North-western timber land and the Far Western prairie when white men
were very few indeed in that country, and the only settlements were
those that had grown around the frontier forts and the still earlier
mission chapels. For instance, in 1849, at twenty-two years of age, he
slept a night or two where St. Paul now weights the earth. It was then a
village of twenty-five log-huts, and where the great building of the St.
Paul _Pioneer Press_ now stands, then stood the village chapel. For two
years he worked at his calling on either side of the American frontier,
and then was sent to what is now Edmonton, in that magical region of
long summers and great agricultural capacity known as the Peace River
District, hundreds of miles north of Dakota and Idaho. There the Rockies
are broken and lowered, and the warm Pacific winds have rendered the
region warmer than the land far to the south of it. But Father Lacombe
went farther--400 miles north to Lake Labiche. There he found what he
calls a fine colony of half-breeds. These were dependants of the Hudson
Bay Company--white men from England, France, and the Orkney Islands, and
Indians and half-breeds and their children. The visits of priests were
so infrequent that in the intervals between them the white men and
Indian women married one another, not without formality and the sanction
of the colony, but without waiting for the ceremony of the Church.
Father Lacombe was called upon to bless and solemnize many such matches,
to baptize many children, and to teach and preach what scores knew but
vaguely or not at all.
In time he was sent to Calgary in the province of Alberta. It is one of
the most bustling towns in the Dominion, and the biggest place west of
Winnipeg. Alberta is north of our Montana, and is all prairie-land; but
from Father Lacombe's parsonage one sees the snow-capped Rockies, sixty
miles away, lying above the horizon like a line of clouds tinged with
the delicate hues of mother-of-pearl in the sunshine. Calgary was a mere
post in the wilderness for years after the priest went there. The
buffaloes roamed the prairie in fabulous numbers, the Indians used the
bow and arrow in the chase, and the maps we studied at the time showed
the whole region enclosed in a loop, and marked "Blackfoot Indians." But
the other Indians were loath to accept this disposition of the territory
as final, and the country thereabouts was an almost constant
battle-ground between the Blackfoot nation of allied tribes and the
Sioux, Crows, Flatheads, Crees, and others.
The good priest--for if ever there was a good man Father Lacombe is
one--saw fighting enough, as he roamed with one tribe and the other, or
journeyed from tribe to tribe. His mission led him to ignore tribal
differences, and to preach to all the Indians of the plains. He knew the
chiefs and headmen among them all, and so justly did he deal with them
that he was not only able to minister to all without attracting the
enmity of any, but he came to wield, as he does to-day, a formidable
power over all of them.
He knew old Crowfoot in his prime, and as I saw them together they were
like bosom friends. Together they had shared dreadful privation and
survived frightful winters and storms. They had gone side by side
through savage battles, and each respected and loved the other. I think
I make no mistake in saying that all through his reign Crowfoot was the
greatest Indian monarch in Canada; possibly no tribe in this country was
stronger in numbers during the last decade or two. I have never seen a
nobler-looking Indian or a more king-like man. He was tall and straight,
as slim as a girl, and he had the face of an eagle or of an ancient
Roman. He never troubled himself to learn the English language; he had
little use for his own. His grunt or his "No" ran all through his tribe.
He never shared his honors with a squaw. He died an old bachelor,
saying, wittily, that no woman would take him.
It must be remembered that the degradation of the Canadian Indian began
a dozen or fifteen years later than that of our own red men. In both
countries the railroads were indirectly the destructive agents, and
Canada's great transcontinental line is a new institution. Until it
belted the prairie the other day the Blackfoot Indians led very much the
life of their fathers, hunting and trading for the whites, to be sure,
but living like Indians, fighting like Indians, and dying like them. Now
they don't fight, and they live and die like dogs. Amid the old
conditions lived Crowfoot--a haughty, picturesque, grand old savage. He
never rode or walked without his headmen in his retinue, and when he
wished to exert his authority, his apparel was royal indeed. His coat of
gaudy bead-work was a splendid garment, and weighed a dozen pounds. His
leg-gear was just as fine; his moccasins would fetch fifty dollars in
any city to-day. Doubtless he thought his hat was quite as impressive
and king-like, but to a mere scion of effeminate civilization it looked
remarkably like an extra tall plug hat, with no crown in the top and a
lot of crows' plumes in the band. You may be sure his successor wears
that same hat to-day, for the Indians revere the "state hat" of a brave
chief, and look at it through superstitious eyes, so that those queer
hats (older tiles than ever see the light of St. Patrick's Day) descend
from chief to chief, and are hallowed.
