By spring the Blackfoot were still suspicious. The attempt to establish a post where the Qu‘Appelle Indians and their traditional enemies might meet was obviously a failure, however profitable the single winter’s trade, and as casually as an hivernant village the post broke up. And on that frontier where every ounce of lead, every broken saw or file, every piece of metal 01 glass, had value, there was much in the breaking-up of a post to interest the hangers-on. As the métis and the Company servants cleared out the cabins and packed the carts there were nine Assiniboin under their feet and at their elbows, inflamed with lust for the stray bullet to be scrabbled from a crack in the floor, or the old hat or the piece of cloth tossed in a corner. When the carts were starting down the hill toward the Big Sandy, Cowie and one of his men named Birston told the Assiniboin they could have the fresh meat that was left, and also warned them to keep their eye on the bench. There were renewed signs of Blackfoot around.
The Assiniboin joyfully prowling the abandoned buildings were not worried. Cowie and Birston mounted and rode on after the last of the screeching carts. They were barely a quarter mile down the long hill slope when the shooting started, and by the time they caught up with the carts on the edge of the plain they could see the smoke of burning buildings rising over the tender green of the Hills. In June, hunting métis found the nine Assiniboin bodies scattered among the ashes of what had been the post.
So the first fur-trading post in the Cypress Hills lasted only a few months. Its going, like its coming, was commemorated with mass murder, and its monuments did not survive its business life by more than a half hour. The ancient stalemate within the Cypress Hills proper, however, was broken; the presence of métis and Cree hunters and of Blackfoot war parties made the wooded coulees at once more populous and more truly dangerous. The activities of the independent traders whose currency was a barrel of water-cut alcohol on a Red River cart would go on, though Cowie and the Company departed, and the brisk trade in skins that the winter of 1871-72 witnessed was a prophecy of the extinction of the grizzlies and the elk, and the decimation of the smaller game.
Already the valley of the Whitemud was becoming one of the favored stops on the nomadic circuit of the hivernants. It was only a day’s journey from the Fourche des Gros Ventres (the South Saskatchewan), and around the Hills during these years was to be found one of the largest divisions of the northern buffalo herd. No one was going to stay away, under the circumstances. Moreover, the experience of Cowie on the shelf by what would later be called Chimney Coulee was instructive: dare the Hills in small numbers and the Blackfoot, smallpox or no smallpox, would exterminate you; inhabit them in force and they were yours.
6
The Last of the Exterminators
One effect of the coming of the horse to any tribe was to make the horse indispensable to that tribe’s neighbors, especially to its enemies. The horse very early became the prime objective in inter-tribal raiding, more coveted than captives and all other forms of booty. The immediate cultural effect of this economic and military necessity was that horse-stealing became one of the most honorable of Indian activities. At one stroke the theft of a horse weakened and humiliated the enemy, strengthened the thief’s tribe, and glorified the thief. As Paul Sharp remarks in Whoop-Up Country, the story of the whiskey forts along the border above Fort Benton, Plains Indians generally regarded the theft of a horse from someone outside the tribe the way Americans regard the theft of home base.
But the white man, painfully aware of the disadvantage of being set afoot in so big and dangerous a country, operated on quite another basis. The semi-mythical cowboy West—which after all both reflected and helped to form the values of the real West —established firmly the convention that the proper response to a horse theft was a hanging. Here was a conflict of values, one of many, sure to provide repeated provocations to hostility between white and Indian. South of the international border that hostility was more easily aroused, and bloodier, for the American attitude was more impatient and more violent than the Canadian, and the circumstances of the American West gave freer play to the instincts of self-reliant and often criminal men. No one who has studied western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide. Extermination was a doctrine accepted widely, both unofficially and officially, in the western United States after the Civil War. It was a doctrine all the more plausible since in most of the American West the first of our great raids against natural resources had cleaned away the fur and eliminated any small function that the Indians might have retained in the trade. The changing of fashion from beaver hats to silk only corroborated what would have happened anyway.
