He found Simpson beside his small fire. They had not talked since Fort Pitt burned, merely plodded on day after day wherever Wandering Spirit led. Simpson was scraping mud from his moccasins and protruding toes.
Big Bear said quietly, Where have gone your horses? Your beautiful horses?
They always hated bush, mud, Simpson muttered. He glanced up. Wandering Spirit sat staring into his fire, his small daughter folded in his arms. Simpson said, He talks with Mrs. McLean. McLean told me he asked her, What would your God do to someone who did what I’ve done?
What did she say?
The Good Book says a man is punished for his evil.
Big Bear said bitterly, Your God has so much practice, punishing.
It was murder.
Quinn said “No!” to the war chief four times.
Yes.
It almost seemed they could be friends again. Simpson asked, Why don’t your men let us go? The soldiers will never stop while we’re captive.
The men think, once you’re gone, nothing would stop the soldiers from killing us all.
But McLean is a powerful White. If he was free, he could maybe persuade the soldiers to stop shooting.
I know, Big Bear said, maybe. But it has, I think, gone too far.
That was the last time they talked. Before dawn Sam Steele’s Police Scout Cavalry emerged under the trees and attacked. The sleeping camp burst into defence and flight, Woods Cree Chief Cut Arm was shot dead as he darted from his lodge. There were captives everywhere, but Steele’s men fired indiscriminately; two shots whistled past Kitty McLean wading with a child through the crossing. In 1975, Horsechild’s wife, Mary PeeMee, told the Cree story of June 3, 1885, the last military battle fought in Canada:
“At Loon Lake the soldiers caught up with them. The people were all afraid, but Big Bear’s medicine was so strong, he would always be safe. Around his neck he wore a necklace of beads. A bear’s claw rested in the hollow of his throat. As long as he wore that claw there, nothing could hurt him. Big Bear walked out into the open while his people fled. It was as if he placed an invisible wall between his people and the soldiers. The soldiers could not see him either. When his people were far enough away to be safe again, he caught up with them.”
“Safe” for the Cree could only mean north, farther into the maze of muskegs, lakes, forest, stony hills, creeks. But not before they buried the five warriors shot at Loon Lake and aged Sitting-At-The-Door, who, in terror, had hanged herself. The fleeing Cree heard that two huge riverboats full of soldiers had arrived at Fort Pitt from Battleford, that whole battalions were searching for them from three directions. They knew a thousand People could not continue in flight together, and small groups broke away, trekking toward Fort Pitt to surrender. Woods Cree with the McLeans and Simpsons disappeared across the Beaver River, and when Wandering Spirit pursued them, the pursuers joined the pursued. Together they struggled through boreal wilderness and reached Fort Pitt on June 22 to jubilation in the enormous soldier encampment. The Cameron and Pritchard parties had already arrived. The Woods Cree surrendered, as did Wandering Spirit, who had started the Cree’s eighty-two-day triumph and travail by killing Tom Quinn on April 2.
Big Bear was not puzzled that Wandering Spirit surrendered or surprised that, when taken prisoner, the war chief tried to kill himself with a knife. There had always been a split in Wandering Spirit, a chasm between gentleness and furious pride, between a rage at humiliation and the shame of guilt. Now the White doctors forced him to stay alive until a rope could be cinched around his neck.
There were only a few hundred Plains Cree left free, moving through swampy forest with noisy soldiers blundering about and finding no one. Their supplies were finished, and several leading men decided that only the prairie could save them. While more groups trickled away to surrender at Turtle Lake and Battleford, Big Bear’s sons Imasees and Kingbird, together with Lucky Man, all implicated in the Frog Lake killings, led a hundred People between Canadian patrols on a six-hundred-mile flight south into Montana. As some Onion Lake Cree would remember it, “Imasees commandeered the best horses and many needed supplies and left his tribal kinsmen as a traitor might leave his comrade. [He] left behind disgust and ill will among those who wanted to join the exodus but were deserted by Imasees.”