But Crowfoot died none too soon. The history of the conquest of the
wilderness contains no more pathetic story than that of how the kind old
priest, Father Lacombe, warned the chief and his lieutenants against the
coming of the pale-faces. He went to the reservation and assembled the
leaders before him in council. He told them that the white men were
building a great railroad, and in a month their workmen would be in that
virgin country. He told the wondering red men that among these laborers
would be found many bad men seeking to sell whiskey, offering money for
the ruin of the squaws. Reaching the greatest eloquence possible for
him, because he loved the Indians and doubted their strength, he assured
them that contact with these white men would result in death, in the
destruction of the Indians, and by the most horrible processes of
disease and misery. He thundered and he pleaded. The Indians smoked and
reflected. Then they spoke through old Crowfoot:
"We have listened. We will keep upon our reservation. We will not go to
see the railroad."
But Father Lacombe doubted still, and yet more profoundly was he
convinced of the ruin of the tribe should the "children," as he sagely
calls all Indians, disobey him. So once again he went to the reserve,
and gathered the chief and the headmen, and warned them of the soulless,
diabolical, selfish instincts of the white men. Again the grave warriors
promised to obey him.
The railroad laborers came with camps and money and liquors and numbers,
and the prairie thundered the echoes of their sledge-hammer strokes. And
one morning the old priest looked out of the window of his bare bedroom
and saw curling wisps of gray smoke ascending from a score of tepees on
the hill beside Calgary.[1] Angry, amazed, he went to his doorway and
opened it, and there upon the ground sat some of the headmen and the old
men, with bowed heads, ashamed. Fancy the priest's wrath and his
questions! Note how wisely he chose the name of children for them, when
I tell you that their spokesman at last answered with the excuse that
the buffaloes were gone, and food was hard to get, and the white men
brought money which the squaws could get. And what is the end? There are
always tepees on the hills now beside every settlement near the
Blackfoot reservation. And one old missionary lifted his trembling
forefinger towards the sky, when I was there, and said: "Mark me. In
fifteen years there will not be a full-blooded Indian alive on the
Canadian prairie--not one."
Through all that revolutionary railroad building and the rush of new
settlers, Father Lacombe and Crowfoot kept the Indians from war, and
even from depredations and from murder. When the half-breeds arose under
Riel, and every Indian looked to his rifle and his knife, and when the
mutterings that preface the war-cry sounded in every lodge, Father
Lacombe made Crowfoot pledge his word that the Indians should not rise.
The priest represented the Government on these occasions. The Canadian
statesmen recognize the value of his services. He is the great authority
on Indian matters beyond our border; the ambassador to and spokesman for
the Indians.
But Father Lacombe is more than that. He is the deepest student of the
Indian languages that Canada possesses. The revised edition of Bishop
Barager's _Grammar of the Ochipwe Language_ bears these words upon its
title-page: "Revised by the Rev. Father Lacombe, Oblate Mary Immaculate,
1878." He is the author of the authoritative _Dictionnaire et Grammaire
de la Langue Crise_, the dictionary of the Cree dialect published in
1874. He has compiled just such another monument to the Blackfoot
language, and will soon publish it, if he has not done so already. He is
in constant correspondence with our Smithsonian Institution; he is
famous to all who study the Indian; he is beloved or admired throughout
Canada.
[Illustration: FATHER LACOMBE HEADING THE INDIANS]
His work in these lines is labor of love. He is a student by nature. He
began the study of the Algonquin language as a youth in older Canada,
and the tongues of many of these tribes from Labrador to Athabasca are
but dialects of the language of the great Algonquin nation--the Algic
family. He told me that the white man's handling of Indian words in the
nomenclature of our cities, provinces, and States is as brutal as
anything charged against the savages. Saskatchewan, for instance, means
nothing. "Kissiskatchewan" is the word that was intended. It means
"rapid current." Manitoba is senseless, but "Manitowapa" (the mysterious
strait) would have been full of local import. However, there is no need
to sadden ourselves with this expert knowledge. Rather let us be
grateful for every Indian name with which we have stamped individuality
upon the map of the world be it rightly or wrong set forth.