North of the border Indians had for generations occupied a useful and established position as middlemen in the fur trade and the pemmican trade, and the very existence of the métis as a buffer race helped to cushion the conflict between cultures there. Probably, too, the near-monopolistic control which the Hudson’s Bay Company exercised after 1821 over all the vast domain of Rupert’s Land meant a degree of responsibility unknown among the American traders. In Canada, the fur trade lasted much longer; settlement came later. Rupert’s Land lay so empty of the squatters, miners, and cowboys of the American West that the chances of irritation were minimized. Not until independent American traders from Fort Benton, abetted by métis from both sides of the Line, worked up into the Saskatchewan and Alberta Plains in the 1860’s, did the Canadian West begin to resemble, in its murderous violence, the American. It is historically appropriate that the most famous conflict between Indian and white in the Cypress Hills country should have started south of the Line; that it should have involved a group of independent traders and wolfers, part of the nervous force working up the Missouri; and that it should have begun with a theft of horses. What is more significant, the episode which became known as the Cypress Hills Massacre was one of the very last acts of a long border drama, one of the final outrages of the literally lawless West. It came at the end of a decade of contact, along that practical and symbolic divide, between the Canadian system of monopoly trading and the American system of competition, whiskey, bullets, exploitation, and extermination. The massacre, with its immediate sequel, brought the American intrusion to an abrupt stop. So far as Canada was concerned, gun-law, self-administered, came to its end at Abe Farwell’s whiskey post on Battle Creek in the Cypress Hills.
The band of wolfers that camped on the Teton River a few miles out of Fort Benton in the beginning of May, 1873, was probably, for that country, an ordinary group. Some were veterans of the Civil War, some had been Indian fighters, all were experienced plainsmen. The ferocious virtues that had been necessary for survival on the American frontier were theirs: they were men who lived freely, wastefully, independently, and they lived by killing—animals as a rule, men if necessary. If any of them were thoughtful men, which is not likely, they may have conceived of themselves as the advancing fringe of civilization, an indispensable broom sweeping clean the Plains for white occupation. As a class, the wolfers were particularly disliked by the Indians, for their practice of poisoning buffalo carcasses killed off Indian dogs as well as wolves. In the Indian view, they tainted the whole prairie, they were cousins to the smallpox. On the other hand, in the wolfers’ view the Indians were cousins to the wolf, at least as dangerous and with the additional disadvantage of being horse thieves. That was why, when they arose in the morning in their camp on the Teton and found their horses missing, they started without a moment’s hesitation into Fort Benton and there they swiftly got together an expedition aimed at recovery and vengeance.
It was not an especially roughneck or outlaw crowd; of them all, only Thomas Hardwick, the “Green River renegade,” was considered a hard case. And as Paul Sharp points out, by no means all of those who rode north on the trail of the stolen ponies were Americans. Three of the group that participated in the Cypress Hills fight, including the one who was accused of starting it and the one who died in it, were Anglo-Canadians, and there were sev
eral Canadian métis as well. The recognized leader was John Evans, a wolfer said to be an ally of the I. G. Baker trading company of Fort Benton; the year before he had been prominent in the “Spitzee Cavalry” that had tried by threat and force to prevent a rival company, the T. C. Power outfit, from selling firearms to the Blackfoot in the Fort Whoop-Up country in Alberta.
That affiliation would introduce trade rivalries into the situation, just as the partly American composition of the avenging party would introduce international suspicions, hysterias, accusations, and legal proceedings.
