The Great Lone Land / A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America

by Sir William Francis Butler

After this little revelation concerning Battenotte and his habiliments, I must admit that I was not quite as ready to look with pleasure upon his performance of the duties of cook, chambermaid, and general valet as I had been in the earlier stage of our acquaintance; but a little reflection made the hole thing right again, convincing one of the fact that travelling, like misery, "makes one acquainted with strange bedfellows," and that luck has more to do with our lives than we are wont to admit. After leaving Saddle Lake we entered a very rich and beautiful country, completely clear of snow and covered deep in grass and vetches. We travelled hard, and reached at nightfall a thick wood of pines and spruce-trees, in which we made a cosy camp. I had brought with me a bottle of old brandy from Red River in case of illness, and on this evening, not feeling all right, I drew the cork while the Cree was away with the horses, and drank a little with my companion. Before we had quite finished, the Cree returned to camp, and at once declared that he smelt grog. He became very lively at this discovery. We had taken the precaution to rinse out the cup that had held the spirit, but he nevertheless commenced a series of brewing which appeared to give him infinite satisfaction. Two or three times did he fill the empty cup with water and drain it to the bottom, laughing and rolling his head each time with delight, and in order to be sure that he had got the right one he proceeded in the same manner with every cup we possessed; then he confided to Battenotte that he had not tasted grog for a long time before, the last occasion being one on which he had divested himself of his shirt and buffalo robe, in other words, gone naked, in order to obtain the coveted fire-water.

The weather had now become beautifully mild, and on the 23rd of November the thermometer did not show even one degree of frost. As we approached the neighbourhood of the White Earth River the aspect of the country became very striking: groves of spruce and pine crowned the ridges; rich, well-watered valleys lay between, deep in the long white grass of the autumn. The track wound in and out through groves and wooded declivities, and all nature looked bright and beautiful. Some of the ascents from the river bottoms were so steep that the united efforts of Battenotte and the Cree were powerless to induce Rouge or Noir, or even Jean l'Hcreux, to draw the cart to the summit. But the Cree was equal to the occasion. With a piece of shanganappi he fastened L'Hereux's tail to the shafts of the cart-shafts which had already between them the redoubted Noir. This new method of harnessing had a marked effect upon L'Hereux; he strained and hauled with a persistency and vigour which I feared must prove fatal to the permanency of his tail in that portion of his body in which nature had located it, but happily such was not the case, and by the united efforts of all parties the summit was reached.

I only remained one day at Victoria, and the 25th of November found me again en route for Edmonton. Our Cree had, however, disappeared. One night when he was eating his supper with his scalping-knife--a knife, by the way, with which he had taken, he informed us, three Black feet scalps --I asked him why he had come away with us from Battle River. Because he wanted to get rid of his wife, of whom he was tired, he replied. He had come off without saying any thing to her. "And what will happen to the wife?" I asked. "Oh, she will marry another brave when she finds me gone," he answered, laughing at the idea. I did not enter into the previous domestic events which had led to this separation, but I presume they were of a nature similar to those which are not altogether unknown in more civilized society, and I make no hesitation in offering to our legislators the example of my friend the Cree as tending to simplify the solution, or rather the dissolution, of that knotty point, the separation of couples who, for reasons best known to themselves, have ceased to love. Whether it was that the Cree found in Victoria a lady suitad to his fancy, or whether he had heard of a war-party against the Sircies, I cannot say, but he vanished during the night of our stay in the fort, and we saw him no more.

As we journeyed on towards Edmonton the country maintained its rich and beautiful appearance, and the weather continued fine and mild. Every where nature had written in unmistakable characters the story of the fertility of the soil over which we rode--every where the eye looked upon panoramas filled with the beauty of lake and winding river, and grassy slope and undulating woodland. The whole face of the country was indeed one vast park. For two days we passed through this beautiful land,-and on the evening of the 28th November drew near to Edmonton. My party had been increased by the presence of two gentlemen from Victoria, a Wesleyan minister and the Hudson Bay official in charge of the Company's post at that place. Both of these gentlemen had resided long in the Upper Saskatchewan, and were intimately acquainted with the tribes who inhabit The vast territory from the Rocky Mountains to Carlton House. It was late in the evening, just one month after I had started from the banks of the Red River, that I approached the high palisades of Edmonton. As one who looks back at evening from the summit of some lofty ridge over the long track which he has followed since the morning, so now did my mind travel back over the immense distance through which I had ridden in twenty-two days of actual travel and in thirty-three of the entire journey-that distance could not have been less than 1000 miles; and as each camp scene rose again before me, with its surrounding of snow and storm-swept prairie and lonely clump of aspens, it seemed as though something like infinite space stretched between me and that far-away land which one word alone can picture, that one word in which so many others centre--Home.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Edmonton--The Ruffian Tahakooch--French Missionaries--Westward still--A beautiful Land--The Blackfeet-Horses--A "Bellox" Soldier--A Blackfoot Speech--The Indian Land--First Sight of the Rocky Mountains--The Mountain House--The Mountain Assineboines--An Indian Trade--M. la Combe--Fire-water--A Night Assault.

EDMONTON, the head-quarters of the Hudson Bay Company's Saskatchewan trade, and the residence of a chief factor of the corporation, is a large five-sided fort with the usual flanking bastions and high stockades. It has within these stockades many commodious and well-built wooden houses, and differs in the cleanliness and order of its arrangements from the general run of trading forts in the Indian country. It stands on a high level bank 100 feet above the Saskatchewan River, which rolls below in a broad majestic stream, 300 yards in width. Farming operations, boat-building, and flour-milling are carried on extensively at the fort, and a blacksmith's forge is also kept going. My business with the officer in charge of Edmonton was soon concluded. It principally consisted in conferring upon him, by commission, the same high judicial functions which I have already observed had been entrusted to me before setting out for the Indian territories. There was one very serious drawback, however, to the possession of magisterial or other authority in the Saskatchewan, in as much as there existed no means whatever of putting that authority into force.

The Lord High Chancellor of England, together with the Master of the Rolls and the twenty-four judges of different degrees, would be perfectly useless if placed in the Saskatchewan to put in execution the authority of the law. The Crees, Blackfeet, Peagins, and Sircies would doubtless have come to the conclusion that these high judicial functionaries were "very great medicines;" but beyond that conclusion, which they would have drawn more from the remarkable costume and head-gear worn by those exponents of the law than from the possession of any legal acumen, much would not have been attained. These considerations somewhat mollified the feelings of disappointment with which I now found myself face to face with the most desperate set of criminals, while I was utterly unable to enforce against them the majesty of my commission.

First, there was the notorious Tahakooch-murderer, robber, and general scoundrel of deepest dye; then there was the sister of the above, a maiden of some twenty summers, who had also perpetrated the murder of two Black foot children close to Edmonton; then there was a youthful French half-breed who had killed his uncle at the settlement of Grand Lac, nine miles to the north-west; and, finally, there was my dinner companion at Saddle Lake, whose crime I only became aware of after I had left that locality. But this Tahakooch was a ruffian too desperate. Here was one of his murderous acts. A short time previous to my arrival two Sircies came to Edmonton. Tahakooch and two of his brothers were camped near the fort. Tahakooch professed friendship for the Sircies, and they went to his lodge. After a few days had passed the Sircies thought it was time to return to their tribe. Rumour said that the charms of the sister of Tahakooch had captivated either one or both of them, and that she had not been insensible to their admiration. Be this as it may, it was time to go; and so they prepared for the journey. An Indian will travel by night as readily as by day, and it was night when these men left the tent of Tahakooch.