It is strange to think of a scholar and a priest amid the scenes that
Father Lacombe has witnessed. It was one of the most fortunate
happenings of my life that I chanced to be in Calgary and in the little
mission beside the chapel when Chief Crowfoot came to pay his respects
to his old black-habited friend. Anxious to pay the chief such a
compliment as should present the old warrior to me in the light in which
he would be most proud to be viewed, Father Lacombe remarked that he had
known Crowfoot when he was a young man and a mighty warrior. The old
copper-plated Roman smiled and swelled his chest when this was
translated. He was so pleased that the priest was led to ask him if he
remembered one night when a certain trouble about some horses, or a
chance duel between the Blackfoot tribe and a band of its enemies, led
to a midnight attack. If my memory serves me, it was the Bloods (an
allied part of the Blackfoot nation) who picked this quarrel. The chief
grinned and grunted wonderfully as the priest spoke. The priest asked if
he remembered how the Bloods were routed. The chief grunted even more
emphatically. Then the priest asked if the chief recalled what a pickle
he, the priest, was in when he found himself in the thick of the fight.
At that old Crowfoot actually laughed.
After that Father Lacombe, in a few bold sentences, drew a picture of
the quiet, sleep-enfolded camp of the Blackfoot band, of the silence and
the darkness. Then he told of a sudden musket-shot; then of the
screaming of the squaws, and the barking of the dogs, and the yelling of
the children, of the general hubbub and confusion of the startled camp.
The cry was everywhere "The Bloods! the Bloods!" The enemy shot a
fusillade at close quarters into the Blackfoot camp, and the priest ran
out towards the blazing muskets, crying that they must stop, for he,
their priest, was in the camp. He shouted his own name, for he stood
towards the Bloods precisely as he did towards the Blackfoot nation. But
whether the Bloods heard him or not, they did not heed him. The blaze of
their guns grew stronger and crept nearer. The bullets whistled by. It
grew exceedingly unpleasant to be there. It was dangerous as well.
Father Lacombe said that he did all he could to stop the fight, but when
it was evident that his behavior would simply result in the massacre of
his hosts and of himself in the bargain, he altered his cries into
military commands. "Give it to 'em!" he screamed. He urged Crowfoot's
braves to return two shots for every one from the enemy. He took
command, and inspired the bucks with double valor. They drove the Bloods
out of reach and hearing.
All this was translated to Crowfoot--or Saponaxitaw, for that was his
Indian name--and he chuckled and grinned, and poked the priest in the
side with his knuckles. And good Father Lacombe felt the magnetism of
his own words and memory, and clapped the chief on the shoulder, while
both laughed heartily at the climax, with the accompanying mental
picture of the discomfited Bloods running away, and the clergyman
ordering their instant destruction.
There may not be such another meeting and rehearsal on this continent
again. Those two men represented the passing and the dominant races of
America; and yet, in my view, the learned and brave and kindly
missionary is as much a part of the dead past as is the royalty that
Crowfoot was the last to represent.
[Footnote 1: Since this was written Father Lacombe's work has been
continued at Fort McLeod in the same province as Calgary. In this
smaller place he finds more time for his literary pursuits.]
IV
ANTOINE'S MOOSE-YARD
[Illustration]
It was the night of a great dinner at the club. Whenever the door of the
banqueting hall was opened, a burst of laughter or of applause disturbed
the quiet talk of a few men who had gathered in the reading-room--men of
the sort that extract the best enjoyment from a club by escaping its
functions, or attending them only to draw to one side its choicest
spirits for never-to-be-forgotten talks before an open fire, and over
wine and cigars used sparingly.
"I'm tired," an artist was saying--"so tired that I have a horror of my
studio. My wife understands my condition and bids me go away and rest."
