The Inconvenient Indian (3 page)

Still, the story, false though I believe it to be, has been too appealing for North America to ignore. And we have dragged the damn thing—with its eroticism and exoticism, its White hero and its dusky maiden—across the continent and the centuries.

There’s an 1885 musical called
Po-ca-hon-tas
,
or the Gentle Savage
by John Brougham, a 1924 film directed by Bryan Foy called
Pocahontas and John Smith
, a racehorse named Pocahontas, a Pocahontas train that ran between Norfolk, Virginia and Cincinnati, Ohio for the Norfolk and Western Railway in the 1950s and ’60s, a Pocahontas coal field in Tazewell, West Virginia, a Pocahontas video game, as well as the towns of Pocahontas in Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Virginia.

There’s a town in Alberta just a little north of Jasper called Pocahontas, where you can rent your very own cabin (with kitchenette) in the heart of the heart of nature, relax in the curative waters of Miette Hot Springs, and enjoy a meal at the Poco Café.

I don’t know about you, but it’s on my bucket list.

The irony is that there are a great many stories that are as appealing as the story of Pocahontas and that have more substance than the fiction of the Almo massacre.

The Rebellion of 1885, with Louis Riel playing the lead, is one such story, as is the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, starring George Armstrong Custer. Each is a moment in the national identities of Canada and the United States, though in terms of prominence and fame, they are not historical equals. While the 1885 Rebellion as a historical moment and Louis Riel as a name are well known throughout Canada, the event and the man hardly register in America. I would say that they don’t register at all, but I ran into someone in San Francisco about twelve years back who knew something about Batoche and was able to use “Duck Lake” and “Gabriel Dumont” in the same sentence. On the other hand, Custer’s name and the legend of the Little Bighorn are well known in both countries, even though the battle in Montana was not nearly as important or as long as the Métis fight for independence. In part, that’s not history’s fault. You can blame the extra brightness of Custer’s star on nineteenth-century American outrage and twentieth-century Hollywood.

Nevertheless, each of these events gave us a man of historical note. To call them “heroes” might be stretching the noun, for, while Riel and Custer are enduring, larger-than-life figures, they also have mixed reputations. Riel may have negotiated the terms under which Manitoba became a part of Canada, but he is also remembered as a messianic nutcase. Custer may have been a successful Civil War commander and one of the officers on hand at General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, but he is also burdened with a reputation as an arrogant officer who made a fatal mistake and
died fighting a superior force. One man was Métis, one was White. Custer died on the battlefield from wounds that were, in a manner of speaking, self-inflicted, while Riel was hanged for treason at the insistence of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald.

In
Prairie Fire
, their 1984 book on the North-West Rebellion, Bob Beal and Rod Macleod argue that “when most Canadians think of the North-West Rebellion of 1885, they picture a righteous and determined Louis Riel leading, for the last time, a band of dissatisfied Métis in a desperate reaction against the Government’s treatment of their people.” I don’t disagree with that general image, but most Canadians, like most Americans, have a shockingly poor grasp of their own history. Dates, people, the large and small nuances of events have all been reduced to the form and content of Classic Comics. This isn’t a complaint. It’s an acknowledgement that people are busy with other things and generally glance at the past only on holidays. Given our hectic schedules, the least I can do is to provide a little historical background so no one will feel left out when our story gets complicated.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn. Or the Battle of Greasy Grass, as it is also known. The 7
^th
Cavalry, under the command of George Armstrong Custer, versus the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne, led by Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Gall, et al. Five companies under Custer’s command—258 soldiers—were wiped out, along with 7 civilians and 3 Arikara scouts.

There were never any figures on Northern Cheyenne and Lakota casualties.

Mind you, this was not the worst defeat that Native forces had inflicted on the U.S. military. In 1791, at the Battle of the Wabash, Little Turtle of the Miami, Blue Jacket of the Shawnee,
and Buckongahelas of the Delaware sent their warriors against an army of about one thousand, led by General Arthur St. Clair. Over half of St. Clair’s forces were killed, the other half wounded. Only forty-eight men escaped unharmed.

