CONCLUSION
In concluding this narrative of my experiences among hostile Indians
a few notes concerning the subsequent careers of those prominently
connected with it, either as belligerents or as captives, will be of
interest.
Louis Riel was hanged at Regina in October, 1885. I saw him there,
wearing a ball and chain, several times during the trials, after he had
been condemned. He was of medium height, compactly built, with thick
curling brown hair and beard, an unusually long straight nose, small
cunning eyes and hands like a woman’s which he used with effect in
graceful gestures when he spoke. His skin was fair for a half-breed and
he possessed marked native ability, which his perverted ideas, cruel
nature and overweening ambition prevented his employing to useful ends.
His purpose in inciting rebellion among his own race and his kinsmen,
the Indians, undoubtedly was to force the Canadian government into
paying him a large sum to leave the country and return to the United
States. In this he was defeated by the unexpected and rapid rise and
spread of the revolt and the shedding of blood, and the scaffold was a
fitting close to his inglorious career.
On my way East in December, 1885, I visited the Manitoba Penitentiary
and through the kindness of the warden, Major Bedson, was permitted to
interview Big Bear, Poundmaker and other Indian prisoners. They were
pleased to see me. Poundmaker was a magnificent type of the American
red man. Fully six and a half feet in height, he had a most intelligent
face, large Roman nose, a deliberate and courtly air, and a slight
stoop which gave a classic pose to his striking figure. His hair was
his especial pride. It hung in two superb plaits almost to his knees.
When sentenced at Regina for treason-felony to two years’ imprisonment,
he exclaimed: “I would rather be hanged!” It was the expected loss
of his hair that moved him. His appearance and manner so impressed
the prison authorities however that he was spared the humiliation of
parting with his cherished locks.
Big Bear’s chief concern was for the scattered remnant of his band
and for his children. He told me then, and also a year later when I
returned West, the truth about his connection with the outbreak, most
of his story being embodied in the foregoing pages. I had always a
keen regard for the old chief and believed his word was to be relied
upon. True, he was a savage, but in estimating his character allowance
must be made for a condition for which he was in no wise responsible,
being born to it. Big Bear had great natural gifts: courage, a keen
intellect, a fine sense of humour, quick perception, splendid native
powers of expression and great strength of purpose.
His voice reminded me always of his name. It was of amazing depth and
volume and I have heard him say “_No!_” in tones which sounded like
the roar of a lion. Yet his speech was capable of taking on a vastly
different inflection, and the next instant I have heard it sink to a
soft whisper, tender and musical as a child’s. The old man came often
to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post at Frog Lake and had dinner with
me and prior to the outbreak we had many times camped and travelled
together. He was one of the most entertaining conversationalists I ever
listened to and I never wearied of his tales and reminiscences. He
could enchain an audience, white or red, whenever he opened his mouth;
his gestures spoke almost as eloquently as his words. He was built more
like a white man than an Indian, being short and heavy. When young he
must have had immense powers of endurance.
I recall his once telling me of having been surrounded with three
others of his tribe on the open plains by a large war party of
Blackfeet. The Crees threw up earthworks with their knives and for
three days lay in their pits, enduring all the pangs of hunger and
thirst, and kept the enemy at bay. He became so accustomed to the sound
of the Blackfoot bullets over his head, the old man said, and grew so
drowsy that he frequently found himself dropping off to sleep as he lay
with his rifle across a depression in the earthworks, watching in the
darkness for the shadow of an approaching foe. On the third night Big
Bear escaped through the Blackfoot lines, killing one of their pickets,
and at daybreak returned with a party of his own tribe and drove the
enemy off.
Had the old chief been a white man and educated, he would have made
a great lawyer or a great statesman. Poundmaker was perhaps a finer
savage to look at, but Big Bear was far the greater man. Poundmaker was
crafty and politic; Big Bear noble, outspoken, fearless.
Big Bear was liberated at the end of two years. He returned to
Battleford and died on Poundmaker’s reservation during the winter of
1887-8. Poundmaker had been released earlier; like Big Bear he did not
long survive to appreciate the blessing of freedom. I have a photograph
of Poundmaker taken just before his death through the bursting of a
blood-vessel at Blackfoot Crossing, near Calgary, where he was visiting
the Blackfoot chief, Crowfoot. I have also a photograph of Big Bear
taken immediately after his capture in 1885.