"That is astonishing," said I; "for, as a rule, neither women nor men
can comprehend the fatigue that seizes an artist or writer. At most of
our homes there comes to be a reluctant recognition of the fact that we
say we are tired, and that we persist in the assumption by knocking off
work. But human fatigue is measured by the mile of walking, or the cords
of firewood that have been cut, and the world will always hold that if
we have not hewn wood or tramped all day, it is absurd for us to talk
of feeling tired. We cannot alter this; we are too few."
"Yes," said another of the little party. "The world shares the feeling
of the Irishman who saw a very large, stout man at work at reporting in
a courtroom. 'Faith!' said he, 'will ye look at the size of that man--to
be airning his living wid a little pincil?' The world would acknowledge
our right to feel tired if we used crow-bars to write or draw with; but
pencils! pshaw! a hundred weigh less than a pound."
"Well," said I, "all the same, I am so tired that my head feels like
cork; so tired that for two days I have not been able to summon an idea
or turn a sentence neatly. I have been sitting at my desk writing
wretched stuff and tearing it up, or staring blankly out of the window."
"Glorious!" said the artist, startling us all with his vehemence and
inapt exclamation. "Why, it is providential that I came here to-night.
If that's the way you feel, we are a pair, and you will go with me and
rest. Do you hunt? Are you fond of it?"
"I know all about it," said I, "but I have not definitely determined
whether I am fond of it or not. I have been hunting only once. It was
years ago, when I was a mere boy. I went after deer with a poet, an
editor, and a railroad conductor. We journeyed to a lovely valley in
Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, and put ourselves in the hands of a man
seven feet high, who had a flintlock musket a foot taller than himself,
and a wife who gave us saleratus bread and a bowl of pork fat for supper
and breakfast. We were not there at dinner. The man stationed us a mile
apart on what he said were the paths, or "runways," the deer would take.
Then he went to stir the game up with his dogs. There he left us from
sunrise till supper, or would have left us had we not with great
difficulty found one another, and enjoyed the exquisite woodland quiet
and light and shade together, mainly flat on our backs, with the white
sails of the sky floating in an azure sea above the reaching fingers of
the tree-tops. The editor marred the occasion with an unworthy suspicion
that our hunter was at the village tavern picturing to his cronies what
simple donkeys we were, standing a mile apart in the forsaken woods. But
the poet said something so pregnant with philosophy that it always comes
back to me with the mention of hunting. 'Where is your gun?' he was
asked, when we came upon him, pacing the forest path, hands in pockets,
and no weapon in sight. 'Oh, my gun?' he repeated. 'I don't know.
Somewhere in among those trees. I covered it with leaves so as not to
see it. After this, if I go hunting again, I shall not take a gun. It is
very cold and heavy, and more or less dangerous in the bargain. You
never use it, you know. I go hunting every few years, but I never yet
have had to fire my gun, and I begin to see that it is only brought
along in deference to a tradition descending from an era when men got
something more than fresh air and scenery on a hunting trip.'"
The others laughed at my story, but the artist regarded me with an
expression of pity. He is a famous hunter--a genuine, devoted
hunter--and one might almost as safely speak a light word of his
relations as of his favorite mode of recreation.
[Illustration: THE HOTEL--LAST SIGN OF CIVILIZATION]
"Fresh air!" said he; "scenery! Humph! Your poet would not know which
end of a gun to aim with. I see that you know nothing at all about
hunting, but I will pay you the high compliment of saying that I can
make a hunter of you. I have always insisted heretofore that a hunter
must begin in boyhood; but never mind, I'll make a hunter of you at
thirty-six. We will start to-morrow morning for Montreal, and in
twenty-four hours you shall be in the greatest sporting region in
America, incomparably the greatest hunting district. It is great because
Americans do not know of it, and because it has all of British America
to keep it supplied with game. Think of it! In twenty-four hours we
shall be tracking moose near Hudson Bay, for Hudson Bay is not much
farther from New York than Chicago--another fact that few persons are
aware of."
