MEEMINOOK
When in the early spring of ’84, on my way down the Saskatchewan with
a trading outfit I first happened across Meeminook, he was I thought
one of the finest types of the pure Indian I had ever seen. It was at
Victoria. He lived at Saddle Lake, thirty-five miles to the east, and
I was going his way. The trail was new to me, and when he volunteered
to keep me company I was more than pleased. He had the figure of a
senator of ancient Rome—tall, graceful, commanding; strong intellectual
features; a nose with a classic bend; a voice deep, sonorous and
musical.
Stretched in the beguiling glow of our camp fire late into the night,
smoking and swallowing frequent draughts of strong black tea out of the
sooty two-quart copper pail, we lay. And Meeminook
“Fought all his battles o’er again;
And thrice he routed all his foes,
And thrice he slew the slain.”
He told of war parties, of Blackfeet scalps won in battle; of camps
raided and horses run off in the dark.
“_Eigh, N’Chawamis_,” he said regretfully in his flowing Cree and grave
deliberate way, “that was a time to live! When the buffalo were like
grass on the plains and with your ear to the ground you could not sleep
for the thunder of their hoofs. A time of feasting and of fighting, a
time to make warriors! They are gone now to the Sand Hills—all gone.
And the men, too—they have followed them, except here and there one of
the old eagles of the Crees!”
When he arrived with the Saddle Lake band in Big Bear’s camp shortly
after the massacre, Meeminook at once looked me up.
“_Eigh, N’Chawamis!_” he exclaimed, pressing my hand warmly. “I was
glad when I heard they had not killed you. While I am in the camp,
Kahpaypamahchakwayo if he loves his life will be careful how he
looks at you!” And Meeminook remained one of my staunchest defenders
throughout the dreary two months that followed.
The night we camped in the coulee I saw Meeminook, his face smeared
with vermilion and yellow ochre, leave his lodge buckling on his
cartridge belt. I asked where he was going—the reason of the paint.
“To the fort.” He stood looking down at me with his engaging friendly
smile, his fine eyes dancing, took my hand and pressed it. “If I do
not come back—well, what of it? It is what comes to us all some time.
Remember always, Meeminook was your friend!”
He sprang to the saddle of the restless black stallion—the same Henry
Quinn had ridden at Pitt—and dashed after the party already climbing
the slope behind the camp. They passed over the top and the trampling
of their horses grew faint and fainter until it died away in the night.
It happened that at about the time the war party left Frenchman’s
Butte, Major Steele, in General Strange’s camp at Pitt, was instructing
his bugler to blow “Boots and Saddles” for the information of his
particular branch of the command, the scouts. The major was lining up
a little war party of his own. His men had discovered the body of poor
Cowan that afternoon on the hill above Pitt, with his heart on the
point of a stick planted in the sod beside him. Now they were anxious
to find somebody not dead who had not been a friend to the murdered
scout.
Pipestone Creek is not much of a stream to be invested with so deep and
wooded a valley as it tumbles down.
The Indians had just reached its eastern bank and were about to descend
and cross, when the ring of steel striking the rocks in the bed of the
shallow stream below came to them. They drew back into the shadow of a
poplar bluff a hundred yards from the brow of the bank and waited.
The scouts filed slowly by twos up the trail leading out of the valley,
Major Steele ahead. As his broad shoulders rose above the level of
the plateau across which the Indians were halted in the darkness,
the whinny of a cayuse struck his ear. He gave a sharp order in an
undertone and the scouts closed up quickly and extended in some bushes
along the edge of the bank.
Meeminook’s horse was a racer. When he had his head he fairly flew.
He had it now. Out from the shadow of a dark cloud broke the peaceful
moon, and simultaneously, from the shadow of the green bluff and across
the intervening space in half a dozen bounds shot the black stallion.
A shrill war-cry cut the night’s stillness and echoed along the deep
forest-flanked valley of the Pipestone—with dark eyes fixed on the
officer’s scarlet tunic, Meeminook was riding down on Major Steele.
“_Crack! Crack!_”
Smoke puffed in his face and two bullets whisked past the major’s nose.
His arm flew out and two answering reports came from the Colt in his
hand.
Meeminook had partly reined in his horse, perhaps with a view to a
better aim. But Meeminook had aimed his last; he would never point a
gun any more. With a bullet through his neck, he sagged down in his
saddle and tumbled to the earth.
I did not see Meeminook again but was told that one of the scouts—who
should have known better—carried about with him in his waistcoat pocket
an ear of the brave redskin. Knowing Meeminook as I did, I felt that
his poor body merited more humane treatment. Savagery is not altogether
a trait of the red man.