by Ron Thompson
We cut over a block to walk through a tunnel of greenery, the trees seeming to cradle the street. They were elm, and they had survived the plague that had devastated their species because of their isolation—because Poplar Lake was a long way from anywhere. How fitting a metaphor, I thought. Even I could see that. A decade before, Clinton and I had considered Poplar Lake the Butt of the World, a remote, small-minded place. We had dreamt of getting out, living our lives in the world beyond here. And now I was back, remembering things I had forced myself to forget.
Genny took my hand. “Penny for your thoughts.”
“These trees.”
“They’re beautiful.” We walked on.
“So. Back to the You story. Do I need to make it up myself? You played Twister in that house over there with three little girls in pigtails. Over there, you played spin the bottle with Becky Beckworth who had braces and—”
“Hold on. Yesterday you asked about the lake. I wasn’t finished.”
Genny sighed theatrically. I took it as a sign I might miss a few details. “For a while, in the early days, Poplar Lake was going to be a metropolis. Some said it would be the New Winnipeg.”
“Except it floods.”
“So does Winnipeg.”
“But because it does, why—why, with the wide open prairie to choose from—why did they build a town here?”
“Well, that’s a long story.”
Sometimes, when Genny really concentrated, her eyes rolled up into her skull. It was an involuntary thing, but that made it all the more endearing, a little flaw that only I ever saw.
* * *
Twenty years after Spunk’s arrival—it was the 1870s now—Pîwiwisakedjak gathered with other chiefs and listened to the white men who urged them all to sign a treaty. It was true what they were told, that the buffalo were disappearing. Hunger was now a reality among the peoples of the plains, and entire bands had succumbed to the diseases that came with it; Pîwiwisakedjak’s and other bands had taken in many survivors, Cree as well as Salteaux and Assiniboine. And everyone knew that more whites were on the way. Maybe a treaty with the Great White Mother was the only way to protect those still living. Many of the chiefs gathered at the parlay came to that conclusion.
But to Pîwiwisakedjak, the promises bandied around by the queen’s emissaries were too glib by far. He was a poker player, and he recognized a bottom dealer when he sat across from one. Their deck, he concluded, was stacked; so he folded his cards, and his tent, and rode away from the parlay with a group of likeminded headmen, reasoning that the Great White Mother would eventually have to deal squarely.
He had been encouraged recently in this belief. Just the previous year, a ragged troop of scarlet-clad horsemen had ridden into his camp. They wore silly hats, there was no denying that; and they seemed to get lost every time they rode out on patrol. But they had a certain earnest integrity. They were straight talkers and good to their horses, and they did not harass, kill, or round up the Indians like the Long Knives south of the Medicine Line. Instead they burnt down the two whiskey posts that American traders had built in the area after old Spunk’s death five years before (contented to the end, loved and cared for by Rolls With Thunder, and surrounded by his red-haired, half-breed children).
“Hold it right there. Don’t say ‘half-breed.’ You can’t say that. Words matter, mister.”
“Mixed heritage? Sturdy hybrids?”
“Métis.”
“But Spunk wasn’t French.”
Genny did not respond. She was concentrating so hard on my story that her eyes began to float up into her skull again.
In gratitude for ridding him of the local whiskey traders, Little Trickster kept the Mounties alive over the winter that followed, and placed his best guides at their disposal so they would not get lost. He smoked a pipe with their leaders, went to the treaty parlay at their urging, and stayed on friendly terms with them even after he rejected the deal that was on offer. In the months that followed, he entertained a succession of emissaries from the fat white mother, each urging him to sign the treaty. He was courteous and fair minded to all of them, but he held out for better terms, even as the buffalo diminished, and white surveyors came through to demarcate the land. Timing is everything in a negotiation, he counselled his allies. In poker a blink is as bad as a smile. The eyes tell the story if you listen carefully. If a man can’t look you in the eye don’t take his word. He was full of wise adages that no one, not even his own people, completely understood. He was one to talk, too, about looking a man in the eye; one of his was cast. No matter what, it was always looking the other way, wandering with a mind of its own; and the other one, the direct one, blinked and watered uncontrollably. It caused people to underestimate him.