The United States held no promise for Big Bear. He mourned his sons who had fled—and Twin Wolverine, who with the Peace Hills bands had remained clear of the conflict—none of whom he would ever meet again. But a few People were still left, including his wife and Horsechild, and so he could not remain in the forest, much as he loved it even without a horse. A soldier camp at Turtle Lake and continuous patrols from Battleford made Jackfish Lake and The Little Hills impossible. But there was Fort Carlton, where his mother and father took him as a little boy, where he first met good Whites who laughed and danced, drank tea and traded honestly, helped you live as free as you pleased, with fine steel needles and axes that never burst in the cold. Carlton was burned rubble, they said; perhaps no soldiers would be there.
They easily avoided Otter’s troops at Turtle Lake and reached the North Saskatchewan River starving. They hid when a steamboat filled with soldiers paddle-wheeled past, the smell of frying meat so good they almost fainted. Then they built rafts, crossed the river, and Big Bear’s wife, with the other women and children, trudged on to find shelter with the Duck Lake bands. But twelve-year-old Horsechild refused to leave his father. They were almost at Carlton when they stopped at a trader’s tent for food. The man gave them hardtack to gnaw but slipped away to report them. And so, on July 2, 1885, Big Bear surrendered, as the press commented sarcastically, to the only four policemen in the North-West who were not hunting him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Recommendation to Mercy
Profusely, often wildly, illustrated weekly papers were published in eastern Canada throughout the brief North-West Rebellion, and by June the front pages of dailies were dominated by the hunt for the one remaining “savage,” Big Bear. When the “Big Bear captives” straggled into Fort Pitt, telegraph accounts from reporters on the spot were columns wide, especially stories of the two widows and the McLean family with their nine children, including Ewan, a “fat, chubby little fellow not two years of age.” To every newspaper’s amazement, “Not one of [the captives] had been subjected to bodily injury or ill-treatment of any sort.” Consequently, after news of Big Bear’s surrender came—“a sixty-year-old coward, a black Indian with an enormous head”—all press interest in Big Bear ceased. What Sir John A. Macdonald called “the five million dollar unpleasantness,” “a mere domestic trouble,” which had killed a mere eighteen Indian, nineteen Métis, and sixty White soldiers and civilians, was ended. Except for the trials and the executions.
Taken to Prince Albert, Big Bear again saw himself in a photograph: seated, alone, a red-striped white Company blanket draped over his shoulders and heavy hair to reveal only his gaunt face and roped, bare feet. His eyes tight as slits stare straight into the camera; looking at the world has exhausted him.
By July 15, Big Bear, Horsechild, and other prisoners had been hauled to Regina for trial. As Horsechild’s wife Mary told it:
“The wagons that took them carried much food. My man said after each meal enough was thrown away to feed all the people for many days. Big Bear hurt to see it wasted when he knew our people had nothing.… Big Bear could have escaped, you know. There were no handcuffs or jails that could have kept him locked up. They say he used to take his handcuffs off and play with them. He could walk in and out of the jail cell.”
In 1983, Alphonse Little Poplar continued that story of Big Bear’s power. One day, depressed by being forever sealed behind walls, he walked out of his locked cell in the police prison to sit in the yard sunshine. Soon frantic guards came running, so he went back in.
“When they entered the building, for a moment no one saw Big Bear. The next they saw of him, he was standing inside his cell. He asked the interpreter to com
e over. ‘Tell [them] … I am very sorry that I frightened them and I will not do it again. You may also remind them that when the Great Spirit gave us sunshine and fresh air, he intended that it was for all to enjoy.’”
For more than a century most Canadians have believed that the North-West Rebellion was a Métis-Indian uprising. The fact is that, except for individual Natives, not a single treaty band joined Riel. The two traditional chiefs who went to Batoche with a few men, the Cree One Arrow and the Sioux Whitecap, did so because the Métis coerced them. Poundmaker’s hungry men looted deserted Battleford only after Indian Agent John Rae refused to so much as talk to them, and they later fought no more than necessary to repel Otter’s attack on their sleeping band at Cutknife Hill. In 1984, John Tootoosis, Elder on the Poundmaker Reserve, interpreted 1885 this way:
“When the Métis people were preparing to have this uprising, the Indian people said no. We won’t support you. We signed an agreement with the Crown not to fight any more; they were to live at peace with these people. We signed a treaty [Cree, âsotamâkêwin, ”a promise”], we have to live up to this treaty.”