Perhaps knowingly, perhaps not, the party of revengers rode northward into a hornet’s nest. Not that they feared any Indian attack, as they might have done a few years before. They were armed to a man with new Henry repeating rifles, and they would rather have welcomed trouble from Indians using the old Hudson’s Bay “fukes,” often sawed off short for buffalo hunting, that had been the favorite trade gun on the horse frontier for generations. But in fact the Cypress Hills, in the space of one short year since Isaac Cowie’s retreat from Chimney Coulee, had been tamed with unprecedented speed. Reduced by smallpox and impoverished and undermined by the whiskey for which they would trade anything, wife or horse or gun, the Blackfoot were not the aggressive and belligerent alliance they had been. Métis villages had spread through the Hills, and made things safer for Cree and Assiniboin and Saulteaux, and in 1872 four posts had been built to tap the trade there. Two of these, both owned by I. G. Baker, had been abandoned at the end of the winter’s trading, early in the spring of 1873, but two others remained, one a Power Company post run by Abe Farwell and one an independent owned by Moses Solomon, just across Battle Creek from Farwell’s. Very nearby were a métis village and a big camp of Assiniboin under Chief Little Soldier.
Both Moses Solomon and Abe Farwell had been selling whiskey, and the Assiniboin oscillated restlessly from drunken belligerence to the sullen anger of a hangover. They especially hated Solomon; for a month they had been telling the métis to stay out of the way so they didn’t get hurt when the Assiniboin cleaned out Solomon’s nest. Unknown Indians had already killed one trader named Rivers earlier in the spring, and that example had inflamed Assiniboin hatreds. Just before the wolfers arrived on their horse hunt, an Assiniboin had stolen a horse from George Hammond, a wolfer friend of John Evans, while he was staying with Farwell.
Hammond had already got his horse back, and the episode had been smoothed over as a sort of joke, when Evans and his party rode in. No one at Farwell’s had seen anything of the missing horses of the Fort Benton men; Farwell said he didn’t think the Assiniboin of Little Soldier’s band could have been the thieves. That might have settled the matter, so far as the Cypress Hills were concerned, except for three circumstances: the wolfers stopped off to do a little Sunday drinking before riding back to Fort Benton; the Assiniboin were energetically engaged in the same way; and in the middle of the festivities George Hammond discovered that his horse had been stolen for the second time.
This is about the point where the evidence begins to fray out in the self-exculpation of individuals, trading jealousies, international relations, Fenian rhetoric, Canadian suspicion, and other forms of obscurity. Pretty surely Evans’ excursion had nothing in it of the annexationist provocation that Canadian public opinion later suspected; pretty surely the initial impulse was simply to get the stolen horses back. But what exactly happened at Farwell’s post was never very clearly established. Apparently Hammond in a fury grabbed up a gun and started for Little Soldier’s camp. He was probably doubly sore because on the occasion of the first theft he had paid the Indian who brought the horse back, though there was every likelihood that he who returned the pony had also carried it off. Now there was every likelihood that the same Indian had so liked the little deal he had worked out that he was trying it all over again. Farwell went along with Hammond, perhaps in the hope of preserving peace. But as his interpreter Alexis Lebompard later testified, Farwell was not competent in the Assiniboin tongue. More than that, Little Soldier was too drunk to hear or speak sense even if Farwell could have handled the language. Farwell may have been an incompetent interpreter, and Little Soldier was certainly drunk; but it is doubtful that either at his best could have dealt with Hammond’s provocative rage or with the provocative insolence of the young Assiniboin warriors. Much of Farwell’s testimony about what happened was aimed at proving that the American (that is, I. G. Baker’s) traders started the fight, and so may have been commercially tainted. He at first blamed the Assiniboin, and then later, after consulting with his anti-Baker employers in Fort Benton, changed his story and said that Little Soldier offered two horses to compensate Hammond. It does not much matter whether Little Soldier actually made that offer, or whether Farwell could have understood him if he did. Considering the exacerbation of feelings and the cumulative distrust and hatred which the whiskey traders’ activities had engendered along that border, only the subtlest of diplomats and peacemakers—not exactly numerous in that time and place—could have averted trouble.
