On Canada's Frontier Part 2

For ninety minutes we watched the glorious riding, the splendid horses, the brilliant trappings, and the paroxysmal fervor of the excited Indians. The earth trembled beneath the das.h.i.+ng of the riders; the air palpitated with the noise of their war-cries and bells. We could have stood the day out, but we knew the players were tired, and yet would not cease till we withdrew. Therefore we came away.

We had enjoyed a never-to-be-forgotten privilege. It was if we had seen the ghosts of a dead people ride back to parody scenes in an era that had vanished. It was like the rising of the curtain, in response to an "encore," upon a drama that has been played. It was as if the sudden up-flas.h.i.+ng of a smouldering fire lighted, once again and for an instant, the scene it had ceased to illumine.

III

A FAMOUS MISSIONARY

The former chief of the Blackfeet--Crowfoot--and Father Lacombe, the Roman Catholic missionary to the tribe, were the most interesting and among the most influential public characters in the newer part of Canada. They had much to do with controlling the peace of a territory the size of a great empire.

The chief was more than eighty years old; the priest is a dozen years younger; and yet they represented in their experiences the two great epochs of life on this continent--the barbaric and the progressive. In the chief's boyhood the red man held undisputed sway from the Lakes to the Rockies. In the priest's youth he led, like a scout, beyond the advancing hosts from Europe. But Father Lacombe came bearing the olive branch of religion, and he and the barbarian became fast friends, intimates in a companions.h.i.+p as picturesque and out of the common as any the world could produce.

There is something very strange about the relations of the French and the French half-breeds with the wild men of the plains. It is not altogether necessary that the Frenchman should be a priest, for I have heard of French half-breeds in our Territories who showed again and again that they could make their way through bands of hostiles in perfect safety, though knowing nothing of the language of the tribes there in war-paint. It is most likely that their swarthy skins and black hair, and their knowledge of savage ways aided them. But when not even a French half-breed has dared to risk his life among angry Indians, the French missionaries went about their duty fearlessly and unscathed.

There was one, just after the dreadful ma.s.sacre of the Little Big Horn, who built a cross of rough wood, painted it white, fastened it to his buck-board, and drove through a country in which a white man with a pale face and blond hair would not have lived two hours.

It must be remembered that in a vast region of country the French priest and _voyageur_ and _coureur des bois_ were the first white men the Indians saw, and while the explorers and traders seldom quarrelled with the red men or offered violence to them, the priests never did. They went about like women or children, or, rather, like nothing else than priests. They quickly learned the tongues of the savages, treated them fairly, showed the sublimest courage, and acted as counsellors, physicians, and friends. There is at least one brave Indian fighter in our army who will state it as his belief that if all the white men had done thus we would have had but little trouble with our Indians.

Father Lacombe was one of the priests who threaded the trails of the 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 Lab.i.+.c.he. 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 suns.h.i.+ne. 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 n.o.bler-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 inst.i.tution. 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 superst.i.tious 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 a.s.sembled 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 a.s.sured 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 amba.s.sador 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 t.i.tle-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 Inst.i.tution; he is famous to all who study the Indian; he is beloved or admired throughout Canada.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ma.s.sacre 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 pa.s.sing 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

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 astonis.h.i.+ng," 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 a.s.sumption 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 coc.o.o.ns, 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 antic.i.p.ation 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.