Prairie Grass

by Joan Soggie

  He was even able to swallow his disgust at the pitiable condition of their livestock and men and signed on as their guide. He agreed to lead the North West Mounted Police Force as far as Fort Carlton. He eventually stayed with them all the way to Edmonton.

  Since their footsore herd of cows and calves could travel no more than eight miles a day, Jean-Jacques trudged ahead of the dispirited troop, leading his own pinto pony and cart, choosing his route with an eye for good grazing. When they met up with a small group of buffalo hunters loaded with meat and hides, he advised Inspector Jarvis to buy pemmican from them to supplement the men’s rations.

  “Ah, yes, I’ve heard of this stuff,” said the inspector, eying the grey mass with suspicion. “A traditional food of the land, I believe. But surely, it is an acquired taste. The men will never eat it. We have our tinned goods, you know.”

  Jean-Jacques made no answer but prepared over his own campfire a pan of fried pemmican and some wild onions he had picked that day as they made their slow progress through a marsh. Calling one of the pink-faced recruits, he handed him a steaming plate of the stuff, and said, “Here, take this rechaud to the boss.”

  That evening Inspector Jarvis and several of his men joined Jean-Jacques at his fire, acquiring a taste for the food of the land.

  One guiding job inevitably led to another, and another. One year and then another rolled by, with his small herd of cattle and string of horses growing under Marie’s watchful eye at her father’s corrals. It was understood by all that Jean-Jacques and Marie belonged to each other and no other. He lived for their brief times together, for the moonlit nights wrapped in each other’s arms, her parents and brothers asleep inside. But it was not until early in 1878 that he felt his position secure enough to ask her father to arrange for the priest at Qu’Appelle to sanction their marriage.

  In later years, telling the story to their children, they laughed at the bad timing. Imagine, waiting all those years to marry, and then choosing the very year that saw the end of bison hunting! For that was the year that prairie fires raged throughout the summer, driving the remaining buffalo further south. The herds never returned to Canada.

  But even in times of famine, babies insist on coming into the world. Marie wanted to name their son Jean-Jacques like his father, but as Jean-Jacques felt a disinclination, acquired from his Cree upbringing, to giving the child his own given name, they settled on Jacques.

  Other changes determined their destiny. The railroad arrived in Saskatchewan territory in 1882, and with it land agents determined to make a profit by trading goods or liquor for Metis scrip. Scrip, issued by government agents to anyone able to prove native-born roots, gave the bearer title to a quarter section of land, 160 acres, often in the plains south of the South Saskatchewan River. These official-seeming scraps of paper were as good as worthless to Metis whose homes were already established further north in the mixed prairie and parkland. For Jean-Jacques, it was a timely boon. Their livestock and household goods were transferred to Marie’s land near the Qu’Appelle. Their second child, Virginie, was born there.

  And Pierre was born the same year that relations between the white government and the native-born people reached their breaking point.

  Despite letters from Indian agents detailing the deplorable conditions on the reserves, and despite repeated petitions from the Metis requesting settlement of their land claims, no satisfactory response came from the government in central Canada. Was it simply bureaucratic inefficiency? Or had those in power decided to break these obstinate people by gradually removing all means of livelihood?

  Indifference or malice, the result for Cree and Metis was the same. A cloud of anger, division and hatred descended on the land. Dumont might still try to negotiate, and Riel might pray for divine intervention. Big Bear might envision the possibility of peace and plenty, and Poundmaker council patience. But Jean-Jacques, remembering that winter night on the Marias River, knew in his bones that war was coming. When he heard Gabriel had gone to Montana to bring back Riel to help the Metis establish their claim to the Saskatchewan, as they had at Red River, he felt it was time to move. There was plenty of wide-open range in more out-of-the-way places.

  “But why?” Marie protested. “We have the paper proving this land is ours. See, my name is on it.”

  “And old Chief Heavy Runner had the American flag they’d given him to show that he was a ‘good Indian.’ The soldiers shot him anyway, wrapped in his flag, and burned his children. We are taking the livestock and moving further west, away from the railroad and the army and this trouble brewing at Batoche.”

  They loaded necessary belongings into the wagon, tucked Jacques and Virginie onto the seat, and with pregnant Marie at the reins, and Jean-Jacques riding herd on the cattle, they made their slow way across the prairie to the place Jean-Jacques had in mind. It was a wide peaceful land of hills and sky, miles from any of the major trails but close to the river. Jean-Jacques felt sure that here, his family would be safe. Their second baby boy was born that summer, in a dugout by the South Saskatchewan River. They named him Pierre.

  So it was that news of the disastrous spring and summer of 1885 reached them only as scattered rumours. The burning of Fort Carlton, the battles at Fish Creek and Batoche, the capture of Riel were alarming stories told by the few travellers who passed through their corner of the prairie. None could tell him what might have happened to his childhood friends, nor whether the Metis or Indian gained any concessions or lost everything.

  Finally, Jean-Jacques could stand it no longer. He announced one morning he would take an extra horse and ride to see for himself what was happening. He would cross the river and head through the Red Ochre Hills north towards land familiar from his childhood. They both knew he could be gone for weeks.

