The Windows Opened
FOR HUNDREDS of years the West had now been explored—inland, to find
new routes for the fur trade, and up in the north to find a new sea
route from Europe to Asia—but no explorer had come in to find new homes
for his fellow-men.
In the middle of last century, however, the Government of Canada sent up
a scientific expedition to find out the real facts about this
country—for one thing, whether it was fit for agriculture. The fur
traders said it was not. People overseas, and most people even in the
Province of Canada, actually believed this, just as a great French
writer a hundred years before had comforted his fellow-countrymen on the
loss of “New France” by asserting that Canada itself was only “a few
acres of snow.”
Some of the more enlightened Canadians, however, were pretty sure that
the common belief was a monstrous delusion; though even they, if any one
had told them the West would yield 900,000,000 bushels of grain in a
single harvest, would have smiled as at a fairy tale.
Even without going very far west, the explorers of 1857 and 1858 saw
enough to convince them that many million acres of the prairie were
arable land of first quality. One of the chief men of the expedition, S.
J. Dawson, wrote:
“Of the valley of Red River I find it impossible to speak in any
other terms than those which may express astonishment and
admiration. I entirely concur in the brief but expressive
description given to me by an English settler on the
Assiniboine, that the valley of Red River, including a large
portion belonging to its great affluent, is a ‘Paradise of
fertility’ . . . Indian corn, if properly cultivated, and an
early variety selected, may always be relied on. The melon grows
with the utmost luxuriance without any artificial aid, and
ripens perfectly before the end of August. Potatoes,
cauliflowers, and onions, I have not seen surpassed at any of
our provincial fairs. The character of the soil in Assiniboia
[now Manitoba], within the limits of the ancient lake ridges [a
great lake covered that region, long ago] cannot be surpassed.
As an agricultural country, I have no hesitation in expressing
the strongest conviction that it will one day rank among the
most distinguished.”
The windows had been opened, though the door was still shut. It was only
a glimpse that the world then got by looking in, but that was enough. “A
Paradise of Fertility.”
The Mother country sent out an expedition on its own account. One of its
objects was to see if a railway could be built through the Rocky
Mountains, as part of a great line on British soil from the Atlantic to
the Pacific. That expedition discovered a pass through which the railway
was finally built, as we shall see. Its discoverer, James Hector, got a
kick from a horse up there, and “Kicking Horse Pass” it has been ever
since. At that time, however, Captain Palliser, at the head of the
expedition, reported after four years’ work that the railway would cost
too much. In 1863 the Red River settlers sent an envoy to England,
begging the Imperial Government to connect them with Canada by rail; but
even that was too expensive.
The door stayed shut, accordingly. Settlers of the more adventurous sort
dribbled in, by the roundabout route through the States, or coming up by
the Lakes. But fur traders and Indians had the prairie and woodlands
almost to themselves for another quarter of a century. The Company went
on bartering, the braves went on hunting—and for some years fighting,
too.
As far back as 1750, Captain Coats had blamed his employers, the
Hudson’s Bay Company, for not trying to convert the natives—“leaving
such swarms of God’s people in the hands of the divill, unattempted, as
well as the other Indians in generall, a docile, inoffensive,
good-natured, humane people,”—“as if gorging ourselves with
superfluitys was the ultimate condition of this life.”
The Indians may not have been so “humane” as the benevolent captain
thought, but, with all their barbarous customs, on the whole they
deserved his good opinion. Fighting to kill for revenge, and to prove
their own courage, they considered the height of virtue. If food ran
short on a journey, they would abandon the aged and sick who could not
travel as fast as the rest, for delay would risk the lives of all the
band. Yet Paul Kane, after visiting many tribes, declared that their
affection for their relatives was very remarkable, particularly for
their children. “I may mention,” he says, “the universal custom of
Indian mothers eagerly seeking another child, although it may be of an
enemy, to replace one of her own whom she may have lost, no matter how
many other children she may have. This child is always treated with as
great, if not greater, kindness than the rest.”
So far as the Indians were savage, that was all the more reason why they
should be taught better. But the Company was afraid of losing their
friendship by interfering with their customs; and we remember how Samuel
Hearne was pushed roughly aside when he tried to stop a massacre of the
Eskimo. Paul Kane tells of a Saulteaux Indian being hung for shooting a
Sioux, in 1845, but that was in the Red River Settlement, which had a
judge and a court-house. The fur traders generally turned a blind eye to
the savagery of their customers. Alexander Henry, who established a
trading post on the Red River at the mouth of the Pembina in 1801, for
the North West Company, and made a little garden there, gives this calm
account of one day’s incidents: “LeBoeuf stabbed his young wife in the
arm. Little Shell almost beat his old mother’s brains out with a club,
and there was terrible fighting among them. I sowed garden seed.”
The Christian folk down east and over in Britain, though they knew
little of what was going on out here, heard enough to make their
consciences uneasy. The churches, one after another, sent missionaries
to convert the Indian. The story of their devotion and sacrifice,
without hope of earthly reward, would fill many books. Most of the
Indians’ education has been carried on by the churches, and still is.
