On the morning of the second day out from Carlton, the guide showed symptoms of haziness as to direction: he began to bend greatly to the south, and at sunrise he ascended a high hill for the purpose of taking a general survey of the surrounding country. From this hill the eye ranged over a vast extent of landscape, and although the guide failed altogether to correct his course, the hill-top yielded such a glorious view of sun rising from a sea of snow into an ocean of pale green barred with pink and crimson streaks, that I felt well repaid for the trouble of the long ascent. When evening closed around us that day, I found myself alone amidst a wild, weird scene. Far as the eye could reach in front and to the right a boundless, treeless plain stretched into unseen distance; to the left a range of steep hills rose abruptly from the plain; over all the night was coming down. Long before sunset I had noticed a clump of trees many miles ahead, and thought that in this solitary thicket we would make our camp for the night. Hours passed away, and yet the solitary clump seemed as distant as ever--nay, more, it even appeared to grow smaller as I approached it. At last, just at dusk, I drew near the wished for camping-place; but lo! it was nothing but a single bush. My clump had vanished, my camping-place had gone, the mirage had been playing tricks with the little bush and magnifying it into a grove of aspens. When night fell there was no trace of camp or companions, but the snow marks showed that I was still upon the right track. On again for two hours in darkness often it was so dark that it was only by giving the horse his head that he was able to smell out the hoofs of his comrades in the partially covered grass of frozen swamp and moorland. No living thing stirred, save now and then a prairie owl flitting through the gloom added to the sombre desolation of the scene. At last the trail turned suddenly towards a deep ravine to the left. Riding to the edge of this ravine, the welcome glare of a fire glittering through a thick screen of bushes struck my eye. The guide had hopelessly lost his way, and after thirteen hours hard riding we were lucky to find this cosy nook in the tree-sheltered valley. The Saskatchewan was close beside us, and the dark ridges beyond were the Eagle Hills of the Battle River.
Early next forenoon we reached the camp of Crees and the winter post of the Hudson Bay Company some distance above the confluence of the Battle Riverwith the Saskatchewan. A wild scene of confusion followed our entry into the camp; braves and squaws, dogs and papooses crowded round, and it was difficult work to get to the door of the little shanty where the Hudson Bay officer dwelt. Fortunately, there was no small-pox in this crowded camp, although many traces of its effects were to be seen in the seared and disfigured faces around, and in none more than my host, who had been one of the four that had recovered at Carlton. He was a splendid specimen of a half-breed, but his handsome face was awfully marked by the terrible scourge. This assemblage of Crees was under the leadership of Mistawassis, a man of small and slight stature, but whose bravery had often been tested in fight against the Blackfeet. He was a man of quiet and dignified manner, a good listener, a fluent speaker, as much at his ease and as free from restraint as any lord in Christendom. He hears the news I have to tell him through the interpreter, bending his head in assent to every sentence; then he pauses a bit and speaks. "He wishes to know if aught can be done against the Blackfeet; they are troublesome, they are fond of war; he has seen war for many years, and he would wish for peace; it is only the young men, who want scalps and the soft words of the squaws, who desire war." I tell him that "the Great Mother wishes her red children to live at peace; but what is the use? do they not themselves break the peace when it is made, and is not the war as often commenced by the Crees as by the Blackfeet?" He says that "men have told them that the white man was coming to take their lands, that the white braves were coming to the country, and he wished to know if it was true." "If the white braves did come," I replied, "it would be to protect the red man, and to keep peace amongst all. So dear was the red man to the heart of the chief whom the Great Mother had sent, that the sale of all spirits had been stopped in the Indian country, and henceforth, when he saw any trader bringing whisky or fire-water into the camp, he could tell his young men to go and take the fire-water by force from the trader."
"That is good," he repeated twice, "that is good!" but whether this remark of approval had reference to the stoppage of the fire-water or to the prospective seizure of liquor by his braves, I cannot say. Soon after the departure of Mistawassis from the hut, a loud drumming outside was suddenly struck up, and going to the door I found the young men had assembled to dance the dance of welcome in my honour; they drummed and danced in different stages of semi-nudity for some time, and at the termination of the performance I gave an order for tobacco all round. When the dancing-party had departed, a very garrulous Indian presented himself, saying that he had been informed that the Ogima was possessed of some "great medicines," and that he wished to see them. I have almost forgotten to remark that my store of drugs and medicines had under gone considerable delapidation from frost and fast travelling. An examination held at Carlton into the contents of the two cases had revealed a sad state of affairs. Frost had smashed many bottles; powders badly folded up had fetched way in a deplorable manner; tinctures had proved their capability for the work they had to perform by tincturing every thing that came within their reach; hopeless confusion reigned in the department of pills. A few glass-stoppered bottles had indeed resisted the general demoralization; but, for the rest, it really seemed as though blisters, pills, powders, scales, and disinfecting fluids had been wildly bent upon blistering, pilling, powdering, weighing, and disinfecting one another ever since they had left Fort Garry. I deposited at Carlton a considerable quantity of a disinfecting fluid frozen solid, and as highly garnished with pills as the exterior of that condiment known as a chancellor's pudding is resplendent with raisins. Whether this conglomerate really did disinfect the walls of Carlton I cannot state, but from its appearance and general medicinal aspect I should say that no disease, however virulent, had the slightest chance against it. Having repacked the other things as safely as possible into one large box, I still found that I was the possessor of medicine amply sufficient to poison a very large extent of territory, and in particular I had a small leather medicine-chest in which the glass-stoppered bottles had kept intact. This chest I now produced for the benefit of my garrulous friend; one very strong essence of smelling-salts particularly delighted him; the more it burned his nostrils the more he laughed and hugged it, and after a time declared that there could be no doubt whatever as to that article,--for it was a very "great medicine" indeed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
The Red Man--Leave Battle River--The Red Deer Hills--A long Ride--Fort Pitt--The Plague--Hauling by the Tail--A pleasant Companion--An easy Method of Divorce--Reach Edmonton.