  Marie had long since accepted his absences, on hunting trips or freighting jobs. Jean-Jacques would have been surprised to hear a complaint from her. What woman would want a man who always stayed close by her side? And despite the evil mood of the time, they were removed hundreds of miles from the fighting. Jean-Jacques felt confident that she could cope with any ordinary dangers that threatened her or their children. After all, the wild days of whisky runners and wolf hunters had subsided as the red-coats patrolled the southwest.

  She stopped young Jacques as he reached for the sack of dried saskatoon berries she had set aside with provisions she was packing in her husband’s saddlebags.

  “Little magpie, not for you!” she scolded.

  Jean-Jacques scooped up Jacques in one arm and spoke over the tousled head burrowing into his chest.

  “Marie. That is not our way, is it, to begrudge a child food?”

  But he saw from the tears in her eyes and her strained, fearful expression that it was not little Jacques who had upset her. His free arm encircled her. They stood for a long moment, rocking, the three of them locked together as one body.

  It took ten days of solitary riding for him to reach the north branch of the Saskatchewan River. Twilight faded to dusk as he followed the riverbank towards whatever might remain of the Battleford settlement. He had heard all the buildings were burned, and Big Bear’s people had taken refuge in the woods. There was no knowing what he might find there.

  But he would find someone, he was sure. A throbbing filled the cool breathless air, the beating of drums, hardly audible, like a scarcely perceived heartbeat. As he drew nearer, through the evening stillness came a far-off wailing. The lament echoed through the river valley. Jean-Jacques’s hair bristled on his neck, and, although never a devout man, he crossed himself. As shadows deepened, the sky seemed lighter by contrast, and the thin anguished song grew clearer. Now he could distinguish individual voices and knew they were women. Never had he heard such a despairing sound. He followed the chanting down the slope towards the river. The singing seemed to be coming from a bluff of trees, now entirely in shadows. A few figures moved into the last rays of the dying sun. He recognized no person but knew without doubt th
at here were Cree.

  Dismounting he approached one and asked her softly in his mother’s tongue, “Sister, what has happened? Who has died?”

  “Died?” She turned to him her bloodshot eyes and wailed as though she had been stabbed. “They are all dead, all, all our young men, hung by the soldiers, hung on a rope to choke and kick, with no honour to go with them into the afterlife …”

  Her voice rose again in wordless keening.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Winterfat. Alternate linear leaves covered with silky white hairs. Flowers late spring. Fruit bracts covered with silky white hairs. Woody and branching at base with old bark grey brown, annual branches covered with woolly hairs. Dry prairie. Deep taproot. Similar to sage but lacks odor. Excellent high protein forage, especially for winter grazing. Sensitive to over-grazing. Gabriellas’ Prairie Notes

  Gabby (2012)

  Anyone living in the Canadian northwest in 1885 would ever after remember it as the year of blood and anger.

  Of that much I was certain.

  I had gone for a two-hour run when the rain finally let up, following the path along the creek south of the city, jogging on the side of the road when the path petered out. The air shone and the world seemed renewed. The creek ran full. So did my heart.

  How was it possible that a few weeks ago I knew nothing of those terrible years of starvation, injustice, resistance? Worse. Had felt nothing. How could someone like me, intelligent, well-educated, drift cheerily into adulthood never knowing the terrible wrongs upon which my nation had been built?

  And I had to ask myself this question: if I had never met Madeline, never dipped into Annabelle’s notebooks or heard her father’s story would I have cared, even if I had learned the facts?

  Or would I have been like Andy, who had learned in an academic way the entire story but still could say, “That’s all in the past. They just have to get over it.”

  I tried to remember what exactly I had previously known. The last Canadian history class I had taken was, I think, my second year in high school. I vaguely recalled dates of provinces joining confederation, textbooks with titles such as The Building of Canada, chapters about Linking the Nation with the railroad, the progress from colony to nation through two world wars. And of course, the two-nation concept, that fairy tale concept of central Canada’s founding nations and languages, French and English. Where did Indigenous people and the Metis fit into that paradigm?

  All I could recall about the era of bison hunters was one semester when I was ten or eleven years old. My teacher had divided the class into small groups and assigned each group a First Nations tribe to research in the library. My group had to make a poster showing how the Huron Indians had lived. Other groups did the Inuit, the Iroquois, and, I think, the Blackfoot tribe. That was the extent of my aboriginal knowledge, up until university, when, as part of a sociology class, one whole lecture had been devoted to the unique societal problems of reserves and aboriginal communities. If anything had been taught about the underlying injustices predating those problems, I had obviously failed to pick up on it.

  So. My nice intelligent boyfriend was not the only one who chose to discount the implications. To pass on the other side. To turn a blind eye.

  I was angry. Angry at an educational system that taught us while maintaining our comfortable ignorance. Angry at my country that touted itself as being fair, open-minded and welcoming while denying most of its true history. Angry at the settlers for blithely swallowing colonial propaganda. Angry at the Indigenous people who had failed to hang on to their birthright. Angry at myself for not knowing what to do with this newfound knowledge. Angry at Andy for his denial that knowing compelled some sort of action.

