An Assineboine camp――The trader McDermott――The chief
“Wolverine”――Fire-water and finesse――The Assineboine war-party――A
chance of a Cree scalp――The trader hears a well-known name――A big bid
for murder, two hundred skins!
The events that now began to unfold themselves in my life and in those
of my companions, took shape and context only after long lapse of time
had passed by.
It was frequently when months had vanished that I learned the various
threads of action which had led to incidents of more or less importance
to me. Hitherto I had been only a boy-actor in the drama of existence.
I was now about to become a sharer in a larger sphere of action, and to
participate in scenes of adventure the springs of which were involved
in the lives and actions of other men. Writing now as I do from a
standpoint of life which looks back across many years to those early
adventures, I am able to set down the record with its various parts
complete. I can see the lines of life upon which other men moved,
and can trace the impulses upon which they acted――can fill in, as it
were, the gaps between their action and mine own, and give to the
story of my life at that period an insight into events which then lay
veiled from me by distance. It will therefore be necessary, in order
that my readers may comprehend clearly the thread of the events I am
about to relate, that I should at times carry them away to scenes in
which personally I was not an actor, and that they should occasionally
o’erleap the boundaries of the moment to look upon a far wider theatre
of events than I myself had at the time beheld.
We will therefore leave the scene at the camp-fire in the Wolverine
hills, and travel in imagination a hundred miles to the south-west,
where, on one of the sources of the Qu’appelle river, a large camp of
Assineboines, or Stone Indians, is pitched.
The camp is a large one, for the buffalo have been numerous all the
summer long on the prairies south of the Qu’appelle, and many scattered
bands of the tribe have come together to hunt and feast upon the mighty
herd. A brisk trade is being carried on too in skins and robes; for
a rich trader has arrived in the camp, with goodly store of guns,
blankets, trinkets, powder and ball, and beads; and chief and brave,
and squaw and boy, are busy at the work of barter and exchange.
[Illustration: A brisk trade is being carried on.]
On the evening we speak of, the chief of the Assineboines was seated
smoking in his lodge, when the leather door was raised and the figure
of a white man entered. It was McDermott, the trader from the Red
River.
The Wolverine extended his hand to the new comer, the trader shook it,
seated himself on the opposite side of the small, clear wood fire that
burned in the centre of the lodge, and began to smoke in silence. The
Indian scarcely moved a muscle, but sat smoking too, his eyes fixed
upon the flame. At last the trader broke silence. “Has any news come of
the young men who are on the war-path?” he asked.
“No,” answered the Wolverine, “they will carry their own news; when
they have something to tell and to show, then they will return.”
McDermott had his own reasons for asking; he wanted horses, and he knew
that if the war-party was successful he would obtain them for a trifle.
Horses lightly got upon the war-path, are lightly parted with by their
captors. A trading gun and some ball and powder would purchase a good
horse in the camp; ten guns’ value would not buy him in the English
settlement on the Red river.
The Wolverine knew well that the trader did not ask these questions
without good reason; and although he had that day received news of the
war-party, both of their whereabouts and future movements, he was not
going to give the smallest item of that news to his questioner without
receiving some substantial return for it.
On his part McDermott was also aware that a messenger had come in
during the day from the war-party, but of the purport of the news, or
the movements of the party, he could not glean any tidings; but he had
brought with him to the lodge of the Wolverine a potent key to unlock
the secret store of that chief's mind, and as he now produced from his
pocket a bottle of the strongest fire-water, there came a look into the
impassive eye of the old Indian opposite that told the trader at once
that the information he sought for would soon be his.
Taking a small tin vessel, he poured out into it some of the fiery
poison, and handed the cup across the fire to the chief. As his hand
passed over the flame he shook a few drops of the spirit on the fire; a
bright blue flame shot quickly up, illuminating all the interior of the
lodge and lighting up the dusky features of the Wolverine, whose arm
was already outstretched to receive the drink he so deeply thirsted for.
“It is good fire-water,” he said as he saw the blaze, “so it will light
up the heart of the red man as it does this red stick.”
