Bitter experience says it is most likely that centuries had passed without these endless miles of grass having seen any humans at all during winter. It was the mid-eighteenth century before Plains tribes, many of whom had had guns for a hundred years, acquired horses, which made it possible to go some distance from camp to obtain water or firewood. Yet I have found, as have other residents of the drier areas, stone circles and cairns, tools and points far from creeks or reliable water sources such as natural springs, which surely indicate that despite the drawbacks, people came and stayed long enough to leave behind traces, some not merely utilitarian, but whose true purpose is unknown, at least to non-Natives.
We do know that Plains people hunted buffalo, great herds of which grazed on the open plains most of the year, probably trekking south and into wooded territory for the winter months. With their guns and horses, buffalo jumps and occasional buffalo pounds, Plains people mastered the art of hunting and buffalo became not only their primary food source but were sought for their hides and put to numerous other uses. Every inch of this area must have been ridden over by buffalo-hunting Plains people, and it must have been very familiar to any number of Native hunting bands who camped here.
Although in the years since I was a student more and more scholars have begun the difficult study of the movements, alliances, life—the history—of pre-treaty Amerindian Nations, I found that the information being published is still in a form that is more than a little confusing to any but the most determined scholar. Never one to do more research than I could avoid, and four hundred kilometers from the nearest university library, I wanted nonetheless to know badly enough why there were no Native people here beyond that one small reserve in the Hills to pursue the answer. Somewhere I had heard this was Blackfoot land which, given the evidence of the reserve, puzzled me. I wanted to know what was correct, thinking that there would be one simple answer.
The first place I looked was to the great period of exploration of what is today the Prairie provinces. I found that no Europeans—at least none who left a record—traveled through the true southwest corner of this province before the mid-nineteenth century. For the most part, the early explorers followed the river systems and there was no major river south of the Saskatchewan, or the Bad River, as Peter Fidler, the first European trader-explorer to follow the South Saskatchewan in 1800 all the way west into what would become Alberta, sometimes refers to it. Henry Kelsey in 1690 and Anthony Henday in 1754, both traveling for the British Hudson’s Bay Company, came the farthest south of the North Saskatchewan River, but neither came as far as the south branch. Even Peter Fidler hadn’t dipped down south of the Cypress Hills. But there were other reasons besides the lack of river systems for the lack of exploration.
I had thought the Cree and Blackfoot were enemies, but John Milloy in The Plains Cree: Trade, Diplomacy and War, 1790 to 1870 cites evidence that there was a peaceful collaboration between them from about 1730 to about 1806 during which time they succeeded in driving south the Snake or Shoshoni people. After that there were short periods of truce, none of which lasted.
Peter Fidler’s “Chesterfield House Journal,” an account of the two winters (1800–02) he spent trading at the junction of the Red Deer and South Saskatchewan just north of the present-day town of Leader, about 175 kilometers northwest of Eastend, indicate no Cree presence, a friendly Blackfoot presence, and a danger so omnipresent from the Fall or Gros Ventre people that Fidler and his men abandoned their post in the spring of 1802, never having dared to go south of the Cypress Hills. According to Milloy, by circa 1850 the Gros Ventre had been pushed south of the Milk River into Montana too, and presumably were no longer a factor within the Palliser Triangle.
John Bennett of Washington University, in the 1960s, began a longitudinal socioeconomic study of the area centered on Maple Creek, which he calls “Jasper”, a town seventy kilometers northwest of Eastend. In Northern Plainsmen, he offers what was the standard interpretation of the situation in the Cypress Hills area leading up to and just before the arrival of settlers:
As this happened [as some of the Woodland Crees moved out onto the plains in search of furs for trading], a kind of no-man’s land developed between the Plains Cree and the other tribes to the east and south; the Cypress Hills and the Jasper region were in the heart of this zone. The Blackfoot eventually dominated the area, maintaining garrisons in or near the Hills in order to keep other Indians from permanent habitation. The presence of grizzly bears in the Hills also discouraged Indian occupance. The Hudson’s Bay Company more or less collaborated in this policy, since they were anxious to maintain the bison herds, to ensure the supply of bison meat (in the form of pemmican) for the posts, and to make profitable sales of guns and other articles to the Indians who did the hunting and trading.