In the spring of 1888 I told one of Big Bear’s men whom I met at
Edmonton of his chief’s death. He clapped his hand over his mouth—the
Indian expression of surprise or incredulity.
“He always said he would never die until his teeth were worn even
with his gums,” was what he said, then. An Indian is usually too
polite to say that he does not believe you, but I quite understood
that Wapatequyoo at that moment held my veracity in light esteem. His
answer was significant as showing the estimation in which Big Bear’s
utterances were regarded by his band. As a matter of fact I immediately
recalled having noticed that the old chief’s teeth were worn short by
mastication.
Big Bear and Poundmaker were the two principal chiefs implicated in the
uprising.
Imasees, Little Poplar, King Bird, Lucky Man and others managed to
avoid capture and escape across the boundary into Montana. They killed
a man drifting down the South Saskatchewan River in a skiff and used
his boat to cross the stream. Little Poplar was shot a year or so later
by a half-breed named Ward with whom he quarrelled over some horses.
They met on horseback on the prairie near Fort Assiniboine and the
Indian opened fire with a revolver. The half-breed responded promptly
with a Winchester. Three bullets pierced Little Poplar before he fell
from his horse, dead.
Imasees became the leader of the band of refugees, which in time
came to be a nuisance and menace to Montanians, killing cattle and
committing other depredations, until in the summer of 1896 they were
rounded up and deported to Canada by United States troops. They were
met by an escort of mounted police and Canadian officials and taken
north to Battleford. Imasees, who had adopted the name of Little
Bear, made a trip to Ottawa and eastern cities in paint and feathers,
wearing all the airs of a great chief. He made speeches and Canadian
officialdom listened deferentially and paid him due respect. Had he
been captured after the rebellion he would doubtless have swung from
the same scaffold as Wandering Spirit, for he was undoubtedly the real
instigator of the Frog Lake massacre. From personal observation, I
have shown that he was guilty of the basest treachery. But such are
the vagaries of time: the accessories condemned and hanged by the
government; the principal fêted and publicly honoured by the same
government.
Imasees died a year or two ago in his camp on the St. Mary’s River in
Montana.
The two murderers, Paskookwyoo and Maymaykwaysoo, also escaped justice.
I believe they are now also dead.
Four-Sky Thunder was released in the summer of 1891. I had seen him at
Stony Mountain Penitentiary, occupying a seat on the tailors’ bench. I
met Peter Hourie, the Indian Department interpreter at Regina, in the
street one day.
“Did you see your old friend?” he asked.
“Who was that?”
“Kahneeokeesikopaniss. He came to the office yesterday, on his way to
Battleford. He said he was sorry to hear that the _Musinageesees_ was
dead. I asked him who he meant. ‘Missa Jim’ _oskineku_, he said. ‘He is
not dead,’ I told him. ‘If you stand on this corner he will pass within
two smokes and you will see him.’”
This was early in the afternoon. I afterwards learned that my old
_chawam_, Four-Sky Thunder, had stood in that spot until nearly train
time, seven in the evening, watching for me. I was sorry that my
business that afternoon had taken me in another direction and that he
was obliged to leave without seeing me again. I understand he is now
dead.
Lone Man put in an appearance at Edmonton a year after the rebellion.
He was trying to sell horses, the white racer upon which he had ridden
down Loasby at Pitt among them. It was an unfortunate indiscretion on
the part of Lone Man, for an ex-member of Steele’s Scouts who lived at
Edmonton recognized the savage of the solitary name by the white horse.
He had encountered him on the afternoon that Quinney, Dufresne and
myself found the scouts at Frenchman’s Butte and about a mile from that
picturesque landmark—which incidentally proves that Dufresne and I were
right in believing there might be stray Indians about and that it would
be the part of wisdom for the missionary to exercise caution.
Lone Man was shut up in the police guard-room at Edmonton to await
trial for shooting at and wounding Loasby. One night he escaped. He was
gone for two days. It was January, the thermometer far below zero. On
the third morning a detachment of police overtook Lone Man on the road.