During the rebellion of 1885 he resisted the call to arms by the chiefs who had entered into treaties with the ever-encroaching whites, saying his treaty had yet to be broken. And the situation facing the treaty Indians was bad. The buffalo were gone now, the people starving, and the food promised them by the government was withheld until they moved to the areas reserved for them. There, on sandy-soiled scrublands and clay-bottomed flood plains, they were expected to take up farming. And once there, the food that had been promised was not delivered anyway, at least not in the necessary quantities; or if it was, it was tainted. It made people sick. Sometimes it killed them outright.
To escape hunger, some bands migrated into the northern woodlands to hunt and fish, and some looked for other places onthe plains, but it was no better anywhere, either north or south of the Medicine Line. A rare few exploited other sources of food. Pîwiwisakedjak’s band, for example, survived on fish from a locallake. And ironically, because they hadn’t signed a treaty yet, they also received enticements of food from the government not provided those who had.
“Wait! You mentioned a lake. At last! That’s Poplar Lake, right?”
“Nope. This is Poplar Lake. That lake’s called Spunk Lake. It’s out past the reserve, a few miles from here. I used to go fishing there with Dad.”
Thus the band survived, tenuously, in the midst of an incipient land rush, one which was growing in intensity. The west was being invaded, colonized. Increasing numbers of whites were arriving to homestead. And the railway was coming. It would only accelerate the flood of the invasion. The treaty Indians had it bad, Pîwiwisakedjak saw that clearly; and he knew that the fish from the lake would not last long. With the numbers dependent upon them, they would be depleted in a couple of years.
Missionaries were arriving as well as settlers. Even before the rebellion, a priest had come to live among Pîwiwisakedjak’s people, a wizened old Irishman known as Father O’Fian. A colourful character, to be sure—rumour had it he had been on the barricades in Paris and at Harpers Ferry, that he’d fought with the Irish Brigade at Gettysburg. It was hinted that he had returned to Ireland to organize against the British, immersed himself in the Cause, but had to leave in a hurry over some factional hooha to turn up, eventually, and rather inexplicably, in a remote hold-out territory on the Canadian prairie. Equally inexplicably, he became thick with Little Trickster, who had never before had the time of day for any form of white religion; some even claimed that O’Fian converted Little Trickster, for it was he who gave him his Christian name: Charles Parnell. Whatever the truth, the priest assumed a place among the elders, and the chief listened to his opinion when he spoke about the whites. It was observed that the good priest absented himself when the Mounties were around, and avoided the men from Ottawa when they visited to deliver their presents and flattery.
* * *
Genny and I were now standing at a level crossing. In the distance, a train sounded its whistle—appropriately, at that point in my account, for the approach of the railway was the impetus for the Great White Mother (or her greedy children in Ottawa) to try again to conclude a treaty; and for Pîwiwisakedjak to finallycome to terms. Tre
aty 4A was signed the year before a rail spur reached the hold-out territory from the main line to the south. When the government’s negotiators tabled their offer, the chief tabled a few proposals of his own. They were small in the scheme of things, and the government men agreed. It was known that there was a push on in Ottawa to reach an accord, some desperation even, what with a couple of key ministers in Sir John A.’s government holding a significant financial stake in the spur line. “I’m not saying the lot of the Treaty 4A Indian has been better than that of others—after the old man died, they had their share of trouble. White society and the twentieth century definitely took its pound of Indian flesh—”
“Aboriginal.”
“Sure. Aboriginal. So, anyway, Pîwiwisakedjak chose the site of his reserve. It’s five miles from town.”
“From Poplar Lake,” Genny said.
“Yep. Out on the high ground to the west.”
“And the lake? The poplar one?”
“I’m getting to that.”
