BIG-LIE DAY
At nine o’clock I was up again, had had breakfast and gone to the
trading shop. It was the first of April. A Big Bear Indian came in.
Wandering Spirit was at the farming instructor’s house, he said, and
sent word that Agent Quinn wanted to see me. I closed the shop and
walked over.
Wandering Spirit grinned as I entered. He wore his war bonnet and
seemed in excellent humour. “Big-Lie Day!” he exclaimed. The other
Indians present laughed. So did Quinn. I joined them. There were more
dupes than one there, that first of April morning, and they were not
the Indians.
Imasees, Big Bear’s son, said to the agent:
“Sioux Speaker. We have had bad advice from the half-breeds this
winter. They said they would spill much blood in the spring. They
wished us to join them. They have already risen; we knew about it
before you. They have beaten the soldiers in the first fight, killing
many. We do not wish to join the half-breeds, but we are afraid. We
wish to stay here and prove ourselves the friends of the white men.
Tell us all the news that comes to you and we will tell you all we
hear. The soldiers will come, perhaps, and want to fight us. We want
you to protect us, to speak for us to their chief when they come.”
Quinn replied: “You make good talk, Imasees. I am glad you wish to
remain friends with us. The fighting is far from here. Stay on the
reservation and no one will bother you. I will see that you do not want
for food.”
Miserable Man joked the agent about his threat in the fall. They shook
hands as they passed out.
“I’m glad Wandering Spirit seems friendly,” remarked Quinn. “He has a
great reputation as a warrior among the tribes and as war chief is most
to be feared. So long as he stays quiet we have nothing to worry about.”
Perhaps it was because I came to know him so well and witnessed the
ferocity of his wild, complex nature when roused, that Wandering
Spirit has always filled the first place in my memory among the many
Indian chiefs I have met. Tall, lithe, active, perhaps forty years
of age, of a quick, nervous temperament which transformed him at a
stroke in moments of excitement into a mortal fiend, he was a copper
Jekyll and Hyde—a savage no more to be trusted than a snake. An odd
thing about him was his hair. Whereas the hair of the ordinary Indian
is as straight as falling water, the plaits of the war chief, while
long and black like any other Indian’s, stood out about his head in
thick curls, forming a sombre background for his dark, piercing eyes.
And those eyes! Shall I ever forget them? I can see them yet, in all
their burning intensity, flashing here and there, seeing everything,
as though it were yesterday. His nose was long and straight, his mouth
wide and lips thin and cruel. He had a prominent chin, deep sunken
cheeks and features darkly bronzed and seamed about the eyes and mouth
with sharply-cut lines. His voice was usually soft and intriguing;
when he spoke in council it rose gradually until it rang through the
camp. It had a smooth, velvet quality that reminded me always, somehow,
of the panther he so much resembled in other ways, and of its soft,
caressing paw—with the claws of steel beneath the velvet.
“He was never much to steal horses,” Four-Sky Thunder said to me one
day later in the camp, when he called with a present of tobacco and we
sat smoking in the lodge. “His greatest pleasure was in fighting, and
he has killed more Blackfeet than any warrior among us, not excepting
Big Bear.”
First councillor, head soldier, war chief, cruel as the grave, a
hunter of men, as proud of his record as any gold-laced general of his
decorations—Kahpaypamahchakwayo, the Wandering Spirit.
In the evening I walked over to Quinn’s house, dropping on the way into
Delaney’s. I found there Gowanlock and his wife, Gilchrist and Dill.
They asked me whether Mr. Simpson, my chief at Frog Lake, had returned
from Pitt and on my replying in the negative, jokingly remarked that he
must be afraid to come out. I answered that if we all had as little to
fear as my chief I should feel easier; he had known and traded with Big
Bear and his band for twenty-five years and he and the old chief were
great friends. I felt I suppose unreasonably irritated. Plainly these
people did not sense the gravity of our position. It seemed to me no
time for flippant talk. True, the Indians had not as yet given us cause
for apprehension, but we were at the mercy of their every whim and
who could say that a situation of deadly peril and anxiety might not
develop at any moment?
I went on to Quinn’s. Crossing a ploughed field beside the house, I
almost stepped in the darkness on an Indian. He crawled away at my
approach. They were guarding the agent’s house, then! He was not to be
allowed to escape as the police had done.
Quinn was seated in his office, just off the front hall. Big Bear,
Imasees and one or two others of the band were with him. Imasees gave
me his chair, passing a common Indian joke about me, at which all
laughed excepting Big Bear. The chief had returned that afternoon from
his hunt. His striking face was dark and swollen from the cold and
the smoke of many camp-fires and he looked weary and troubled. He was
speaking of “Uneeyen”—Riel—the half-breed rebel leader, and went on:
“He said to me, ‘Big Bear, much blood will flow.’ He was trading whisky
on the Missouri River and wanted the Crees to help him make war.
“When I was in the Long Knives’ (Americans’) country I had a dream, an
ugly dream. I saw a spring shooting up out of the ground. I covered
it with my hand, trying to smother it, but it spurted up between my
fingers and ran over the back of my hand. It was a spring of blood,
Kapwatamut!”
Imasees left the house. His father’s talk seemed to trouble him. The
old chief rose. “Good night, Kapwatamut,” he said. He extended his
hand, and there was deep concern in his voice as he looked into the
agent’s eyes and repeated: “Good night!”
After they were gone, Quinn said: “They seem friendly. Guess they’re
going to be all right.”
I answered: “Something’s troubling Big Bear; he behaves queerly. I’m
sure no harm’s to be anticipated from him personally. I’d like to feel
as sure of the others.”
I remained with Quinn until eleven. He told me of the Minnesota
Massacre in the ’60’s, when his father, an Irishman and a noted scout
for the United States troops, had been ambushed and killed by the
Sioux. Also of his own narrow escape at that time, when the hostiles
at grey dawn raided the small frontier town where he was employed in
a trading business and he had jumped in an empty barrel and worked it
under the counter with his fingers. The Indians had missed him when
they sacked the store and he had got away that night. Half starved,
after several perilous days and nights he had at length reached a
military post. He said to me as I was leaving:
“Well, Cameron, they might kill me, but they can’t scare me.”
Poor Quinn! I wonder if he guessed how soon his courage and his boast
would be put to the proof?
One Man and Sitting Horse, the uncle and brother of Quinn’s wife, a
Cree woman, went to him in the night with horses and offered to see him
well on the way to Fort Pitt.
Quinn would not go.