A Good Man (63 page)

Frantically, he scoops up snow, scouring his hands, scrubbing his face to make himself presentable for her, washing himself clean.
I must offer her my best self
, he thinks.
My very best self
.

He hears Case begging her to go back but she doesn’t heed him. And McMullen is shouting the same to her from behind the swaying curtain of snow she is parting, but Mrs. Tarr is not listening to anything but her own heart. She does not hesitate. She is coming to him.

She is very near now, her face gleaming wet with snow, gleaming with resolution. How he wishes that he could offer her his arm and parade her before everyone who thought him worthless, lead her into his father’s house, escort her into Mr. Hind’s parlour, stroll with her before Mr. McMicken’s wondering eyes, walk her through all the days of his life before he was loved.

She is extending a hand to him now; some small glinting gift closed in her little fist. He is humbled by her consideration, ashamed that he has nothing for her. But then love is not a balance, one thing piled against another; he knows that now.

As he reaches out for Mrs. Tarr’s hand he sees a flame leap between them; it sears him with joy; it toes him.

And Ada falls to her knees beside Dunne’s body, trying to pat out the fire that is wicking the threads of the hole scorched in his shirtfront by her derringer. “Look what you have made me do, Mr. Dunne,” she whispers. “Oh, look what you have made me do.”

TWENTY-NINE

FOR MONTHS HIS
daughter had been besieging him with letters. “Please come home and pay me a visit. I am lonely for you and your stories.” So, shortly after the failure of the Terry Commission to persuade the Sioux to return to the United States, Walsh requested and was granted a long leave to visit his family. The Major was as eager to see his little Cora as she was to see him. The few letters he had received from his wife were nothing like his daughter’s; they exuded nothing but chilly resentment.

As he travelled east through the United States by train, news of his journey preceded him, and Walsh found himself beset by newspapermen at every stop. They swarmed him at stations where he waited for his next connection, clambered into his car when the locomotive halted to take on coal and water. In the articles they wrote, they admiringly dubbed him “Sitting Bull’s Boss,” characterizing James Morrow Walsh as the white man who had single-handedly brought the bloodthirsty red scoundrel Sitting Bull to heel, contrasting his success with the American failures to control the chief. Reporters pressed the same question on the Major: Who or what was responsible for the recent troubles with the Plains tribes? Walsh pulled no punches with his answers; he laid bare knuckles to politicians’ faces. The blame, he said, rested with the U.S. government’s habit of breaking treaties with the Indians, and with the sticky-fingered reservation agents who stole the provisions destined for the people in their care, then sold them for their own profit. These remarks plucked many sensitive nerves in Washington, and when they twanged with outrage, the reverberations were felt all the way to Ottawa. A discomfiture to both governments, he was given a good dressing-down and told to clamp his jaws shut.

But soon, Sir John A. Macdonald was once more in power. With the Liberals sent packing, Walsh believed things were looking up. Macdonald, Old Tomorrow, had created the
NWMP
; surely, he would take a paternal interest in his offspring. When the Prime Minister decided to place the direction and oversight of the Police within his own portfolio, everything pointed to better days for the force, better days for Walsh. He felt his star was on the rise.

But Old Tomorrow had noted the Major’s peccadilloes, how he had spoken without reserve while on leave. He saw how, with a little coaxing, penny-a-line scribblers had tempted the Major to say intemperate, undiplomatic things. Walsh was cheeky, overconfident, impulsive, and naive, dangerous qualities for a man in his position.

But, for the present, there was no denying the Major’s value. He did have influence with Sitting Bull. In uncertain times, this was useful. And the times were uncertain. When spring came, the Americans set ablaze the prairie wool that sustained the buffalo. By day, smoke blackened the sky. By night, raging fires danced lividly on the horizon. That summer, corralled by flame, the buffalo did not come north. The tribes above the Medicine Line converged on the last oasis ofe, the Cypress Hills, threatening a bloody collision with the Sioux. The Blackfoot, Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux all complained that their old enemies were stealing food from the mouths of their children. An outbreak of tribal warfare and the price of putting it down was not a cost a frugal government cared to contemplate.