* * *
The boom began with the railway, but the selection of the site for what became Poplar Lake was left to old Pîwiwisakedjak. To close the deal he had demanded freehold title to two hundred square miles of prairie in the vicinity of his reserve. The tract lay astride the route of the future railroad, and as the steam locomotives of the day had a limited range, there was going to be a white settlement somewhere within it. He consented to have the land surveyed, but it would be held in trust until sold, with all proceeds going to the band. And the chief would decide who bought it. He would choose his own neighbours.
Many suitors came to Pîwiwisakedjak’s camp to smoke a pipe with him. He sat cross-legged on the ground, bejewelled in medals bestowed by the Great White Mother, his eyes dancing and watering, talking in riddles that confused the whites while he took their measure. He was unimpressed by the various eastern promoters who tried to talk over one another. Little Trickster knew a horse thief when he saw one. Luddites, utopian socialists, the various delegations burning with religious fervour—he found them all clueless. A European aristocrat who intended to bring his peasants with him, so they could continue paying him tribute—doomed from the get-go. And a band of remittance men, looking for a place to indulge their upper-class pastimes: tennis, polo, and fox hunting, with brandy and buggery in the den at night . . . well, they could have their English ways—just not in his territory.
He entertained a succession of immigrant settlement companies. He had nothing against Swedes or Belgians, Ukrainians, Germans or Jews, or even Canadians—he knew he could put up with any of them if he had to, and he did—but he was on a quest for something. Protections for his people. He had seen the scourge the white man brought, a disease of the soul that destroyed those afflicted. He remembered the anarchic bacchanal of Spunk’s arrival, the death of his sister’s child, and the traders who came later. They had always resorted to liquor, and Pîwiwisakedjak had seen what it had wrought. It was subjugation, a dependence that ate away at those who succumbed to it. So when Theodore Abernethy, the earnest emissary of the Etobicoke Temperance Society, arrived from Ontario and declined to take a pipe (“Tobacco,” he asserted, “is highly addictive, but I brought you some camomile tea.”) Little Trickster took interest.
The deal was consummated quickly: two hundred square miles, 128,000 acres of virgin prairie, sold to the champions of the temperance movement; and not for horse blankets and beads but cold hard cash. Well, not exactly cash, but a promissory note, and with it Pîwiwisakedjak secured what he had sought: a dry settlement adjacent to his reserve. His people would be forever free of the scourge of alcohol.
An advance man from the railway, which was worried about building across Indian land, even if it was freehold, witnessed the agreement. He was an engineer, a big, straight-talking Scot who impressed the chief with his pragmatism and appreciation for the land, for he had an engineer’s eye for terrain; and he hit it off with old Father O’Fian. Pîwiwisakedjak turned to him to play a role in the transaction by binding his employer to three specific conditions: the railway would act as intermediary on the transaction; Pîwiwisakedjak himself would select the site of the future town; and the railway would build its whistle stop where the chief chose it to be.
The old man’s final condition was the only that benefitted him personally. He wanted a lifetime pass to ride the railway. He had heard that old Chief Crowfoot had gotten that, and he wasn’t going to let a Blackfoot get a better deal.
CHAPTER 7
Back in Etobicoke, the Temperance Society set about raising capital to cover the purchase price of the land and the cost of building a settlement. The members contributed what cash they could scrape together, but they needed to raise more, and they knew that they were unsophisticated in such matters, that they would need professional counsel. To find it, they turned to a nearby big-city newspaper, the newly established Toronto Evening Star, a paper favoured by Fabians, suffragettes, and other whingers and malcontents—
“I like the Star,” Genny said, interrupting my flow. “I like all those whingers and malcontents . . .”
For all its zeal for social reform, the Evening Star was not choosy about whose ads it ran. Thus the Etobicoke teetotallers succumbed to a discrete solicitation:
Expert Assistance
In the Resolution of Financial Constraints
For Worthy Undertakings.