During the argument the Benton men had come up behind Hammond and Farwell to back them up, and now they began to grow alarmed at the threatening manner of the Assiniboin, and when the young warriors began to throw off their clothes and the women scurried for the woods, the wolfers took cover in the abrupt gully between Farwell’s and the Indian camp. Thomas Hardwick either did or did not yell at Farwell to get out of the way so that the whites could shoot. Farwell either did or did not go on urging the Indians to stay back out of trouble, and either did or did not return to the gully to argue with the angry Benton men. George Hammond either fired at the Indians, as Farwell said in one phase of his testimony, or the Benton men replied to random Indian shots, as métis eyewitnesses Joseph Laverdure and Joseph Vital Turcotte testified. The true cause, even the true provocative stimulus, of a little battle like this is about as hard to establish as the true cause of a major war. Fear and anger face each other in a parley; a knight draws his sword to kill an adder that has stung his heel, and the whole Round Table comes down.
Rumor somewhat exaggerated the casualties of this particular quarrel, some stories building the number of dead Assiniboin up to two hundred. Cowie, reporting the incident, said eighty. He also reported that the body of Little Soldier, killed in the midst of his big drunk, was impaled on a lodge pole and left as a warning to all insolent Indians. Farwell in a toothsome modification testified that Little Soldier was found dead drunk in his lodge at the end of the battle, and that his head was cut off and stuck up on a stake.
None of this seems to be true, though Cowie’s report of a great sobering of Assiniboin belligerence afterward was probably based on observation. For it is certainly true that a relatively small group of whites (more than the six that Cowie reported, but precisely how many it is impossible to say) inflicted a terrible defeat on the Assiniboin. From the coulee, which was gullied three to eight feet deep and ran along the front of the Indian camp within fifty yards, the wolfers poured a catastrophic fire into the charging warriors. Three times, according to the testimony of John Duval, a métis, the Assiniboin rallied with great bravery to rush the coulee; three times the firepower of the repeating Henrys drove them back. Balked in a frontal attack, they withdrew to another coulee to snipe at long range. Flanked by Evans and Hardwick and raked from a hilltop, they flanked the two wolfers in turn and all but had them when the other white men charged to the rescue. In that charge the one white casualty, Ed Grace, received his death, and the wolfers retreated to Farwell’s fort with his body. From there they covered the Assiniboin camp until nightfall, when the Indians scattered, leaving their dead behind. There were anything from fifteen to thirty-six of them, depending upon which witness one accepts, when the wolfers next morning pulled down the camp on top of them and set the whole place afire. The body of Ed Grace, to prevent its being found and mutilated, they buried under the floor of Solomon’s fort. Then they sloshed kerosene on the log cabin and burned it to ashes
, and rode off toward Fort Whoop-Up to see if by any chance the Bloods in that direction had their horses.
And so the trading settlement on Battle Creek, like its predecessor on Chimney Coulee, went up in smoke and the smell of cremated bodies dead by violence. The Indian policy of the American side of the frontier, pushed northward precisely to the divide that separated the Missouri watershed from that of Hudson Bay, came to its logical and many times repeated result of cultural and ethnic conflict culminating in bloodshed. It is impossible to estimate the degrees or shades of blame that attach to individuals involved. The Power interests seem to have taken every opportunity to embarrass the Baker people who took part. At the same time, the massacre blew up much Canadian dislike of the United States, a dislike that had been stimulated by annexationist pressures, by the Fenian invasions, and by the not always ingenuous sympathy in American quarters for Louis Riel and his “rebellious” métis. Once charge and counter-charge had begun, American opinion in general gathered in support of the wolfers, feeling that they were being victimized by Hudson’s Bay Company pressure. Canadian opinion held the wolfers to be a band of Missouri River gunmen. It seems safe to believe that the traders and wolfers, though violent and bloody enough, true offspring of the violent frontier that had bred them, were less ruffianly than some of the testimony and most Canadian opinion suggested.
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