True Patriot Love (5 page)

As they journeyed toward the Lake of the Woods, Grant and Fleming met Ojibwa people, fur traders on their last legs, miserably poor, dressed in ragged European jackets embroidered with beads, holed coins and bear claws, sometimes wearing French kepis of buffalo skin
decorated with feathers. The women in their camps, Grant noticed, were “dirty, joyless-looking and prematurely old,” while the men hunted, fished and did any work “that a gentleman feels he can do without degradation.” When the party of white men showed up at these encampments, the language of greeting—as the language of the fur trade had been—was French: “B’jou, B’jou!” (
Bonjour! Bonjour!
). At one encampment, the chief treated them to a magnificent speech in Ojibwa in which, while he welcomed them to his land, he wanted something in return for their passage through it. Grant and Fleming’s Iroquois cook prepared the chief a breakfast of fried pork and pancakes and served it on a newspaper spread over a rock.

At night, by the campfire, Grant filled his diary with long reflections in pencil. When the Americans were building the railway, attacks by the Sioux and the Cheyenne on survey parties like theirs had been constant. Grant was relieved that the chief had allowed them passage through his land, but he was aware that he was in the middle of nowhere, utterly dependent on Aboriginal companions whose way of life the railway would eventually destroy. Already, the Ojibwa, having lost the fur trade, were watching from their encampments as white settlers in canoes and barges moved past them, almost every day, on their way to the plains. In his diary, Grant struggled with the realization that his nation would be built on the ruins of others:

And now a foreign race is swarming over the country, to mark out lines, to erect fences, and to say “this is mine and not yours,” till not an inch shall be left the original owner. All this may be inevitable. But in the name of justice, of doing as we would be done by, of the “sacred rights” of property, is not the Indian entitled to liberal, and if possible, permanent compensation?

At the Northwest Angle, a landing stage on the western shore of the Lake of the Woods, the Metis and Iroquois guides deposited the party and with a wave of farewell set off back to Shebandowan.

The baggage was loaded onto Red River carts and the party set off, once again, on the Dawson Road, in the driving rain, through thick forest. At two in the morning, soaked and exhausted, unable to see where they were going, they blundered toward a half-finished Hudson’s Bay store, left open, and, fumbling past stacks of tools and piles of lumber, threw themselves down and fell fast asleep.

The next morning—July 31st—Grant awoke, rubbed his eyes and stepped out into bright sunshine. They had broken through the forest cover and he was standing on the edge of the Prairies.

“I found myself in Paradise,” Grant scribbled excitedly into his diary.

A vast whispering ocean of green grass, waist high, sprinkled with wildflowers, yellow, lilac and white, stretched
to the horizon, perfectly flat, under a vast blue sky. The elemental stillness was broken only by the whispering grass and snatches of birdsong. There was not a building, not a fence, not a column of smoke in sight.

That July morning in 1872, he later recalled, was a moment of ecstatic confirmation, one of the happiest of his life. He and Fleming had come west, he later said, “simply to find out whether Canada was doomed to end in Lake Huron, or whether there was a country for our children here and all the way to the Pacific.” That day, in July, he said, “the question I had been asking myself was settled.”

Fleming, the botanist Macoun and Grant dug around in the soil under their feet and happily, if rashly, concluded that you could stick a plough in here and run a straight furrow all the way to the Rockies. Already, in his mind’s eye, Grant began to people the plain with the citizens of a great nation.

The point where they broke the forest cover and encountered the Prairies for the first time is about thirty miles from Fort Garry, what today we call Winnipeg. The waist-high grass is long gone, replaced by close-cropped grazing land, and the silence is gone too, replaced by the flat whine of the big rigs rolling along the four lanes of the Trans-Canada Highway. But you can still feel the wonder my great-grandfather felt when you break through the forest cover of the Canadian Shield and the big sky suddenly opens up and the plains appear, stretching away as
far as the eye can see. It is one of the places where Canada awakens awe.

They put the horses back in the shafts and made haste to Fort Garry, arriving in the late afternoon, filthy, flybitten and exultant. At the mansion of Governor Archibald, the staff drew them hot baths and gave them their first mail from Halifax. Grant wrote back to his wife, “This is going to be a great country and I am glad that I will hereafter be in a position to know and understand it.”