Some of these men were as ingenious as they were devoted. There was
James Evans, for example. In 1836 he not only invented a phonetic
written language for the Crees, but printed it for them, at first
melting down bullets to make the type, mixing soot and water for ink,
and using birch bark for paper. It was hard work. “Christianity to them
seems a Chimera, Religion a design to draw them from the libidinous
Pleasures of a lazy life.” So it appeared to an English writer when the
Hudson’s Bay Company had just started; and far on in the nineteenth
century, though many tribes had been persuaded to exchange their pagan
belief for the white man’s creeds, it was difficult—as it still is—to
wean them from their haphazard ways to the white man’s standard of
persistent industry.
To uproot the Indian’s cherished belief in the virtue of war against a
“hereditary foe” and “traditional enemy” was equally difficult—and not
at all strange, considering how recent is our own awakening to the folly
of that belief.
As I look out on my farm beside the old Edmonton trail, and see the
motors whizzing by, I see in imagination hordes of painted Blackfeet
riding over this very land to slay the Crees, and hordes of Crees again
to scalp the Blackfeet—in my own lifetime, too, though I was too far
off to see it.
The little town over yonder, with its churches and banks and stores,
preserves the memory of those bloody times in its very name—Lacombe.
One winter night in 1865 the missionary Albert Lacombe was the guest of
the chief in a Blackfoot camp. Suddenly the crackle of guns awoke the
sleeping Indians. “Assinaw! Assinaw! The Crees! The Crees!” shouted the
braves, as they rushed out to defend the camp. Bullets whizzed through
the tent; you could smell the powder—the Crees were as close as that.
Now both tribes liked the missionary, as much as they hated each other.
He ran out and shouted to the Crees, but his voice was drowned in the
din. He found a Blackfoot woman, dying of wounds, and baptized her. A
Cree came on her body, scalped her, and killed her child. The fight went
on all night, and half the camp was captured. At dawn the missionary
told the Blackfeet to stop firing, and went out again alone to parley
with the raiders. A spent bullet struck his head, nearly stunning him,
and he fell. “You have killed your friend,” a Blackfoot shouted. Then
the Crees heard, and were horrified. The fight was at an end; the
raiders turned right-about and made off.
Three years later, in 1868, the same Lacombe was in camp with the Crees.
In the middle of the night, their scouts brought word that Blackfoot
raiders were hiding in the brush across the valley. The missionary went
out, and, standing unarmed in the moonlight, shouted—“Hey! Hey! Are you
there and wanting to fight? Then my Crees are ready for you. Come on,
and you will see how they can fight. They are brave, my Crees, if you
come to kill their people!” The voice “sounded big over the great
prairie”—but there was no reply. Not a shot was fired; the raiders
slunk off to their homes.
Though the Indians did not know it, their country was then on the eve of
a great change. The year before, in 1867, the old Province of
Canada—Ontario and Quebec—had united with the Atlantic Provinces of
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to form a federation, a “Dominion of
Canada.” To complete the Dominion, to unite all these British lands from
sea to sea for ever in one strong federation, it was necessary first of
all to bring in the vast territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company. This was
done in 1869. The Company gave up all its exclusive privileges for a
payment of $1,500,000 and 45,000 acres of land. The Company also kept
all its forts, with full liberty to go on trading in free competition
with others. This it continues to do, on the largest scale, and the
white settlers whom it used to shut out are now its best customers. As
the furs obtained in two centuries of trading had sold for about
$100,000,000, the shareholders had no cause to complain of their
bargain.
The French Métis on the Red River, however, were uneasy when they heard
of this transference of the country to new rulers, and even some of the
white settlers at first objected to the change, for which their opinion
had not been asked.
The Government, to get the country ready for settlers, sent land
surveyors up from the East. The Métis took fright. Seeing those
strangers running straight lines across the land, the ignorant people
thought their farms were going to be taken away from them—the long
narrow strips of land running back from the river front.
A Governor was appointed by the Dominion authorities, and came round
through the United States, for there was no other railway communication
between Eastern and Western Canada. When he came to the frontier, at
Pembina, he found a barricade across the trail, and was ordered by a
“_Comité National des Métis de la Rivière Rouge_,” or “National
Committee of Red River Métis,” to turn back and go home again. A
“provisional government” was set up; Louis Riel, a halfbreed of some
education but little sense, the leader of the insurrection, seized the
Hudson’s Bay post of Fort Garry, and imprisoned a number of loyal
settlers. One of them, a young man from Ontario named Scott, was tried
by a rebel court-martial and shot; his body was pushed through a hole in
the ice of Red River.
A storm of helpless indignation swept over Canada—helpless because the
rebels were separated from the seat of power and population in the East
by more than a thousand miles of lake and river. An officer then known
only as Colonel Wolseley, later on Commander-in-Chief of the British
Army, was put at the head of a boat expedition, which arrived after a
three months’ journey—to find that the mere news of an army’s approach
had put down the rebellion. The government made it clear to the Métis
that none of their rights would be interfered with: the Red River
district was organized as the Province of Manitoba and gave no more
trouble.