By the early part of the nineteenth century the situation had developed into a stable military frontier, with the Cree and their occasional allies, the Assiniboine, raiding the Blackfoot but generally fleeing before the implacable Blackfoot could retaliate in force. But the no-man’s land policy held, and the long delay of white settlement of the region was due to Blackfoot hostility and the collaborative desire of the Company to keep whites out.
John Palliser’s accounts of his expeditions across the southern prairie from 1857 to 1859 bear this out. They reveal that although he was making plans to go farther south into the Cypress Hills proper, he was strongly advised by experienced members of his party that because of the Blackfoot whose territory it now was, it would be far too dangerous, and that if he persisted in his intentions, most of his party would desert him rather than go along. Palliser abandoned the idea and, except for a quick run on horseback down to the border and back on the Alberta side of the Hills by two of his men, Palliser and the rest of his party never saw the country south of the Hills either.
Between 1850 and 1865 the southern plains were relatively peaceful. But by the latter date the buffalo were disappearing and those remaining were retreating farther and farther to the west into Blackfoot lands. The Cree, desperate for their food supply, had no choice but to follow them into enemy territory. Milloy describes a party of Cree men in 1868 as having gone to the Cypress Hills, “one hundred and fifty miles inside Blackfoot territory,” which would place the division of territory by the two nations at a line running north-south somewhere between Moose Jaw and Swift Current.
Many skirmishes and deaths were the result. A famous Cree leader, Maskepetoon, was killed by the Blackfoot during a battle in 1869 and this escalated the conflicts into a Blackfoot-Cree war all along the border between the two nations. Often their battles must have taken place in the very land where I live and walk, and that today is emptied of Native people.
In the fall of 1870 between six and eight hundred Cree and Assiniboine warriors—often the two nations are spoken of as if they were all Cree, since they often acted together, despite the fact that they spoke different languages—from all over what would become the province of Saskatchewan advanced all the way west through Blackfoot territory to the junction of the Oldman and St. Mary’s rivers, near Lethbridge in present-day Alberta, where they were defeated in battle once and for all by the Blackfoot Confederacy. But by then there were almost no buffalo left in Cree territory—Bennett dates this as 1877 in the Cypress Hills area—and despite having defeated them, the Blackfoot began to allow the Cree to hunt in their lands. Thus, this territory where I live, once exclusively Blackfoot, became also Cree.
Fourteen years after Palliser’s last Saskatchewan expedition, and two years after that decisive battle near Lethbridge, Isaac Cowie was sent to the extreme east end of the Cypress Hills—that is, in the Hills just outside of what is today the town of Eastend—to establish a fur-trading post for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Today called Chimney Coulee, it had been a wintering place for the Métis, and doubtless before that for whatever Natives might have been passing through, hunting. Cowie was apparently the first European to come this far south, and he spent the wi
nter there trading profitably with the Métis, Assiniboine and Cree, but not the Blackfoot, the very people the Company had hoped to lure into trade.
By spring he no longer felt it was safe to stay and he and a companion rode out from the post just ahead of a party of Blackfoot who shot the nine Assiniboine who had stayed behind to forage. The Blackfoot then burned the post to the ground. Isaac Cowie and his companion, Birston, heard the shots and saw the smoke from the burning buildings spiraling into the sky as they reached the plain below. Chimney Coulee is about ten miles from where I sit writing this, and from our northwest window I can see Anxiety Butte, the high point above it, on the ranch of a friend.
It was true then that southwest Saskatchewan had been the homeland of identifiable Native people, the evidence of which I saw everywhere I looked. All the more eerie and disturbing then to walk the streets of the towns and, except for Maple Creek, not see a Native face. And I still didn’t know why. I decided it was time to look to the treaties.