Fort Garry was the bustling administrative centre of Manitoba province, with a straggling village called Winnipeg growing up around it. On the muddy streets, Grant reported, saloons were more numerous than churches. The saloons were full of land speculators, government surveyors divvying up the land into sections and plots, Metis guides and drovers, American railway prospectors, new immigrant farmers and the occasional Cree or Ojibwa.

The new province of Manitoba, brought into the Dominion two years earlier, in 1870, was a tinderbox of resentments. In 1869, Louis Riel, a twenty-eight-year-old former seminarian, had assembled a crowd at St. Boniface Cathedral to protest the presence of federal land surveyors who were, he cried, stealing land from underneath the feet of the Metis. Riel’s first rebellion soon took fire, drawing support from English and French settlers alike, and he formed a provisional government and issued a list of
demands addressed to the federal government in Ottawa. These included provincial status for the territory, French as an official language of the province, land grants to be controlled by the province, treaties to be concluded with the Indians and education to be controlled by Catholic and Protestant churches. For a time, Riel carried all before him, but when the provisional government hanged Thomas Scott, an English farmer, for resisting, Orange Protestants in Ontario were so outraged that the federal government dispatched a military expedition to put down the insurrection. Riel fled into the Dakota territory.

Grant never met Riel, and for obvious reasons
Ocean to Ocean
avoids any mention of the rebellion. It was essentially a railway promotion brochure, after all, and the less said about rebellions the better. Grant wanted the West to be peopled by white, English-speaking farmers. Riel wanted the West to be French and Metis and Aboriginal.
Ocean to Ocean
’s national dream prevailed. To this day, Riel awaits acknowledgment as the true founder of the province of Manitoba. He remains the apostate visionary of a Canada that never stood a chance.

In Fort Garry, while they were purchasing what they needed for their westward journey, Grant met the leader of the francophone community in Manitoba, the Archbishop of St. Boniface, Alexandre-Antonin Taché, and he sounded out the veteran missionary, probably in French, about whether the land to the west was suitable for agricultural
settlement. Taché, sensing that Grant was there to attract droves of English-speaking settlers, avoided giving a clear answer, though the old fox knew the West like the back of his hand.

Grant also met Donald Alexander Smith, Chief Commissioner of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the North West, a fellow Scot and Presbyterian, former fur-trade dealer turned railway speculator. Smith, better known later on as Lord Strathcona, became the driving financial force behind the completion of the CPR.

Around midday on August 2, the expedition set off again, a line of Red River carts and buckboards, loaded high with tents, baggage, pemmican, salt pork, pots and pans, guns and ammunition. Occasionally, as they wended their way through the single-track trails of the grasslands, they would pass a new homestead. The last one, somewhere near Portage la Prairie, was inhabited, it so happened, by a family called Grant. They had supper with the family in their rough log cabin, one wall decorated with a cheap poster of the Liberal leader of the day, Alexander Mackenzie. Needless to say, these Scottish pioneers, patriotic, Liberal in politics and undaunted by life on the edge of nowhere, enchanted Grant.

George Monro Grant left them thinking noble thoughts, but there was no disguising the fact that beyond that homestead at Portage, there was nothing: not a house or settlement, not a beckoning plume of smoke from a
chimney. For the next three weeks, the Prairie sky swallowed them up.

Their imaginations had been prepared by the popular watercolours of Paul Kane depicting romantic Indian warriors spearing buffalo, but there were no warriors and no buffalo to be seen anywhere. The animals had been pushed to the brink of extinction, and the Plains Cree, through contact with settlers and whiskey traders, were being devastated by smallpox and alcohol. Now the railway was coming. Without realizing what they were doing, the Fleming-Grant survey party was sounding the death knell of a Plains civilization that had endured for millennia.

The survey party was in the hands of a Metis guide and a group of Metis horsemen, wranglers and carters, some French, some English, all given to swearing like troopers but all skilled in the ways of the trails that wended their way through the grass, the clumps of alders and the salt ponds day after day for three weeks. The expedition lived on pemmican—dried meat mixed with tallow—and on the fowl that Fleming’s son brought down with a shot gun. They made thirty to forty miles a day on the Yellowhead trail, a meandering cart track that connected Hudson’s Bay fort to Hudson’s Bay fort and led eventually to the Yellowhead Pass in the Rockies.

