The windows had been opened, though the door was still shut. It was only a glimpse that the world then got by looking in, but that was enough. “A Paradise of Fertility.”
The Mother country sent out an expedition on its own account. One of its objects was to see if a railway could be built through the Rocky Mountains, as part of a great line on British soil from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That expedition discovered a pass through which the railway was finally built, as we shall see. Its discoverer, James Hector, got a kick from a horse up there, and “Kicking Horse Pass” it has been ever since. At that time, however, Captain Palliser, at the head of the expedition, reported after four years’ work that the railway would cost too much. In 1863 the Red River settlers sent an envoy to England, begging the Imperial Government to connect them with Canada by rail; but even that was too expensive.
The door stayed shut, accordingly. Settlers of the [a]Indian Humanity and Savagery] more adventurous sort dribbled in, by the roundabout route through the States, or coming up by the Lakes. But fur traders and Indians had the prairie and woodlands almost to themselves for another quarter of a century. The Company went on bartering, the braves went on hunting—and for some years fighting, too.
As far back as 1750, Captain Coats had blamed his employers, the Hudson’s Bay Company, for not trying to convert the natives—“leaving such swarms of God’s people in the hands of the divill, unattempted, as well as the other Indians in generall, a docile, inoffensive, good-natured, humane people,”—“as if gorging ourselves with superfluitys was the ultimate condition of this life.”
The Indians may not have been so “humane” as the benevolent captain thought, but, with all their barbarous customs, on the whole they deserved his good opinion. Fighting to kill for revenge, and to prove their own courage, they considered the height of virtue. If food ran short on a journey, they would abandon the aged and sick who could not travel as fast as the rest, for delay would risk the lives of all the band. Yet Paul Kane, after visiting many tribes, declared that their affection for their relatives was very remarkable, particularly for their children. “I may mention,” he says, “the universal custom of Indian mothers eagerly seeking another child, although it may be of an enemy, to replace one of her own whom she may have lost, no matter how many other children she may have. This child is always treated with as great, if not greater, kindness than the rest.”
So far as the Indians were savage, that was all the more reason why they should be taught better. But the [a]Printing from Bullets on Birch Bark] Company was afraid of losing their friendship by interfering with their customs; and we remember how Samuel Hearne was pushed roughly aside when he tried to stop a massacre of the Eskimo. Paul Kane tells of a Saulteaux Indian being hung for shooting a Sioux, in 1845, but that was in the Red River Settlement, which had a judge and a court-house. The fur traders generally turned a blind eye to the savagery of their customers. Alexander Henry, who established a trading post on the Red River at the mouth of the Pembina in 1801, for the North West Company, and made a little garden there, gives this calm account of one day’s incidents: “LeBoeuf stabbed his young wife in the arm. Little Shell almost beat his old mother’s brains out with a club, and there was terrible fighting among them. I sowed garden seed.”
The Christian folk down east and over in Britain, though they knew little of what was going on out here, heard enough to make their consciences uneasy. The churches, one after another, sent missionaries to convert the Indian. The story of their devotion and sacrifice, without hope of earthly reward, would fill many books. Most of the Indians’ education has been carried on by the churches, and still is. Some of these men were as ingenious as they were devoted. There was James Evans, for example. In 1836 he not only invented a phonetic written language for the Crees, but printed it for them, at first melting down bullets to make the type, mixing soot and water for ink, and using birch bark for paper. It was hard work. “Christianity to them seems a Chimera, Religion a design to draw them from the libidinous Pleasures of a lazy life.” So it appeared to an English writer when the Hudson’s Bay Company had [a]How Lacombe Stopped the Fight] just started; and far on in the nineteenth century, though many tribes had been persuaded to exchange their pagan belief for the white man’s creeds, it was difficult—as it still is—to wean them from their haphazard ways to the white man’s standard of persistent industry.
To uproot the Indian’s cherished belief in the virtue of war against a “hereditary foe” and “traditional enemy” was equally difficult—and not at all strange, considering how recent is our own awakening to the folly of that belief.
As I look out on my farm beside the old Edmonton trail, and see the motors whizzing by, I see in imagination hordes of painted Blackfeet riding over this very land to slay the Crees, and hordes of Crees again to scalp the Blackfeet—in my own lifetime, too, though I was too far off to see it.
The little town over yonder, with its churches and banks and stores, preserves the memory of those bloody times in its very name—Lacombe.