrows, the Nakoda were unable to defend their exposed position. “What had looked for a while like a battle,” our guide said quietly, “soon became a horrible massacre.” By day's end, the violence had claimed the lives of one wolfer (a French-Canadian named Ed LeGrace) and somewhere between fifteen and eighty Nakodas, a variance that obscures the fate of many women, children, infants, and elders.