  The run helped. So did a good night’s sleep.

  The next morning, I felt calmer. There was no point in driving out to Mammoth today. I would continue reading Madeline’s commentary, Annabelle’s notes, Jean-Jacques La Prairie’s story.

  And this evening, I’d drive south to meet Andy and we’d spend the weekend at Grasslands National Park. I anticipated exploring a countryside that hadn’t changed much in a hundred years. Learning even a little bit about the people who had once made this region their home had made me more curious about the land itself.

  I wanted to understand the forces that had eroded the symbiotic relationship between the people and the land.

  But first, I burrowed back into that tumultuous period of change, the late 1800s.

  * * *

  Following the revenge executions at Battleford, the full weight of colonial justice sent major players in the uprising to their death or into exile. Riel was executed, Dumont took refuge in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Cree leaders Poundmaker and Little Bear both died soon after being released from prison.

  The back of the resistance was broken. The Metis slid inexorably into a morass out of which there seemed no escape. With their leaders branded as traitors and their aboriginal kin treated as beggars, humiliation was heaped on degradation as they struggled to hold their heads high in this strange new world. Some chose to deny their roots and imitate the ways of the English-speaking newcomers, in the hope of winning acceptance.

  Jean-Jacques (1887-1900)

  Jean-Jacques applied for scrip prior to 1885, and later registered his children so that Jacques, Virginie and Pierre each qualified for his or her own bit of land. Although what a buffalo-hunting-drayman-cowboy was to do with just a few acres of grass puzzled him sorely.

  Telling himself that, “The land, she won’t go nowhere,” Jean-Jacques left his few dozen head of cattle and some of his horses to fend for themselves in the general vicinity of his holding along the South Saskatchewan River, an area almost totally devoid of settlement. Jean-Jacques accepted work offered by ranchers struggling to establish their spreads near the Cypress Hills. Grass was good, water available, markets growing. His days passed in a blur of ceaseless but peaceable activity. Spring roundup, calving and branding. Hunting coyotes or the occasional pack of wolves or stray cougar suspected of picking off calves. Fall roundup and the long trek to market while the main herd was settled into winter pasture. He and Marie settling themselves in with food and fuel for the long cold months when the main activity was simply survival. Each season brought its work and its rewards.

  Jean-Jacques was content with the place he had earned for himself and his family. His almost uncanny ability to determine whether a horse would work best as a cutter, a herder, a swimmer or a roper, and his success in training them for the chosen role, placed him high in the estimation of ranchers and cowhands. The continual demands of his own or his employers’ herds occupied his hands and challenged his mind. Haunting memories lost their power to torment.

  The last of the 1800s passed. Jacques, Virginie, and Pierre grew up learning all their parents could teach them, although Jean-Jacques and Marie often were at a loss how to prepare their children for a world they had difficulty figuring out themselves. Their Cree kin grieved for lost independence and struggled to adapt. The elders of the tribe looked to the past, trying to retain traditions of their lost world. Children were carted off to residential schools where they learned to hide their thoughts and deny their feelings. Their braids were cut off, their language banned.

  At least his own children had been spared that indignity, Jean-Jacques reflected. He had taught his boys the skills cowboys need and tried to maintain for his children a network of friends and relatives. Whenever work and weather allowed, they travelled to scattered Metis communities or nearby reservations to visit friends or celebrate a wedding. He knew his children lacked the rich variety of associations he’d enjoyed in his youth, but at least they knew a few of their people. He took comfort in the thought that a brighter future might await them all in this new century, 1900.

  * * *

  Marie leaned against the rough log corral. The afternoon stillness held a warning of frost. The crisp autumn air throbbed with a high clear chorus of cranes passing overhead. She often
stood here, on days like this, when the ranch yard was deserted, listening to the flocks flying south as they had every one of her nearly fifty years.

  Soon Virginie will be leaving home for good, going with her husband to build a life of their own.

  Virginie. Her laughing brown-eyed daughter, who never walked if she could run and always had a quick retort to her brothers’ gibes. Marie sometimes saw herself when she looked at Virginie, her younger happier self.

  Now her thoughts turned inward, examining her life here on the ranch. She had few regrets. Through all her years with Jean-Jacques, she’d put her hand to whatever work needed to be done, raising chickens or tending calves or growing vegetables to feed her family and sometimes the cowhands too. Work aplenty, but seldom another woman to share her everyday worries, fears she never would admit to her daughter. Virginie. When Virginie left, she would be even more alone than she already was.

  Marie gave herself a little shake. It is right that Virginie should leave, build her own life with her own man on their own land.

  “Only a fool would trade land for money,” Jean-Jacques had warned his family. “This land fed and clothed our parents and their fathers and mothers before them. It will feed and clothe you, too, if you listen to it, use what it gives you, take care of it. The land, she is our mother.”

  Others might be cheated out of the land they were entitled to, but their children would never exchange their scrip for a few dollars or a bottle of whisky, as some had. Of that Marie was certain. But what good is it to us if we stay here working to build someone else’s ranch? It is time for us to move on, back to our own land, and use everything we’ve learned to build our own place.