He knew of course that several of his fellow-tribesmen had been hanged
at Battleford and doubtless anticipated a like fate. He took off his
white blanket and waved it in the wind, trying to stampede the police
horses. They plunged and snorted but the attempt failed. Then Lone Man
shouted defiance, telling the police they were dogs and calling on them
to shoot and be eternally condemned. They arrested him instead. He got
six years in Manitoba Penitentiary.
Whether or not Lone Man still lives I do not know, but about fifteen
years ago I one day received in the mail a letter post-marked Pincher
Creek, Alberta, addressed in an unfamiliar hand. It was signed:
“Your old friend,
“SAM JOHNSON.”
I had known Johnsons, of course—plenty of them—but I couldn’t place
Sam. But when I reached the postscript the riddle was explained.
“I used to be called The Lone Man,” it read, “but my right name is
Sam Johnson.
“Your old friend,
“SAM JOHNSON.”
Civilization do move, by heck!
Clarence Loasby has been for years an official of the Canadian Pacific
Railway in the Kootenays, British Columbia. He wears in a ring on his
finger one of the two bullets received on that scouting trip at Pitt
and for which he is indebted to The Lone Man.
Henry Quinn I saw several times during 1897 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He
did not look much like the sprightly young fellow I knew in ’85. He had
lived among the Sioux for some years and appeared to have sunk in the
social scale. He was big and burly and showed his mixed blood much more
than did his uncle, the Indian agent at Frog Lake.
My friend and protector, Louis Patenaude, lived until recently on the
bank of the Saskatchewan near Fort Pitt, with his stepfather, old Mr.
James K. Simpson. Both, I am sorry to say, are now dead. There were no
better men anywhere.
Kahneepotaytayo lives on the reservation at Onion Lake. Though I had
not seen him since the Rebellion, he recognized me at once when I drove
out to his place in the fall of 1923. No one seeing him now would
believe he could have been the handsome and active head dancer of Big
Bear’s band in 1885, the spearer of the White Dog’s Head and next to
Little Poplar (of whom he was a nephew) perhaps the greatest dandy
in the camp. His first wife was a daughter of Wandering Spirit; his
present one is a daughter of Apischiskoos, among the murderers hanged
at Battleford.
Whatever her father may have been, the daughter of Apischiskoos is
a fine type of Indian woman, pleasant to look at, ready of speech,
amiable, laughing and sincere. Everything about their camp on the
Pipestone near Onion Lake was as spick and trim as could be when I
visited them again in the fall of 1925. I made them some small presents
of things most dear to the Indian heart—tea, tobacco, sweets. They
were so kind, so frankly delighted over the visit that before leaving
I wished to say something agreeable, something sympathetic, to mention
some redeeming trait in her turbulent parent. I did. He had had two
daughters, neat, attractive girls about sixteen years of age at the
time of the massacre. They knew no English and we spoke in Cree.
“Your father was a good friend to me.” A shadow crossed her cheerful
face. She murmured something—probably to the effect that they should
not have hanged him, though I could not catch it. “In the winter before
the ‘bad time’ he came to me one day. ‘My daughter is very sick,’ he
told me. ‘She has a bad cold. I have no medicine—nothing to buy any.’ I
felt sorry. I said: ‘I will give you some medicine. Also a little tea
and sugar and biscuit for her.’ He came back in two weeks. ‘That was
splendid medicine,’ he said. ‘My daughter is quite well again.’
“He never forgot that. When others in the camp were against me, he
threatened them, always ready to defend me.” I paused a moment: “I
don’t know—perhaps it was for you he got the medicine?”
Like a flash, memory flew back over the years. Her eyes lighted; she
turned a beaming face to me: “Yes; I know!” she exclaimed. “It was
_yellow medicine_, wasn’t it?”
It was. What I had given Apischiskoos was a small bottle of honey—the
only “medicine” I had had that I thought might help a cold. Across
that great span of forty years she had not forgotten my trifling act
of kindness. She proved it convincingly.
When we were leaving she stood with Kahneepotaytayo alongside our car
with its three white occupants. I waited. They wanted, I knew, to
say something, to make a little speech to me at parting. At length
Kahneepotaytayo spoke:
“We are very pleased that you have come to see us. We never thought
to look at you again.” He was silent for a second. “And perhaps, _if
Manito thinks_, we shall see you yet again sometime.” And they call
this man a pagan!