Environment is a positive force. We could feel that we were disturbing
what the artist would call "the local tone," by rushing through the
city's streets next morning with our guns slung upon our backs. It was
just at the hour when the factory hands and the shop-girls were out in
force, and the juxtaposition of those elements of society with two
portly men bearing guns created a positive sensation. In the cars the
artist held forth upon the terrors of the life upon which I was about to
venture. He left upon my mind a blurred impression of sleeping
out-of-doors like human cocoons, done up in blankets, while the savage
mercury lurked in unknown depths below the zero mark. He said the
camp-fire would have to be fed every two hours of each night, and he
added, without contradiction from me, that he supposed he would have to
perform this duty, as he was accustomed to it. Lest his forecast should
raise my anticipation of pleasure extravagantly, he added that those
hunters were fortunate who had fires to feed; for his part he had once
walked around a tree stump a whole night to keep from freezing. He
supposed that we would perform our main journeying on snow-shoes, but
how we should enjoy that he could not say, as his knowledge of
snow-shoeing was limited.
At this point the inevitable offspring of fate, who is always at a
traveller's elbow with a fund of alarming information, cleared his
throat as he sat opposite us, and inquired whether he had overheard that
we did not know much about snow-shoes. An interesting fact concerning
them, he said, was that they seemed easy to walk with at first, but if
the learner fell down with them on it usually needed a considerable
portion of a tribe of Indians to put him back on his feet. Beginners
only fell down, however, in attempting to cross a log or stump, but the
forest where we were going was literally floored with such obstructions.
The first day's effort to navigate with snow-shoes, he remarked, is
usually accompanied by a terrible malady called _mal de raquette_, in
which the cords of one's legs become knotted in great and excruciatingly
painful bunches. The cure for this is to "walk it off the next day, when
the agony is yet more intense than at first." As the stranger had
reached his destination, he had little more than time to remark that the
moose is an exceedingly vicious animal, invariably attacking all hunters
who fail to kill him with the first shot. As the stranger stepped upon
the car platform he let fall a simple but touching eulogy upon a dear
friend who had recently lost his life by being literally cut in two,
lengthwise, by a moose that struck him on the chest with its rigidly
stiffened fore-legs. The artist protested that the stranger was a
sensationalist, unsupported by either the camp-fire gossip or the
literature of hunters. Yet one man that night found his slumber tangled
with what the garrulous alarmist had been saying.
In Montreal one may buy clothing not to be had in the United States:
woollens thick as boards, hosiery that wards off the cold as armor
resists missiles, gloves as heavy as shoes, yet soft as kid, fur caps
and coats at prices and in a variety that interest poor and rich alike,
blanket suits that are more picturesque than any other masculine garment
worn north of the city of Mexico, tuques, and moccasins, and, indeed,
so many sorts of clothing we Yankees know very little of (though many
of us need them) that at a glance we say the Montrealers are foreigners.
Montreal is the gayest city on this continent, and I have often thought
that the clothing there is largely responsible for that condition.
[Illustration: "GIVE ME A LIGHT"]
A New Yorker disembarking in Montreal in mid-winter finds the place
inhospitably cold, and wonders how, as well as why, any one lives there.
I well remember standing years ago beside a toboggan-slide, with my
teeth chattering and my very marrow slowly congealing, when my attention
was called to the fact that a dozen ruddy-cheeked, bright-eyed, laughing
girls were grouped in snow that reached their knees. I asked a Canadian
lady how that could be possible, and she answered with a list of the
principal garments those girls were wearing. They had two pairs of
stockings under their shoes, and a pair of stockings over their shoes,
with moccasins over them. They had so many woollen skirts that an
American girl would not believe me if I gave the number. They wore heavy
dresses and buckskin jackets, and blanket suits over all this. They had
mittens over their gloves, and fur caps over their knitted hoods. It no
longer seemed wonderful that they should not heed the cold; indeed, it
occurred to me that their bravery amid the terrors of tobogganing was no
bravery at all, since a girl buried deep in the heart of such a mass of
woollens could scarcely expect damage if she fell from a steeple. When
next I appeared out-of-doors I too was swathed in flannel, like a jewel
in a box of plash, and from that time out Montreal seemed, what it
really is, the merriest of American capitals. And there I had come
again, and was filling my trunk with this wonderful armor of
civilization, while the artist sought advice as to which point to enter
the wilderness in order to secure the biggest game most quickly.