Nevertheless, by August 1885, there were as many Cree as Métis in prisons at Battleford and Regina. Gabriel Dumont, who had organized the Métis army and personally shot more Canadian soldiers than anyone, was safe in the United States, but the trial of Louis Riel—who had shot no one but was nonetheless charged with levying treasonous war—began on July 20. By July 31, Riel had destroyed his lawyer-imposed defence of insanity by making a brilliant, reasoned statement of his behaviour to the court. The jury found him guilty and Judge Hugh Richardson sentenced him to hang.
On August 13, the elderly One Arrow from Duck Lake was the first Cree chief to stand trial. He was charged with treason-felony: of intending to levy war against the Queen, her Crown, and Dignity. Peter Houri, one of the most experienced Cree interpreters in the North-West, could find no Cree equivalents for traitor, rebellion, or crown. When One Arrow heard himself accused of “knocking off the Queen’s hat and stabbing her in the behind,” he asked Houri, “Are you drunk?” However, a White man testified he saw One Arrow talking to Riel during the rebellion, so the chief was found guilty and sentenced to three years in Stony Mountain Penitentiary, Manitoba.
On August 17, Chief Poundmaker received the same sentence for the same charge, largely on the basis of a questionable letter sent to Riel with the chief’s name written under it. Poundmaker, like the other chiefs, was not permitted to say one word in his own defence.
Big Bear had to wait until September 11 for his day in court. Two months locked inside log walls for a man who had lived his life outdoors and slept only inside the high cone of a buffalo-hide lodge—no wonder that, beyond the confusing charge, he appeared disoriented, hostile, old. And in the courtroom stood Peter Houri, who at Fort Walsh had interpreted Big Bear’s long speech before he made his X mark in order to feed his starving People. They could only glance at each other, in silence.
There was no debate about nine White men being killed at Frog Lake, or Fort Pitt being sacked, or whether two hours of gunfire—perhaps three?—had been exchanged at Frenchman Butte; the question was, had Big Bear been in command of the warriors when this violence happened? The court practice of translating only short summaries of testimony into Cree made it extremely difficult for Big Bear to follow the case against him, nor could he advise defence lawyer Beverly Robertson what answers to follow up on. Robertson, from Winnipeg, already had experience in defending both One Arrow and Poundmaker.
Robertson built his case around the fact that Big Bear was obliged to stay with his band in time of crisis, even when he strongly disagreed with his warriors’ actions. Indeed, where else could an elderly Cree chief go?
John Pritchard testified that Big Bear had no control over the warriors at the Frog Lake killings, the shooting of Constable Cowan, or the destruction of Fort Pitt. James Simpson stated that at Frenchman Butte, Big Bear was two miles behind the rifle pits, that he had known the chief for “nearly forty years,” and that he had “always been a good Indian to the white man.” But now “his young men had succeeded in taking his good name from him.” Company clerk Stanley Simpson (no relation to James) testified that he heard Big Bear say he wanted his men “to cut the head of the white people off,” but Robertson quickly proved that Stanley understood no Cree, and certainly not such a complex statement. Catherine Simpson nervously murmured that Big Bear was in her kitchen when she heard the first shot fired at Frog Lake and that “he got up and went out, and I heard him say, don’t do it … that is, leave it alone.” William McLean, despite his two-month captivity, declared Big Bear to be “a good Indian,” but he was no longer a leading man in the band, and that his son Imasees “treated him with utter contempt.” The chief had neither taken nor accepted any pillaged goods at Fort Pitt, and during the councils on whether they should join Poundmaker, Big Bear “had no influence at that time [among] the leading spirits in the camp.” Henry Halpin testified that Big Bear told him at Frog Lake that “this thing that has happened here was not my idea,” and later that he “did not want to go toward Battleford,” that is, join the rebels. Finally, William Cameron blurted out a long affirmation of the chief’s good character, stating that in councils “Wandering Spirit did all the talking” and that it was Imasees—”one of the worst of the Indians and one of the headmen concerned in massacre”—who forced him to surrender all the ammunition in the Company store on April 2.