EVER, towards the setting sun drifts the flow of Indian migration; ever nearer and nearer to that glorious range of snow-clad peaks which the red man has so aptly named "the Mountains of the Setting Sun." It is a mournful task to trace back through the long list of extinct tribes the history of this migration. Turning over the leaves of books belonging to that "old colonial time" of which Longfellow speaks, we find strange names of Indian tribes now utterly unknown, meetings of council and treaty making with Mohawks and Oneidas and Tuscaroras.
They are gone, and scarcely a trace remains of them. Others have left in lake and mountain-top the record of their names. Erie and Ottawa, Seneca and Cayuga tell of forgotten or almost forgotten nations which a century ago were great and powerful. But never at any time since first the white man was welcomed on the newly-discovered shores of the Western Continent by his red brother, never has such disaster and destruction overtaken these poor wild, wandering sons of nature as at the moment in which we write. Of yore it was the pioneers of France, England, and Spain with whom they had to contend, but now the whole white world is leagued in bitter strife against the Indian. The American and Canadian are only names that hide beneath them the greed of united Europe. Terrible deeds have been wrought out in that western land; terrible heart-sickening deeds of cruelty and rapacious infamy--have been, I say? no, are to this day and hour, and never perhaps more sickening than now in the full blaze of nineteenth-century civilization. If on the long line of the American frontier, from the Gulf of Mexico to the British boundary, a Single life is taken by an Indian, if even a horse or ox be stolen from a settler, the fact is chronicled in scores of-journals throughout the United States, but the reverse of the story we never know. The countless deeds of perfidious robbery, of ruthless murder done by white savages out in these Western wilds never find the light of day. The poor red man has no telegraph, no newspaper, no type, to tell his sufferings and his woes. My God, what a terrible tale could I not tell of these dark deeds done by the white savage against the far nobler red man! From southernmost Texas to most northern Montana there is but one universal remedy for Indian difficulty--kill him. Let no man tell me that such is not the case. I answer, I have heard it hundreds of times: "Never trust a redskin unless he be dead." "Kill every buffalo you see," said a Yankee colonel to me one day in Nebraska; "every buffalo dead is an Indiaan gone;" such things are only trifles. Listen to this cute feat of a Montana trader. A store-keeper in Helena City had some sugar stolen from him. He poisoned the sugar next night and left his door open. In the morning six Indians were found dead outside the town. That was a cute notion, I guess; and yet there are other examples worse than that, but they are too revolting to tell. Never mind; I suppose they have found record somewhere else if not in this world, and in one shape or another they will speak in due time. The Crees are perhaps the only tribe of prairie Indians who have as yet suffered no injustice at the hands of the white man. The land is still theirs, the hunting-rounds remain almost undisturbed; but their days are numbered, and already the echo of the approaching wave of Western immigration is sounding through the solitudes of the Cree country.
It is the same story from the Atlantic to the Pacific. First the White man was the welcome guest, the honoured visitor; then the greedy hunter, the death-dealing vender of fire-water and poison; then the settler and exterminator--every where it has been the same story.
This wild man who first welcomed the new-comer is the only perfect socialist or communist in the world. He holds all things in common with his tribe--the land, the bison, the river, and the moose. He is starving, and the rest of the tribe want food. Well, he kills a moose, and to the last bit the coveted food is shared by all. That war-party has taken one hundred horses in the last raid into Blackfoot or Peagin territory; well, the whole tribe are free to help themselves to the best and fleetest steeds before the captors will touch one out of the band. There is but a scrap of beaver, a thin rabbit, or a bit of sturgeon in the lodge; a stranger comes, and he is hungry; give him his share and let him be first served and best attended to. If one child starves in an Indian camp you may know that in every lodge scarcity is universal and that every stomach is hungry. Poor, poor fellow! his virtues are all his own; crimes he may have, and plenty, but his noble traits spring from no book-learning, from no school-craft, from the preaching of no pulpit; they come from the instinct of good which the Great Spirit has taught him; they are the whisperings from that lost world whose glorious shores beyond the Mountains of the Setting Sun are the long dream of his life. The most curious anomaly among the race of man, the red man of America, is passing away beneath our eyes into the infinite solitude. The possession of the same noble qualities which we affect to reverence among our nations makes us kill him. If he would be as the African or the Asiatic it would be all right for him; if he would be our slave he might live, but as he won't be that, won't toil and delve and hew for us, and will persist in hunting, fishing, and roaming over the beautiful prairie land which the Great Spirit gave him; in a word, since he will be free we kill him. Why do I call this wild child the great anomaly of the human race? I will tell you. Alone amongst savage tribes he has learnt the lesson which the great mother Nature teaches to her sons through the voices of the night, the forest, and the solitude. This river, this mountain, this measureless meadow speak to him in a language of their own. Dwelling with them, he learns their varied tongues, and his speech becomes the echo of the beauty that lies spread around him. Every name for lake or river, for mountain or meadow, has its peculiar significance, and to tell the Indian title of such things is generally to tell the nature of them also. Ossian never spoke with the voice of the mist-shrouded mountain or the wave-beat shores of the isles more thoroughly than does this chief of the Blackfeet or the Sioux speak the voices of the things of earth and air amidst which his wild life is cast.