McDermott cautiously refrained for some moments from asking any more
questions of the whereabouts of the war-party. A perfect adept in the
ways of Indian trade, he knew the fire-water would soon do its work on
the brain of the Wolverine.
The Indian drank, and returned the empty cup to his visitor.
“I wished to learn the movements of your young men,” said McDermott
after a long pause, during which his sharp eye had noted the Indian’s
face as he sat glowering over the fire, “because I am about to quit
this camp, and I am afraid they may come upon my horses at night and
mistake them for those of an enemy.”
“What direction do you travel?” asked the chief.
“Towards the settlement,” replied the trader. “My supplies are nearly
exhausted, and it is time to return home.”
This was a lie. He had no intention whatever of leaving the plains,
and the best portion of his goods he had kept concealed from the
Assineboines in a cache on the Qu’appelle river. For the third time he
filled the cup, and already the eye, glistening in the firelight like
that of a serpent, told the effect the fiery liquor was having upon
the Wolverine’s brain. “I want you,” went on the trader, “to send with
me the Indian who came to-day from the war-party. He will protect my
horses from being taken, in case I should fall in with your young men.”
“There will be no danger to your horses,” said the Indian. “My young
men are far away from the trail that leads to the settlement; but you
want to get the horses they have taken, not to protect your own. Well,
give me the rest of that bottle, and you may take with you the young
man who to-day has come from the party. He will lead you where you
will find them.”
The bargain was soon struck, and as the trader quitted the lodge the
Wolverine was clutching in his bony fingers the fatal fire-water,
which, more than war, hunger, or exposure, has destroyed the red man’s
race over the wide continent of North America.
McDermott having obtained the chief’s consent to his taking the
brave lately arrived from the war-party away with him, without which
permission it would have been fatal to his future interests in trade
to have moved him, lost no time in setting out on his road. He put
together the greater portion of his goods, and leaving a half-breed
servant to continue the exchange of those things that it was impossible
for him to take away, he departed from the camp at midnight, and by
daybreak was far away from the last trace of the Assineboines.
He had with him the Assineboine scout as guide, and two retainers, a
French half-breed and a Salteaux Indian. The party rode rapidly; they
had a large band of horses, and packs and saddles were frequently
changed. By the evening of the first day they drew near the last
mountain range of hills. The scout led the way. When night fell upon
the plain they were on the edge of the hills; presently a small lake
was reached. It was now dark, but the guide knew the track, and he
pushed on into the hills.
A long ride further through rough and broken ground, on which they
had carefully to pick their way, brought them suddenly face to face
with a small fire burning in a glen between abrupt hills. Around the
fire were seated several figures. It was the camp of the war-party.
The braves sat late around their fires, but there was reason for their
doing so. A scout had only lately returned with news of importance. The
story he had to tell was to this effect. At sunset he had been looking
from a hill over the prairie to the west; he had suddenly observed two
horsemen riding from a point in the line of hills farther to the south,
out into the plain. Judging from the lateness of the hour, that a camp
must be in the neighbourhood of the place from whence those horsemen
had gone, the scout had ridden cautiously forward towards that portion
of the hills. He had soon discovered a fire, beside which a solitary
white man sat. Concealing himself effectually from sight, he had
watched and waited.
Soon there had come an Indian and another white man, bearing with them
what seemed the dead body of another Indian. But this man was not dead;
he shortly began to speak, to eat, to drink. He was a Cree, who told a
story of having crawled a long way over the prairies from the south.
The scout knew only a little of the Cree language, and he had been able
only to follow roughly what the wounded man had said. As for the other
men――the white men he had never seen before, but the red man was the
Red Cloud, the famous wandering Sioux.
Now the principal item of this story that had interest for the
Assineboines, who sat eager listeners around the fire, was that which
had reference to the wounded Cree Indian: the Crees were enemies; the
war-party had as yet taken no Cree scalps. How could they return to
their camp with no trophy to show? The women and children would laugh
at them; the old men would say, “Ah! it was different in our time; we
did not come in from the war-trail without horses or scalps.” Here then
was a great chance of supplying this most pressing want.