Impeccable Ethics. Respectable Inquiries Only.
* * *
There are so many charlatans, so many scams, the President of the Ethical Standard Integrity Trust advised the delegation from the Temperance Society when they met in his private suite at the prestigious Queen’s Hotel in Toronto. One must, he said, be vigilant against financial trickery. A fool and his money are soon parted. Theroad to hell is paved with good intentions. And in these times . . .
(The times were tough. The global economy had been flatsince the 1870s. It was called the Long Depression, and in Canada it lasted well into the 1890s. The young nation stagnated during those years, its population shrinking instead of growing.)
I chose to meet you today, said the President of the Trust, in camera, here in chambers, so that I may speak frankly. And I will tell you frankly, friends: that no bank will lend against land in the west. Oh, they will tell you a tale to the contrary. They will shower you with false promises to draw you in, but I will tell you something of their modus operandi: a bank will lend you an umbrella on a clearing trend and demand it back at the merest hint of rain—and extract a pretty penny in the bargain. Well, the Ethical Standard Integrity Trust is not a bank. We are a trust. He nodded around at the teetotallers, letting the concept of trust sink in, as his assistant, a young lady of pleasing disposition and impeccable manners, served tea.
A stock issue is what you require, he continued. But there is the issue of control. To lose control of such a laudable endeavour, to others of lower morals . . . bankers, robber barons, licentious drinkers. We know their tricks. We know where abuses can occur. And we will not sell cheap, not budge the least from our principled expectation. We will set a price, a fair price, make a fair and frank solicitation, and let the impartial, invisible hand of commerce settle the matter in our favour.
At some point, the discussion shifted from you and your to We and Our, encompassing both the Etobicoke Temperance Society and the Ethical Standard Integrity Trust. It was comforting for the Society’s members, this sense of togetherness with a man of substance and affairs.
A share company, the President opined, will accomplish our goals and provide all the requisite legal protections. We will form a company and sell shares in it, but it is imperative that at the end of that process we control the voting shares. We must engage a lawyer to protect us, and to ensure the legalities. We at the Trust have one with whom we customarily work on matters such as this. He practices in the suite adjacent to this. With your consent, and if he is not otherwise occupied
at the moment with matters of business import, I will ask Miss Flanders to enquire if he is in. I should like to introduce him to you, and for him to join our meeting—if he is available. He is much in demand in the world of Commerce.
The teetotallers assented, and were pleased when comely Miss Flanders returned with this legal beagle who (after consulting his pocket watch) consented to join their meeting. And they were duly impressed with him, his learned comments and astute observations, and the way he interacted with the President. The two clearly enjoyed a productive and complementary working relationship, gained over years of commercial collaboration. Thus, on the spot, the Society engaged the pair to advise them on the creation and capitalization of the Great West Colonization & Settlement Company.
Under the guidance of the Trust and its capable counsel, the teetotallers began the process of incorporation, which required the preparation of a company charter and bylaws, with countless signatures and approvals. The Trust, with its deep experience (thankfully the President continued to take a personal interest in the venture) relieved the Etobicokers of the burden of details. All the President asked of them, as he oversaw the necessary arrangements, was their patience; and their timely approval and consent. And regular as clockwork, under the benign gaze of the President, as the angelic Miss Flanders hovered with tea, a smile, and a solicitous word for each of the Society’s members, their efficient and much-in-demand solicitor laid out documents for their signature. If a query was raised, the President accepted it magnanimously, but the busy man of law, bumping up against other pressing engagements, sighed and consulted his watch, while the expression on Miss Flanders face became one of tender embarrassment for the questioner. And compassion, for she sympathized with his lack of worldliness.
At one of their conferences a concern was raised by Theodore Abernethy, the man who had personally concluded the purchase agreement with Pîwiwisakedjak. I have one requirement, Abernethy said, that I do not hear or see reflected. The first money you collect must be paid into a trust account managed by the railway. That was the chief’s stated wish.