There I found that the boundary of Treaty Number Four (1874), with the Cree and Saulteaux, or Ojibwa, included all of the area where I live, and also the Cypress Hills proper. Treaty Number Seven signed in 1877 with the Blackfoot, Blood, Piegan, Sarcee and Stony (Assiniboine)—the latter had to be negotiated with separately since they spoke a different language than the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy—describes its eastern boundary as “west of the Cypress Hills, or Treaty Number Four.” Despite this, Olive Dickason, in her authoritative Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from the Earliest Times, in her map of treaty boundaries, draws a dotted line around the highest part of the Hills, indicating that the boundary is uncertain. I thought that since this area was covered by treaties, there ought to be reserve lands designated within the area, and I spent some time trying but failing to find the papers which would show precisely where they were.
But then I found a paper by historian John Tobias called, ominously, “Canada’s Subjugation of the Plains Cree, 1879–1885,” I found a partial answer to the question why, after centuries of Natives living in and crossing this land, there is now only one small reserve of around three thousand acres, populated by about two hundred mostly Cree and some Assiniboine people, in the Cypress Hills area.
In a nutshell, when the buffalo disappeared in the late 1870s the Plains people were starving, and they massed together in the Cypress Hills area where there had always been game in the past, and where there was Fort Walsh, a North-West Mounted Police post, an agency of the government, and officials with whom to negotiate for land and from whom food, in the meantime, might be obtained. By this time more than half of the Native population of treaties Four and Six, chiefly Cree, was present in the Hills, a situation which alarmed both police and any other resident Europeans present. In 1876 Chief Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa Sioux had crossed the border with four thousand followers immediately after the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Although it was a temporary situation, this move further alarmed authorities. With so many Native people massed together in one area, the possibility of an Indian confederacy and then an Indian war loomed large in their imaginations. (In fact, the leaders of the Cree nation, Sitting Bull leading the Dakotas, and Crowfoot of the Blackfoot Confederacy did try to establish an alliance, but weren’t able to come to an accord.)
For the most part, the Cree leaders had refused to take treaty, and the newly appointed Indian commissioner, Edgar Dewdney, saw in the starving people his chance to force them to do so. He ordered that rations be given only to those who had taken treaty. When the leaders then requested contiguous reserves in the Cypress Hills area, which would have resulted in nearly all of southwest Saskatchewan becoming Indian territory, Dewdney refused and ordered that all Native people must move out of the Cypress Hills area and onto reserves either at Qu’Appelle to the east or north of the South Saskatchewan River. Rations would be refused to anyone who remained. To ensure that no Natives would remain, in 1883 he ordered the closure of Fort Walsh so that there was no place in the area for Natives to obtain rations. Everyone, or nearly everyone, gave in, signed a treaty if they hadn’t already, and left southwest Saskatchewan.
A small band under the leadership of Cree Chief Nekaneet remained behind in the Hills after the rest of their people had gone, living southeast of Maple Creek, presumably where the reserve is today. Neil John MacLeod, in an unpublished manuscript called “The Indian Agent,” says that “they steadily refused to accept [benefits of treaty] and were a most independent people…” In 1913, according to the local history book, the local people signed a petition to the government requesting a reserve for these people, the result of which was a grant of 1,440 acres, which, in about 1940, was extended to include a further two and a half sections. It was not until the mid-seventies, the local history book says, that the group received—or accepted, depending on who tells the story—treaty rights. Their land became known as the Nekaneet reserve, after the one tenacious chief who had refused to be driven out. This ignominious and dishonorable history, all too commonplace as it is on both sides of the border with regard to the treatment of Native people by Europeans, came to a sort of conclusion in 1992 when the people of Nekaneet negotiated a land-claims agreement in which they at last gained the right and the funds to purchase a large tract of land in their beloved Cypress Hills.