Hunger also drove the Sioux to undertake forays into their old hunting grounds in Montana where a few small herds of buffalo were still to be found. On these expeditions young men occasionally helped themselves to ranchers’ horses and skirmished with their traditional enemies, the Crow. A group of buffalo hunters led by Sitting Bull exchanged shots with two companies of Bear Coat’s soldiers. Such incidents prompted anger on the part of the United States. Why did Canada not restrain the hostiles? If the Canadians would not or could not control Sitting Bull and his warriors, the Americans would be forced to take steps to protect themselves. So Walsh was moved to Wood Mountain, the doorstep of the Sioux. Let the braggart demonstrate he could do what the newspapermen claimed, exert a salutary influence over his bosom chum Sitting Bull. Let him stop the depredations. The transfer was a demotion in everything but name. A lonely, isolated post, a handful of men to put fingers in a dam ready to crack in a hundred places.

The following winter, famine haunted the Sioux. The children’s swollen bellies were filled with nothing but wind. The women grew gaunt and haggard, the men hollow-eyed with hunger. The babies sucked their fingers and wailed. Old people wrapped themselves in their blankets, lay down to stare into the fire and die. The desperate Sioux began to slaughter their prized horses for meat. The blood of buffalo runners streaked the white plains. Nights, the wolves howled and gulped the crimson snow.

Walsh gave out all the food he could spare from the Police stores, but it was not enough. At mealtimes, women and children huddled in the cold outside the barracks, waiting for the constables to pass out leftovers. Like dogs, the Sioux fell on the scraps, licked the tin plates clean of bacon grease. When spring arrived they were reduced to snaring gophers, robbing eggs from birds’ nests, and boiling soup from the hooves of the butchered horses that littered the earth when the snow melted.

Old Tomorrow knew an opportunity when it showed itself. He had no intention of loosening purse strings to feed the Indians that the Americans had foisted on him, Indians that continually aggravated relations with a testy, powerful neighbour. He would take the starvation stick in his hand and beat them back across the border with it. The Sioux needed to understand two things very clearly: the Canadian government would never provide them with rations and it would never grant them a reservation.

Walsh was not the man to carry out this hard-faced, hard-fisted policy. After all, he had taken it upon himself to hand out food to the Sioux without government authorization. In a report submitted to Macdonald, he had the temerity to praise the stoicism and restraint the Indians had displayed during the winter of famine. The Major was far too sympathetic to the Indians’ plight. Some whispered he was going native. It was no secret he had fathered a child with a Blackfoot woman. There was talk of a harem of Sioux concubines; the most notable and beautiful, White Tooth, was a niece of the Sioux chief Little Saulteaux. Walsh, it was said, had more in common with a Turkish pasha than he did with a married officer and gentleman.

Some
NWMP
officers, such as Lief Crozier and Acheson Irvine, complained that Walsh was asserting a monopoly on Sitting Bull so he could prance and preen in the public eye. Fame had gone to his head. By the next year a story was making the rounds that he planned to exhibit Sitting Bull in fairs and carnivals all over Eastern Canada, to line his own pockets by parading his pet Indian.

Eventually, Macdonald decided it was time to sever the umbilical cord between Walsh and Sitting Bull. The Major was ordered to the Fort Qu’Appelle detachment, two hundred miles east of Wood Mountain, far enough, it was hoped, to make it impossible for him to exert any influence on the chief. But before leaving Wood Mountain, Walsh pledged to Sitting Bull that he would request permission from Ottawa to speak to the President of the United States on behalf of the Sioux people. He would bargain for better terms. If the President would not give them, Walsh said he would petition the Grandmother to give the Sioux a reservation in Canada. He gave one last caution to Sitting Bull before departing. He told his friend he must make no decision about returning to the United States before he heard from him.

