The one real settlement in the whole of the West was that of Fort Garry, extending about 50 miles along the banks of the Red River, and “back from the water, [a]Métis on the Hunting Trail] according to the original grant from the Indians, as far as a person can distinguish a man from a horse on a clear day.” Here lived about 6,000 Métis, all speaking Cree and French, though “governed by a chief named Grant.”
The white folk, about 3,000 in number, were Scottish families, living “in great plenty so far as mere food and clothing are concerned.” Luxuries were “almost unattainable.” There was “no market nearer than St. Paul’s, on the Mississippi River, a distance of nearly 700 miles over a trackless prairie.”
The Scotsmen were genuine farmers—the fathers of western agriculture.
The Métis of that time—well, they had discarded “the practice of scalping,” but otherwise Kane says they differed “in very few respects from the pure Indians.” In fact, when our artist went riding with them after buffalo, the first game they stalked was a party of Sioux Indians, of whom they brought down eight at one volley. “They abandoned the dead bodies to the malice of a small party of Saulteaux, who accompanied them.” These Indian allies immediately “commenced a scalp dance, during which they mutilated the bodies in a most horrible manner. One old woman, who had lost several relatives by the Sioux, rendered herself particularly conspicuous” in this ghastly work.
When they came up with the buffalo, a herd of four or five thousand bulls, the chase continued only about one hour, but at the end of that time five hundred lay dead and dying over an area of five or six square miles. It was calculated, according to Kane, that the Métis alone destroyed 30,000 annually.
Farther west, near Fort Carlton, our traveller found [a]Slaughter of Man and Buffalo] the Indians hunting buffalo in their own way—driving them into an enclosure and then despatching them with spears and arrows. Some of the bowmen were so strong that arrows passed right through the buffalo’s body.
This had been the third herd driven into one pound within ten or twelve days, the disgusted artist says, “and the putrefying carcasses tainted the air all round. The Indians in this manner destroy innumerable buffaloes, apparently for the mere pleasure of the thing. Not one in twenty is used in any way, so that thousands are left to rot where they fall.” Even the wolves, hovering around while the slaughter was going on, could not dispose of such a monstrous feast.
Who can wonder at the disappearance of the buffalo, massacred like that? The Indian might have gone on hunting them on foot with bows and arrows forever without making much difference to the herd; but first came the horse, then the gun, and then the crowd of Métis wanting pemmican to feed white traders as well as themselves—with all these against him, the King of the Plains could not hope to survive. And other calamities besides man overtook him. Between Fort Pitt and Edmonton, Paul Kane saw large herds of buffalo swimming across the Saskatchewan, on their usual spring migration; but he saw also thousands of dead buffalo strewn along the banks—so weakened by disease, or by lack of food, that they were drowned in the attempt to swim the river.
The guns which the Indians got from the white man and used to exterminate their “best friend, the buffalo,” helped them also to exterminate each other. The feud between the Iroquois confederacy and the Hurons in the [a]Blackfoot Raiding Cree] early days of Eastern Canada was no more relentless than the feud between the Blackfoot confederacy and the Crees in the West, even in the reign of Queen Victoria.
Voyaging down the North Saskatchewan one day, below Fort Pitt, Kane says, “we saw a large party of mounted Indians riding furiously towards us.” They proved to be “a war party of Blackfoot Indians, Blood Indians, Sur-cees, Gros Ventres and Paygans—the best mounted, the best looking, the most warlike in appearance, and the best accoutred of any tribe I had ever seen.” But—“we had a Cree Indian in one of our boats, whom we had to stow away under the skins lest he should be discovered.” The warriors were friendly enough to the white men. “They spread a buffalo skin for us to sit down upon, depositing all their knives, guns and bows and arrows on the ground in front of us, in token of amity,” and passed round the pipe of peace. “After our smoke several of the young braves engaged in a horse race, to which sport they are very partial, and at which they bet heavily; they generally ride on those occasions stark naked, without a saddle, and with only a lasso fastened to the lower jaw of the horse.”