Every white man in the country could tell of fights and murders laid to barbarian account. Sixteen years previously fifteen hundred settlers had been butchered in Minnesota by the Sioux. During the spring of 1876—two years before—Custer’s force of eleven hundred men had been wiped out by the Sioux, in Montana. Bands of Sioux had come into the Canadian territory, and had always said they had no quarrel with the children of the Great White Mother. Some had settled near Portage la Prairie, and had behaved very well, on the whole.
When exterminations were so recent, and relatively so near, travellers into the Great Lone Land didn’t feel as safe as if they were in Montreal. There had been one rebellion of Metis at Fort Garry; and Riel and Gabriel Dumont, who ferried the Simpson party across the river a few miles from the present Rosthern, were yet to head a second revolt.
A prophet would have been called a fool if, as the surveyors trailed across the site of the present Rosthern, and the land where the world’s champion wheat has been grown by Segar Wheeler, he had said the elevators there would supply the youngest member of the party with waybills representing over a million bushels of wheat exported in a single season.
During the surveying of Red Pheasant’s reserve, south of Battleford, which is now crossed by the Grand Trunk Pacific branch from Naseby to the old town of Battleford, Shaw was out alone when he saw an Indian on a hill, and flashes of sunlight proceeding from his hand. After a while the Indian was joined by thirteen others, mounted, who brought his horse with them. They were the advance guard of a remarkable company of Sioux, who were visiting as far north from their own Montana, to estimate the prospects of continued happiness in the ancient, unfrontiered hunting grounds. They were not looking for buffalo, for not many were then left on the Canadian prairies, partly because of the reckless slaughter that had gone on everywhere, and partly because Sitting Bull was herding survivors below parallel forty-nine.
The touring Sioux were of the ten thousand who had destroyed Custer’s army two years before, and were using their share of the plunder. The scout’s flash was from a heliograph, and was no doubt informing those who later came up that a lone Paleface was on the rolling plain. The couple of hundred Sioux—who presently camped near Red Pheasant—had United States army wagons, tents, rifles, ammunition—everything that civilization could usefully furnish for such a country. They were a much finer race, physically, than the Crees who were about to be allocated to reserves.
The Sioux visitation had some influence on a situation which carried much anxiety to Governor Laird, as well as a very real danger to all the whites in that part of the country, and also to the whole future of Western Canada.
The half dozen reserves around Battleford having been delimited, the Simpson party started for Edmonton, by way of Frog Lake and Fort Pitt—Frog Lake where nine people were massacred during the second Riel rebellion, still seven years in the future; and Fort Pitt, which, at that perilous time, was precipitately evacuated by Inspector Dickens, son of the novelist. At Fort Pitt the party was ordered back to Battleford. On September 17th a general election had put Sir John Macdonald again in power, and some wise person in Ottawa assumed that favour depended on halting a company of chainmen two thousand miles from the nearest Canadian railway station.
With the rest of the party Shaw spent the winter of 1878-9 at Battleford. It was a winter free from dull care—cold but gay; simple in its furnishings, but abounding in social diversions. Reports came in, though, that it was a winter of want for the Indians, and that trouble might be looked for in the spring, unless a miracle happened to their food supply.
From time immemorial the Indian had been accustomed to an abundance of buffalo meat, limited only by his ability to slaughter it. Sitting Bull’s herding of the buffalo in Montana brought great privation to the Crees and Blackfeet. In the spring of 1879 they assembled at Battleford, demanding assistance from the Canadian Government.