I have never anywhere met friends who were more unaffectedly glad to
see me than these simple, kindly red folk of the Plains.
François Dufresne is interpreter for the Indian Department at Onion
Lake, where the agency is now located.
Poor Louis Goulet has been for twenty years an inmate of the Home for
Incurables at Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. I drop off to see him when
I pass that way. He likes to talk over the days, long gone, when he
could enjoy the sunlight like other people. He is completely blind.
Adolphus Nolin, vigorous and active still, lives on a ranch near
Onion Lake. I spent a night with him not long since. It was Nolin and
Pritchard who saved the white women from the Indians in ’85 after
their husbands had been killed. I saw John Pritchard at Battleford in
the fall of 1925 a few days before his death at the age of 86. His
only reward for guarding the white women in the Indian camp was the
consciousness of a good act nobly performed. It is not to the credit
of the Canadian government that his splendid services at that difficult
time were never recognized. He might at least have been given a small
pension, like the women whose lives he had saved.
Father Le Goff lives at the Roman Catholic Mission of Lac la Biche,
north of the Saskatchewan, on the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway.
Despite his eighty-six years, his health, as he wrote me recently, “is
very good.” The little French priest has had a most eventful life.
Prisoner of Big Bear’s followers in ’85, he was again a prisoner
thirty years later of the Germans. In June, 1914, he was in Liége,
Belgium, arranging for the publication of a Chippewyan dictionary he
had written, when the Great War broke. He was captured and shut up in a
monastery, but escaped to Switzerland. He continued after his return to
labour among the Chippewyans, with whom he must have spent nearly fifty
years, until quite recently.
Mr. W. J. McLean lives, with several of his numerous family, all long
grown up, in Winnipeg.
On Poundmaker’s reserve last fall, I looked up Horse Child, Big Bear’s
only surviving son. In build and many little mannerisms he reminded me
strongly of his father. He was twelve at the time of the ’85 troubles;
now he is fifty-two. I met there also Sakamataynew, Poundmaker’s only
son.
[Illustration:
KAHNEEPOTAYTAYO.
BIG BEAR’S HEAD DANCER (PHOTO 1925).
_Facing p. 252_.
]
[Illustration:
FINE DAY.
LEADER OF THE INDIANS IN THE CUT KNIFE BATTLE, 1885
(PHOTO 1925)]
My dear old comrade, Frederick Stanley Simpson, met his death on
October 1st, 1891, in the Nelson River, a tributary of Hudson Bay,
in an heroic effort to save the life of his senior officer, Horace
Belanger, chief factor in charge of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s district
of Norway House. Belanger was an immense man, helpless out of
his depth. Their canoe capsized in a dangerous rapid and Simpson, a
powerful swimmer, exhausted by his exertions to help his chief and
paralysed by the icy water, sank to rise no more, Belanger also losing
his life. The sacrifice was witnessed by an Indian, the third member of
the party, who escaped. The following are the last lines of some verses
I wrote in his memory at the time of the tragedy:
“Lord Jesus, Thou Who even betrayer’s kiss
Forgiving, shed Thy precious blood to drown
For ever all earth’s sin, and said, than this
Hath no man greater love, that he lay down
Life for his friend—grant him a meritorious crown.”
Simpson had the nature of a true nobleman. He was my greatest friend.
Frog Lake is no longer deserted, but the centre of a beautiful and
thriving white settlement. A railway under construction from Battleford
to Edmonton north of the Saskatchewan will reach it this year of 1926,
and its hills, which have echoed to the whoops of the red man, will
give back only the peaceful whistle of the locomotive. Its isolation
and wild loneliness are things of the past.
_THE FROG LAKE MEMORIAL_
_I stood on the site of the grey drama of ’85, envisioning all its
harrowing details. Again it was a beautiful day. Overhead the sun shone
brightly; a soft air faintly stirred the green leaves of the poplars.
Indians, some who like me had witnessed the incarnadined saturnalia,
stood about; half-breeds also, and many whites—men, women and children.