But the Battle of the Wabash did not make it into the public’s limited consciousness in the same way that the Battle of the Little Bighorn did. While both were utter defeats, the Little Bighorn was framed as a romantic tragedy. We’re fonder of that kind of story. Arthur St. Clair was a plodding but efficient military man, who was simply outmanoeuvred by Little Turtle, whereas the legend that is Custer was, in large part, a convergence of political interests and national pride. His defeat occurred as America was celebrating its hundredth birthday and news of the rout ruined the party.

And we’ve told the story of Custer’s defeat so many times, in so many ways, that his moment on the plains of Montana has become a metaphor for heroic but ill-advised and failed endeavours.

Custer’s Last Stand.

Of course, we don’t have much call for this particular metaphor any more. In our gated, modern world, fault now gets deflected. Ruinous incursions such as Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are no longer assigned to one individual. Rather, we have, through a well-developed, propagandistic sleight-of-hand, made the people and places we attack responsible for our aggression.

If you can read only one book on the Little Bighorn, read Evan Connell’s
Son of the Morning Star
. Connell takes no prisoners, White or Red. He understands that the fight was not about the national pride of an emerging nation or the pursuit of one man’s glory. It was about killing. He understands that, when the killing
starts, whether it’s on the plains of Montana or in the deserts of Iraq, everyone ends up covered with blood.

But if you have time for a second book, Brian Dippie’s
Custer’s Last Stand: The Anatomy of an American Myth
offers a detailed look at how the Custer myth was created and, more importantly, how it has been maintained.

Almost immediately, after word reached the world that Custer had got his ass kicked in Montana, America’s artistic class went to work. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Frederick Whittaker, and the like lifted Custer out of the Montana dirt, hoisted him high on their metred shoulders, and rhymed him around the country in free verse and heroic couplets. At the same time, artists began recreating and reimagining the story with paint and canvas. My three favourites are John Mulvany’s
Custer’s Last Rally
, painted in 1881, Cassilly Adam’s 1884
Custer’s Last Fight
, which was the basis for the more well-known 1896 Otto Becker lithograph commissioned by the Anheuser-Busch company, and E.S. Paxson’s 1899 painting
Custer’s Last Stand
, which contains so many figures that the canvas looks like a cowboy and Indian version of
Where’s Waldo?

Okay, I exaggerate. Paxson painted a yellow flag just above Custer, which makes him easier to find.

In all three paintings and the lithograph, Custer stands tall in a murdering crowd of soldiers and Indians, his pistol going bangbang, his vorpal blade going snicker-snack, as he fights his way into history. And story.

Of course, none of the paintings is an accurate depiction of what did happen. There’s just no way they
could
be accurate. There was no one on the battlefield with a camera or a cellphone.
The scenes that the paintings show are all guesswork in the service of heroism and bravery. Yet the story that they tell is that Custer stood fast to the last and that he went down boots on, guns blazing, when in fact, he might have cut and run, might have gone scampering off across the coulees while his company tried to hold the high ground. Or he might have been killed in the first skirmish and been just another body rotting on the prairies when the fighting reached its zenith.

Nor has time changed the allure of the myth to any great degree. Contemporary artists such as Mark Churms, Alton Tobey, Thom Ross, and William Reusswig have continued to recreate a defiant, heroic Custer. Evanston, Illinois hosts an annual Custer’s Last Stand Festival of the Arts. And, each year, there is a re-enactment of the battle at Hardin, Montana, during Little Bighorn Days, where you can watch the whole drama sweep across the landscape and, later, meet some of the cast and crew.

In other words, we don’t need the truth. We have the legend. And even if we were somehow able to know what transpired on that day in June of 1876, that knowledge would not set us free. As with John Smith and Pocahontas, we like the story of Custer’s Last Stand too much ever to give it up.

I’ve discussed these stories at public lectures and in the classes I teach, and the communal desire to believe that John Smith and Pocahontas really were lovers, and that Custer most certainly fought well and died valiantly, is palpable.

Okay, perhaps they were. Perhaps he did.