When Police visitors to the Sioux camps reported to Ottawa that Walsh had made promises to assist the Indians, Old Tomorrow concluded the Major’s behaviour was incorrigible. Once again the loose cannon was careering around the deck, wreaking havoc, smashing carefully laid plans to splinters, cutting the legs out from under the captain of the ship. It was time to lash Walsh in place. He was recalled East where he could do no more damage, plunked down in his own parlour to stare out the window at a sleepy town.

With Walsh exiled, the newly appointed commissioner of the
NWMP
, Lieutenant Colonel Irvine, and the man who had taken over the Major’s command at Fort Walsh, Lief Crozier, went to work. They paid Sitting Bull no deference or respect. Instead, they turned their attention to lesser chiefs, hammering home the point that if the Sioux wanted food and land they would get them only by returning to the States. Their children would waste away to nothing in Canada if their fathers did not take them south.

One by one, hunger gnawed loose the chiefs’ allegiances to Sitting Bull. The exodus to the States began. Spotted Eagle was the first to go. Rain in the Face, who had painted himself as a skeleton and danced so defiantly before General Terry, saw the flesh melting off his people’s bones and took them across the Medicine Line. The ferocious Gall, who had lost two wives and three children at the Little Bighorn, and bitterly hated the Long Knives, crossed the Milk River with Crow King to surrender to the Americans. At the last minute, when they had second thoughts about laying down their arms, Major Ilges, newly transferred to Fort Keogh, turned artillery on their village and shelled them into submission.

The only chief Crozier and Irvine could make no headway with was Sitting Bull. He still placed all his faith and hope in Long Lance; he was waiting for his friend to come back from his parley with the President. The Americans sent Fish Allison, an Army scout fluent in Lakota, to try to cajole Sitting Bull into striking his colours. But Bull would not listen. Over and over, he repeated he could do nothing until he talked to Major Walsh; he needed to open his heart to Long Lance. Then, on April 28, 1881, Bull suddenly struck out from where the Sioux were camped at Willow Bunch, bound for Fort Qu’Appelle. With him went thirty-eight lodges of his poverty-stricken people.

But Long Lance was not at Fort Qu’Appelle as Bull had thought. The chief was stunned. No one could tell him when the Major was returning or even if he would ever return. The Sioux made camp there where a pitifully few ducks and fish taken from the lake scarcely dulled their hunger. The mission priest accepted a couple of skinny, played-out nags as payment for flour. Each dawn, Sitting Bull stood on the shore of the lake, praying to the One Above, and peering into the mist as if he expected Long Lance to emerge from the grey vapours rising from the cold waters.

At last, the Sioux turned wearily back, retraced the two-hundred-mile journey to Willow Bunch. When he arrived at his encampment, Sitting Bull received another hard blow. Many more of his band had gone over the Medicine Line, among them his dearest daughter, Many Horses. Of the thousands of Sioux who had come to Canada, all that remained loyal to him now were a few hundred, many of them old and ailing.

By July, all hope was exhausted. Sitting Bull led his people over the Medicine Line and turned himself in at Fort Buford. He handed his fine Winchester carbine to his five-year-old son, Crow Foot, to surrender to Major Brotherton because he could not bear to do it himself.

The ring was finally snapped in the bull’s nose. Nine days after the surrender, the Sioux chieftain and his people were loaded on a river steamer and sent off down the Missouri.

The arrival of the
General Sherman
in the growing, newly prospering town of Bismarck could not have been better timed. July 31 was a Sunday. Church services had ended, affording the godly the same opportunity to line the bank of the Missouri as the waddies, the saloon-haunters, the bummers, the wharf rats, and the paisley-vested bottom dealers of the gaming rooms. They stood squinting into the blazing sunshine as the steamer’s paddles churned the silty water, its stubby prow laying a creamy furrow down the river, its funnels scattering smoke and cinders into a pale blue sky.