CHAPTER VI
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.