It seemed that, far from being guilty, Big Bear had done everything he could to prevent violence and murder. He had, in fact, saved many lives and continuously counselled peace. Robertson, who had made a vigorous defence, considered the evidence for acquittal so strong that he ended his case. However, that a renowned head chief—who had, admittedly, done much good—could not leave his band during a severe crisis and would not have the power to control band warriors in times of starvation, rage, humiliation, battle-camaraderie, and attack remained incomprehensible to the all-White jury of Henry Grove, William Hunt, Robert Martin, John Morrison, Albert Smith, and J.W. Smith. They “return in fifteen minutes with a verdict of ‘guilty,’ with a recommendation to mercy.”
Sentence was pronounced on September 25. Of the nineteen prisoners in the dock, Big Bear was called first. Judge Richardson asked, “Do you have anything to say before sentence is passed upon you?”
The man who once held audiences rapt for hours, whose voice of “amazing depth and volume” could “sound like the roar of a lion” and whose “gestures spoke almost as eloquently as his words” certainly had something to say. The hours of incomprehensible trial, where he was permitted nothing but silence, had not over-awed him. However, not one word of his speech appears in the official government record of his trial: 49 Victoria Sessional Papers (No.52) A. 1886. Only the Toronto Mail (October 5, 1885) printed a paraphrased summary, and it remained for Cameron, whose life Catherine Simpson had saved with a blanket, to offer some strands of memory. Forty years later he recreated some of the English translation in his personal memoir, The War Trail of Big Bear:
“The old man drew himself up with that imperious air that proclaimed him leader and fitted him so well He gave his head the little characteristic toss that always preceded his speeches.
“‘I think I should have something to say,’ he began slowly, ‘about the occurrences which brought me here in chains.
“‘I knew little of the killing at Frog Lake beyond hearing the shots fired. When any wrong was brewing, I did my best to stop it from the beginning. The turbulent ones of my band got beyond my control and shed the blood of those I would have protected. I was away from Frog Lake a part of the winter, hunting and fishing, and the rebellion had started before I got back. When white men were few in the country I gave them the hand of brotherhood. I am sorry so few are here who can witness to my friendly acts.
“‘Can anyone stand here and say that I ordered the death of a priest or an agent? You think I encouraged my people to
take part in the trouble. I did not. I advised them against it. I felt sorry when they killed those men at Frog Lake, but the truth is when news of the fight at Duck Lake reached us, my band ignored my authority and despised me because I did not side with the half-breeds. I did not so much as take a white man’s horse. I always believed that by being the friend of the white man, I and my people would be helped by those who had wealth. I always thought it paid to do all the good I could. Now my heart is on the ground.
“‘I look around me in this room and see it crowded with handsome faces—faces far handsomer than mine (laughter). I have ruled my country for a long time. Now I am in chains, and will be sent to prison, but I have no doubt the handsome faces I admire will be competent to govern the land (laughter). At present I am dead to my people. Many of my band are hiding in the woods, paralyzed with terror. Cannot this court send them a pardon? My own children! Perhaps they are starving and outcast, too afraid to show themselves in the big light of day. If the government does not help them before winter, my band will surely perish.
“‘But I have too much confidence in the Great Grandmother to fear that starvation will be allowed to overtake my people. The time will come when the Indians of the North-West will be of much service to the Great Grandmother. I plead again,’ he cried, stretching forth his hands, ‘to you, the chiefs of the white men’s laws, for pity and help to the outcasts of my band!
“‘I have only a few words more to say. Sometimes in the past I have spoken stiffly to the Indian agents, but when I did so it was only to obtain my rights. The North-West belonged to me, but I perhaps will not live to see it again. I ask the court to publish my speech and to scatter it among the white people. It is my defense.
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