It was true that the Red Cloud was well known over all the northern
prairies. It would be no easy matter to carry off the Cree from his
protection; nor would it be safe to molest the white men who were with
him, for the noise of harm done to white men travelled sometimes far
over the prairies, and reached even the ears of the Great Mother who
dwelt beyond the big sea in the land where the sun rose.
These things considered made it wiser to attempt the capture of the
Cree while both the Indian and his white friends were absent from their
camp. If this could be effected, then indeed the party might return in
triumph to their friends and justly receive the rewards of bravery.
It will be seen from the foregoing summary of the conversation which
had been held over the fire by the Assineboines now grouped around it,
that the bravery of the party individually or collectively was not
of the highest order; but in truth the thing we call courage is much
the same among red men as among white all the world over. Confined to
no class or to no people, its examples will be found often mixed with
strange evidences of cowardice; and side by side with the man who dares
for the sake of daring, will be found the man in whose heart a bit of
cheap courage is only less cherished than his life.
It was while thus the party of Assineboines debated their future action
that the voice of the scout who had left them some days previously
was heard saluting from the darkness. The new arrivals came forward
into the circle of light. McDermott was an old acquaintance, and he
and his Salteaux were soon seated around the fire. The presence of
the trader did little to interrupt the flow of conversation between
the Assineboines. Too much engrossed by the prospect of such an easy
prey, they soon resumed the thread of their discussion, and after some
questions asked and answered the new comer was left to smoke in silence.
But as the Assineboines debated their plans, and mention had been made
once or twice of the two men in the other camp against whom the braves
had no quarrel, there came into the trader’s face an expression of rapt
attention, and he listened eagerly to every word that fell from his
companions. He might well start at the utterance of one name――the name
of the Red Cloud, the son of the man he had foully betrayed to his
doom.
Face to face he had never met the Sioux chief, but a vague undefined
fear had oppressed him whenever his name had been mentioned. He well
knew that the vengeance of the Sioux is deep and lasting; he knew too
that if any act merited revenge it was the act which he had committed
upon the father of this man with whom he had had no cause of quarrel,
with whom he had been on terms of long and deep intimacy, in whose tent
he had eaten in former times, when the Sioux had held their lands up to
the shores of the Otter Tail and to the sources of the Mississippi.
Nine years had passed since that foul deed had been wrought. In the
wild life of the prairies, and amid a society whose deeds of violence
were of too frequent occurrence, the memory of any particular act
of bloodshed is soon forgotten; but time had never blotted out the
recollection of the treachery of the trader McDermott. There was not a
Sioux on the most southern tributary stream of the great Missouri who
had not heard of that dark night’s work, when, drugged at the feast to
which he had gone in the confidence of old friendship, the chief Black
Eagle was carried through the snow of the winter night and yielded a
prisoner at the frontier post on the Red river.
Since that time the trader had grown rich. He had many successful
ventures on the plains; for the quarrels of the Sioux were not the
quarrels of the Crees, the Assineboines, and the Blackfeet, the Sircies
or the Salteaux; but through all these years he lived as it were in the
shadow of his own crime, and he felt that while a Sioux was left to
roam the prairie, the dead body of the man whose life he had sold was
still unburied. Many a time when the shadows darkened upon the great
landscape had he heard in his heart the mysterious voice of conscience,
upbraiding him with the deed of blood; but more than all had he
conceived, with the intuitive faculty of fear, a dread of the Red Cloud.
Whether there came tidings of a battle or a skirmish, fought between
the remnants of the Sioux, the Mandans, the Minatarree, or the Ogahalla
branches of that once mighty nation with the troops of the United
States, McDermott longed to learn that this wandering chief, whose
presence ever haunted his imagination, had at last met his end. But he
ever seemed to bear a charmed life.
At one time he was heard of in a raid upon the American post on the
great bend of the Missouri; again came tidings that he had led a small
band of the Ogahalla against a detachment of soldiers in the fort hills
of Montana, and that not one living soul had escaped to tell the fate
of the American soldiers; and again there came news that a solitary
Indian had been seen by the Touchwood hills, or in the broken ridges of
the Mauvais Bois, and that this roving red man was the Red Cloud.