I had learned that since the beginning of the seventeenth century and the first contact with Europeans who recorded what they saw this area had been at one time or another under the sway of the Gros Ventre, the Blackfoot, the Cree and the Assiniboine, not to mention, in the most southwesterly corner, for a brief time, the Shoshoni, that in the end, had it not been for the desperation of the people so that they signed treaties agreeing to leave the Cypress Hills area, my neighbors might have been Cree and/or Blackfoot; in fact, it is possible that these lands might never have been opened for settlement at all.
The little red sandstone scraper the writer and I had found in the grass had been made by someone; someone, whether Blackfoot or Cree, Assiniboine or Gros Ventre, or someone long before the existence of these nations, someone had chipped out that sharp edge and used it to scrape clean a buffalo or deer or rabbit skin. Holding the scraper in the palm of my hand, I tried to feel the presence of the other, a woman, I thought, who had used the tool. The way it matched the curve of my palm, the weight and balance of it so perfect for the work it was designed to do, its unexpected beauty, the unknown one who had used it, the mystery of the daily fabric of her life, drew me to it. Who was she? When had she lived? Who were her people? From where had they come?
Day after hot summer day I walked by myself in the dry, yellow grass, bent, looking down. Sometimes, coming upon a circle, I stooped and put my hands on two of the stones, feeling their coolness or their warmth. Someone had laid them just so—how long ago? A hundred years, when the buffalo were disappearing and the people were starving? On their way back from their fruitless search in Montana did they pause here and offer prayers to the four directions and lay these stones carefully, a modest tribute in all those miles of unmarked grass to say, Here we stopped; here we offered prayers. Let everyone who passes know this was so. Or perhaps the circles marked places where the powers of the land gave a good dreamer a dream, or a vision was granted someone. Or was it a thousand years ago? Or two thousand? Or nine thousand?
Stone markings in the grass; stone, the only available material, one that would withstand the summer fire and the winter sorrow; stone, formed when the earth was formed, older even than the ancient race who lifted it and made of it small homage to their gods. I pondered what I saw: the miles of yellow grass, the unimaginable depth of the sky, the unbroken solitude that was a constant possibility.
One day, as I wandered alone and on foot in a ten-section field, that is, a field of over six thousand acres, something strange happened. I had been driven out of the house by a jitteriness, an unnamed and inexplicable unease that prevented me from working or even from sitting still. As I wandered,
instead of fading as was usually the case, the uncomfortable sense of need—but for what?—grew stronger. It seemed to me that I was out there for a purpose, that there was a place I was supposed to be, or that something was going to happen. I had no idea where or why or what, but the sensation was too strong to be ignored, or I had learned enough by then to know ignoring it as we have all been trained to do would be a kind of willful madness. I was free to follow it, free in time and in the circumstances of my life, and so I did.
I had no experience with whatever was happening to me any more than anyone else would have had. I bent all my efforts to follow this powerful sense of being drawn to something. Concentrating hard I realized that I had a sense that it was not my brain but my gut—my solar plexus area and my abdomen—that seemed best able to respond to this call.
I climbed a hill—I remember feeling puzzled and uncomfortable—looked around, and knew this wasn’t what I was looking for. I went on another quarter mile or more and climbed another high ridge and looked around. But no, this wasn’t the place either. When glaciers scraped down this countryside they left behind in some places scatterings of small rocks, in others none at all, and very occasionally a boulder called an erratic. These rocks, focal points in the landscape, had been used for centuries as buffalo rubbing stones and after the demise of the buffalo by cattle in a landscape otherwise bare of objects on which to scratch an itch or chase away insects. Somehow, I began to know that I was looking for one of these rocks.
I went farther down a ridge and saw a boulder in the distance, but I knew somehow that wasn’t the right one. I saw another, but no, that wasn’t it either. By this time in my life I was committed to the pursuit of these strange notions, even as I fully recognized them as peculiar. One part of me struggled to subdue doubt: what did I have to lose; maybe I was about to learn something that mattered about the world; I had spent too much of my life denying what I felt; I would not do that anymore. One part doubted, laughed at my foolishness; another part went on with certainty, serenely following what seemed to that part at least to be a genuine call from something other than myself.
Perfection of the Morning Page 13