Louis Riel’s is a somewhat longer story. It officially begins in 1869 with what has come to be called the Red River Rebellion or the Red River Resistance, and it ends with the 1885 North-West
Rebellion. In 1869, Canada bought Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was a huge chunk of real estate, some 3.9 million square kilometres that had York Factory at its centre, took in all of Hudson Bay, and ran out to include all of Manitoba and large parts of Saskatchewan, Alberta, Quebec, and Ontario, along with small pieces of Minnesota, Montana, and North and South Dakota. It was the same sort of purchase that the Americans had made in 1803, when they bought the 828,000 square miles known as the Louisiana Purchase—land that would later be carved up into fourteen states and parts of two Canadian provinces—from Napoleon and the French for $15 million. Rupert’s Land, a larger, albeit more desolate chunk of real estate, cost the government of Canada some 300,000 pounds which makes it, square kilometre for square mile, the better deal.

The problem was that the Hudson’s Bay Company didn’t own the land they sold to the Canadian government, any more than the French owned the land they sold to the Americans. They didn’t even control it. The purchases were no more than paper promises and wishful thinking.

Not that this bothered either government. As soon as Canada bought Rupert’s Land, Ottawa appointed William McDougall—a man not fond of the French—as governor. In August of 1869, McDougall sent surveyors into the territory to cut up the land into nice, square township blocks, which ignored the seigneurial system that the Métis had established of long narrow lots that ran back from the river. Push came to shove, and, in November, the Métis forced the surveyors to retreat.

Out of this confrontation, and the continuing irritant of competing French and English interests, arose Louis Riel. Riel led the
fight for a Métis homeland. He helped to form a provisional government for the territory and tried, along with others, to negotiate peacefully the matter of who controlled what. All in all, things were going along nicely until February of 1870 when Charles Boulton, John Schultz, Charles Mair, and Thomas Scott tried to overthrow the Manitoba provisional government by force. The coup failed, and Boulton and Scott were captured, while Mair and Schultz scurried back to Toronto. Riel pardoned Boulton and, in an ill-advised move, executed Scott. Predictably, the execution set off an explosion of anti-Métis, anti-Catholic, anti-French sentiments, and Riel was forced to flee Canada for the safety of the United States.

By 1885, Canada had been a nominal confederation for eighteen years and was still trying to sort out the nasty bits of nationhood, particularly English-French and Indian-White relations, issues that continue to vex and annoy the country’s current Chief Factors. Many of the Métis had moved from Manitoba to Saskatchewan and formed a large settlement at Batoche on the South Saskatchewan River. By now it was clear that the Dominion of Canada, as the fledgling country called itself, was not at all interested in negotiating Métis rights or listening to Métis concerns.

And in that year, Riel returned to lead the North-West Rebellion.

Between April and June of 1885, the Métis fought a series of engagements with government forces, the pivotal battle being fought at Batoche. It was there that Riel, Dumont, and the Métis made their stand. For three days they held out against superior forces until their ammunition ran out. Riel surrendered, and Dumont, along with many of his troops, escaped across the border into Montana.

At Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s insistence—“though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour”—Riel was hanged for treason, and English Canada patted itself on the back, confident that it had settled the Métis question once and for all. This nineteenth-century instance of national smugness might call to mind a singular moment during the U.S. invasion of Iraq that featured President George W. Bush standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS
Abraham Lincoln
in May of 2003 under a banner that blithely announced to the world: “Mission Accomplished.”

Louis Riel. George Custer. All that history. And the names of these two men are what we have to show for it. Oh, sure, we have other names as well—Gabriel Dumont, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull—all of which may well trigger a synaptic flash within the general populace. Dumont, who was an excellent strategist and a more effective leader than Riel, continued to be a pain in English Canada’s Protestant
derrière
for the rest of his life, but since he didn’t die heroically or tragically, his value as a cultural icon is limited.

Crazy Horse was stabbed and killed by soldiers at Camp Robinson, while Sitting Bull was shot and killed by police at the Standing Rock Agency in North Dakota. Which should have given each some measure of sparkle. But their deaths occurred at several removes from that pivotal moment on the rolling prairie above Greasy Grass Creek, and since they didn’t die with Custer—with their boots on, as it were—their value has slipped, though both men continue to be part of the imagination of the West and the subject of contemporary biographies.