Apart from summer storms that came upon them in tempests of wind and hail, nothing broke the silence of their days, Grant sometimes lying in the bottom of a
wagon gazing skyward, sometimes riding a horse, gripping the pommel of his saddle with the stump of his right hand. In Fort Garry, they had jettisoned their eastern woollens and flannels and now wore riding chaps, boots and buckskin jackets. It’s fair to say that those long days on the trail, sometimes breaking into a gallop to run after birds, sometimes chasing each other, other times letting the reins free so that they could daydream, were the happiest moments of my great-grandfather’s life.

Once, they stopped in fear as a party of horsemen suddenly appeared on the horizon and rode fast toward them, drawing up in a huge plume of dust. They were Sioux warriors, about eighty of them, chased north into Canadian territory by the railway men, ranchers, settlers and cavalry of the United States. The warriors sidled up beside Grant and Fleming’s wagons and, through the Metis guides, told them that they were from the Missouri territory, heading to Fort Garry to swear allegiance to the Great White Mother. Their fear, they told Grant, was that the local Cree and Ojibwa might drive them back into the United States. They were magnificent men, Grant wrote, dressed in blankets and leggings and wearing their eagle headdresses. One of them had a painted tin horse a foot long hanging on his naked chest, skunk fur on his ankles, hawk feathers in his hair and a great bunch of sweet-smelling lilac bergamot flowers under one arm. The chief wore a necklace of bear claws, and moccasins belted with broad stripes of porcupine
quills dyed bright gold. They parlayed with Grant and Fleming’s party, Grant recorded, “with a dignity of manner that whites in the new world must ever despair of attaining,” and then took their leave.

Somewhere in the Saskatchewan territory, they overtook a missionary, George McDougal, and Souzie, his Cree guide, and for a number of days, McDougal and Souzie travelled with them. McDougal was returning to his mission at Victoria Settlement. He had ministered to the Crees there, in a rough-hewn church, dispensary and school, and two years before had lost his wife and his daughters to a smallpox epidemic that had cut down the settlement. To this day, you can see the pitiable marble headstones of the McDougal family, including their adopted Cree daughter, all swept away in what to devout believers must have been the most unfathomable of God’s mysteries. Only now was the widower missionary returning to his post. By the campfire at night, the Presbyterian and the Methodist had time to ponder the ways of God.

When Grant asked McDougal to name “any positive improvement in morality that had resulted from the Missionaries’ labours,” McDougal tersely replied—one can imagine him staring darkly into the campfire—“Yes, Christianized Crees would not steal your horses … when you were passing through their country.”

Come now, Grant insisted, there must be some more positive impact to the Christian message. McDougal
would concede only that they “did keep the Lord’s Day after a fashion, treated their women rather better, were more comfortable, a little cleaner, sent their children to school for a while.” Then he added, bitterly, that they still remained “dirty, vicious, miserable” and not much better than the Indians who stayed pagan. McDougal’s despair did not manage to unsettle Grant’s optimism. When they did reach Victoria Settlement, Grant was moved to tears by the sight of Cree children singing Christian hymns in their own language.

Grant concluded there were only three alternatives for dealing with the Indians. The Americans had tried the first alternative—extermination—and it had only provoked bloody wars. The second alternative was pauperization, forcing Indians onto reservations as permanent wards of the federal government. This would have the same effect, he thought, as welfare dependency among the white working poor. He remained opposed, throughout his life, to the reserve system. His preferred third way, very vague and high-minded though it was, was to treat the Indian “as if he had in him the makings of a man.” When civilized, he added, he will not be like the average Ontarian. “Neither is the French habitant nor the Hindo … yet both are very good people in their way. But he will be a man.” Civilization meant allowing Indians to own property, to become industrious farmers and mechanics like white people did. They could keep treaty lands as communal
property, but they should be afforded the incentives of private ownership and hold title to their individual farms and homesteads.