But the awful suspense and foreboding that had weighed upon us, early
sojourners in the land, on that distant day, were absent. We now here
were met together in peace, although it was that unforgettable day
and event that had drawn us to this common centre, for we were come
to attend a significant ceremony—the unveiling of a monument erected
by the government of Canada as a lasting reminder of that sombre and
historical occurrence._
_The date was the 9th of June, 1925. Judge Howay, of New Westminster,
B.C., member of the Board of Historic Sites and Monuments, represented
the government. Accompanying him were Howard Angus Kennedy, who had
come to Frog Lake in 1885 as correspondent for a Montreal newspaper,
and Arthur S. Morton, professor of history at the University of
Saskatchewan. Judge Howay asked me, as the sole white survivor of the
massacre, to unveil the memorial._
_While he addressed the gathering I stood before the cairn and looked
about me. Close beside it were eight graves, marked by simple iron
crosses bearing names familiar to me since youth: Quinn, Delaney,
Gowanlock, Gilchrist, Dill, Gouin, Williscraft, Cowan—the names of men
nearly all of whose hands, long cold and still, had once met mine in
the warm clasp of friendship. Memory brought back vividly the faces
of these pioneers, once so full of life, of plans, of ambitions. I
recalled their ready laughter, their boisterous pranks, their pleasant
voices. And I reflected that for forty years they had rested there;
that the snows of forty winters and the showers of forty summers had
fallen like a benediction upon them, the caressing, flower-scented airs
blown over them, as they slept their dreamless and unbroken sleep._
_Across the short intervening span of wooded hill and gentle,
grassy slope I saw the spot that had marked for these adventurous
souls the end of the trail, I heard again all those frightful
sounds—the exploding guns, the startled shrieks and outcries,
the galloping horses, the strangely-terrifying cadence of the_
mauchawahawm-nigamawn—_the war-song—and the appalling whoops of the
frenzied savages, the ineffectual “Stop! Stop!” of Big Bear as he
rushed toward the carnage, the sputtered admonition of shaking old
Osowask, old Yellow Bear, willing, yet fearful too, openly, in that
hour of dreadful deeds, to befriend me: “Go with the women—don’t leave
them!” And I remembered, too, the hopelessness that possessed me, the
impossibility at the moment of the thought that I should by any miracle
escape the doom that with such stupefying and ghastly suddenness was
sweeping over the others._
_Yes, for forty years these gallant fellows had rested quietly there,
while I walked and wrought and played in God’s glorious sunlight and
had known all the joy of living and now had sons grown to the age that
I was then._
_An Indian, a pure blood Cree, mounting a knoll, read in rounded
English periods from a manuscript in his hand an eloquent address. It
was not an apology—it was not meant to be—for the massacre, but it was
a plea for charity, for consideration, for understanding of the red man
and of the feelings which culminated in the commission of that dark
and bloody crime. He cast what must have been to most of the listening
white men a new light on that ruthless and deadly act of vengeance. The
land of the Indian, a proud people, was being wrested from his grasp by
pale-skinned strangers who looked with scarcely-disguised contempt upon
him as an inferior and derided his pretensions of ownership. Well! The
Indian was not to be trampled upon—he would show them! He would destroy
the invader; the land should know him no more; he would take back his
country! Poor, simple children of nature! The provocation, while it
did not excuse, was some mitigation of the ferocious wrong. Let the
white man put himself in the Indian’s place! Even so, the majority were
against it; Big Bear’s men only, and a few others were implicated._
_The speaker was the Reverend Edward Ahenakew, an ordained clergyman of
the Church of England._
_I drew the cord; the flag fluttered down. The cairn, its bronze
inscription glowing in the warm sunlight, stood uncovered. The
government of the country had paid its tribute to these stalwart
pioneers of ’85._
_It was a solemn moment._
BRISTOL: BURLEIGH LTD., AT THE BURLEIGH PRESS
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
Inconsistent hyphenations have been left as is.
Page 33 “him; ‘I’m resigning” replaced by “him; “I’m resigning”.
Page 76 “agent’s nephew” replaced by “agent’s nephew.”.
Page 252 “Facing p. 252,” replaced by “Facing p. 252.”