That curious instinct which danger frequently gives to the mind long
before any actual symptom of its approach is visible, had warned the
trader McDermott that while the Sioux lived he had reason to dread at
his hands a fate as cruel as the one to which he had consigned the old
chief.
Now all at once, sitting here at this camp fire, he heard the dreaded
name of his enemy, and gathering from the conversation that only a
few miles away from where he sat lay camped the man he feared more
than anything on earth, it is little wonder that his heart beat loudly
within his breast, and his face showed unmistakable traces of the
conflict of passion that raged within him. For with the news of this
proximity of his hated enemy there was also a chance not to be lightly
lost. Here was the Sioux in company with a wounded Cree, close to a
war-party of Assineboines hungry for trophies and for plunder. His
course was plain. Could he succeed in inducing the Assineboines to
attack the Sioux camp, and end for ever his hated enemy? It would go
hard with him if he could not.
Listening to the conversation of the braves, and at the same time
endeavouring to frame his plans for the destruction of the Sioux, he
sat silent for some time. The presence of white men in the camp of the
Sioux alone disquieted him; it prevented his openly proposing to the
Indians who were with him to attack the camp, and joining them himself
in doing so.
The death on the prairies of two Indians would have mattered little,
but the murder of two white men was an event that might give rise
to unpleasant questions being asked in the Red River; and when next
he visited his home there, it might be to find himself charged with
complicity or actual share in the crime.
He pretended therefore not to have heard much of what the Assineboines
had been speaking among themselves, but to approach his object from an
outside point altogether.
Watching an opportunity, and addressing himself to the leader of the
band, he began.
[Illustration: Watching an opportunity, the trader addressed the leader
of the band.]
“I see no trace of war,” he said, “and I hear of no horses having
been captured. Are the Crees too strong, that your braves have feared
to encounter them? or do they watch their horses so closely that you
cannot get near them?”
The taunt struck the mark it had been aimed at. “We have not taken
scalps,” replied the leader, “because the Crees keep together and shun
our presence. The horses of the Crees are fleet to run away; but it may
not be long,” he added, “before we have horses, and scalps too.”
“I want some good horses,” went on the trader, “and I will give a large
price for them; but they must be of the right kind――not small, starved
ponies, but mustangs of size and power, fit for a chief to ride.”
He well knew the horses which the Red Cloud usually rode and used, and
in mentioning the style of horse he now required he painted exactly
those of his enemy.
“And what would you give for such a horse?” asked the Assineboine
leader.
The trader thought for a moment. Here was his opportunity. Now or never
he would name a price dazzling to the Indian――cheap to him, since it
might for ever rid him of the man he feared and hated.
“I would give for such a horse,” he slowly replied, “two hundred skins.”
Two hundred skins! Never had horse fetched such a price since the
mustang breed had reached these northern prairies from the great
plateau of New Mexico and the Spanish frontier, two hundred years ago.
The Indian was dumb with astonishment――for three such horses he and his
band would get 750 skins. Why they would be rich for evermore. They
would be the envy of every young Assineboine in the tribe. The fairest
squaws would be their wives, for they could lay such a pile of presents
at the lodge doors of the parents that it would be impossible to deny
their suit. What guns, too, they could buy, and fancy rifles, and
store of beads and gaudy dress, with porcupine quills, and blankets of
brightest hue!
All these things flashed through the minds of the war-party as they
listened to the trader’s offer. The bid was too high; the last doubt
about attempting to kill the Cree and carry off the horses of the
Sioux vanished, and already they began to speculate upon their future
disposal of so much wealth and so much finery. So far as they were
concerned the doom of the Cree, and for that matter of the Sioux, and
his associates if resistance was offered, was settled.
The trader saw with suppressed joy this realization of his fondest
hopes. He well knew the Sioux would fight to the bitter end sooner
than lose friend or horse. He had only one fear, and that was that the
murder of the Cree and the capture of the horses might be effected
while the Sioux was absent from his camp, and that thus the life of his
enemy might be saved.
As he wrapt himself in his robe a little later on in the night, and lay
down to sleep by the still smouldering embers of the camp fire, he felt
at last that his long fear was wearing to an end, and that the fate of
his enemy was sealed.