{seven} Modern Times

It wasn’t the end of the world . . . but you could see it from there.

JAMES WELCH, The Death of Jim Loney, 1979

What had started as a playful adventure was gradually ratcheting up from whimsy to engagement to full-on obsession. I’d wake in the morning amid the flotsam and jetsam of anxious dreams, wondering what that plane crash or flooded house or lost child was trying to tell me about the Cypress Hills and its ragged histories. What do you want from me? I’d ask the view outside my window. I come from the Peace River Country eight hundred miles from here. Why is it so important for me to listen to all your sad, old, moldy, half-forgotten stories? But in my heart of hearts, I already knew the answer. The stories the hills have to tell are bigger than their pinpoint settings, larger than “X marks the spot” on a map. At different times, in different ways, what happened here also happened everywhere else across the North American plains, from the Llano Estacado to the Grande Prairie. The Cypress Hills are a landscape that connects all the dots and offers its teachings to even the most fretful and unwitting of pilgrims.

Meanwhile, back at Chimney Coulee, nothing much is happening because, these days, nothing ever does. For a place that is so richly endowed with stories, the site has astonishingly little to show for it. If it weren’t for the text on the signboards, you would never guess that people had lived here, and died here, in the recent past. Their graves lie unmarked and undetected; their chapel has been lost. Even the stone chimneys, which stood guard over the abandoned Métis village until 1915, when the last one tumbled down, have entirely disappeared. They were carried away, stone by stone and load after heavy load, by incoming settlers, who (so the local-history book says) used them to pave their patios and to buttress the earthworks of an irrigation dam at Cypress Lake, an hour’s drive to the west.

But the land has never forgotten. When archaeologists conducted test excavations at the site in the mid-1990s (with the assistance of an enthusiastic cadre of local volunteers), they uncovered evidence, in the form of stone tools and fire-cracked rocks, to show that people had frequented Chimney Coulee long before the pemmican trade pushed in. Layered above those early and as-yet-undated occupations lie charred timbers from Cowie’s trading post—just inches below the grass—together with a generous scattering of seed beads, tea wrappers, bone shards, and fragments of fine china. The excavation also yielded a number of fish scales, reminders of a remarkable lake that once lay in the valley, a quarter of a mile downslope, which sent its waters both north to Hudson Bay and south toward the Gulf of Mexico. Now reduced to a coarse hatching of marsh plants, the lake was drained in 1907 during the pioneer-era frenzy of railway construction.

As if these weren’t enough stories for one little clearing to tell, Chimney Coulee guards another source of buried treasure. In 1877, three years after les hivernants took up seasonal residence here, the fabled red coats of the North-West Mounted Police established an outpost a few steps up the hill. A photo taken a couple of years after their arrival features, from back to front, a sky hazed with smoke from a blur of Métis chimneys, a fringe of spruce trees pushing up from the ravine, three low-slung log buildings, and six gents and a dog strung in a rough line across the foreground. Two of the men appear to be hunters, with rifles over their shoulders and small game in hand, but the other four are in full Mountie regalia, complete with either pillbox or Dudley Do-Right hat. (As for the dog, I can only say that it looks like a border collie type, black with a white chest, and shows every sign of being affectionate.)

Although the police were here on and off for the next three years, with a garrison of up to ten men, every surface trace of their presence has vanished. Not far underground, however, the archaeologists found the remains of a log structure where the police post had once stood and, as one might perhaps expect of a bachelor roost, an inordinate number and variety of lost buttons.

To understand what on earth the North-West Mounted Police were doing in a coulee in the middle of nowhere, we have to shift the scene about an hour’s drive to the west, to a site on the West Block, or western upland, of the three plateaus that form the Cypress Hills. Ever since Keith and I first arrived in Eastend, the National Historic Site at Fort Walsh had been on our must-see list, though complications involving tow trucks had at first prevented us from making the trip. With reliable transport, however, the ninety-minute journey proved to be a breeze, as we spun west through Robsart and Consul (reversing the route that had brought us here from Cody way back when) and then headed north, on gravel, through a weirdly silent world.

At first, the land sloped away into nothingness, as open as the sea, but then tawny swells rose up on either side of the road and ushered us into a well-watered valley of surpassing beauty. Are we there yet? we wondered. But no, apparently not, because a sign directed us left, up and around a crazy set of switchbacks and through a dark enclosure of trees, before spitting us out on top in wide open country. We rolled on for another few minutes, marbles on a tabletop, and then tumbled over the edge of the world into a valley that, until the last moment, was completely hidden from sight.

By now, we were well and truly in the outback, yet here was a parking lot with space for tour buses, an elegant visitors’ center, and a paved path that drew the eye to the top of a grassy knoll.

“Come on,” I said, grabbing Keith by the arm. “This is going to be fun.” A few steps up the path, we found ourselves looking out and over a spectacular sunlit valley framed on the far side by a rise of hills scrawled with stands of spruce. In the center of the scene, with those dark slopes as a backdrop, stood an array of white-roofed buildings surrounded by a tall palisade and defended by a circular guard house. Finally, we had made it to Fort Walsh. Although the original establishment is long gone—it was dismantled in 1883, as I subsequently found out—early photos still exist, and I can report that, feature for feature, it looked quite a bit like this. Now, with a Red Ensign fluttering over the barracks and the Canadian maple leaf flying high above the open gates, the fort seemed to be encouraging us to take a sunny walk into the past. What harm could there possibly be in that?

But first, a brief stop at the visitors’ center and a slight change of plans. Fort Walsh could wait, or so said the guy in a Parks Canada uniform who met us at the door, but the bus to a more distant part of the site was ready to go. All aboard. With a wave of the hand, he directed us onto a school bus, and off we went, goodness knew where.

A gravel track led us down into the valley that we had overlooked a few minutes earlier, our bright yellow bug heading directly toward the wooden fortress. “We’ll have you back here in about half an hour, and you can tour the place then,” the driver called out, as he swung past the palisade, across what he called the parade ground, and up a slope on the other side.

“See those ruts?” he said, pointing out his side window as the bus growled up the hill. “That’s what’s left of the old trail from Fort Benton, down in Montana. Everything had to be hauled in that way—oxen, you know, covered wagons, ten miles a day. Even the mail—instructions from Ottawa—used to come in through the States.”

Dutifully, I peer out the window at the faint, grassed-over tracks that snake across the side hill. And then, with a cough and a shudder, the bus heaves itself onto the summit of a flat-topped ridge where the land is sweet with wild roses and softened by a shining wind and dimpled by a multitude of round depressions. In the valley behind us, old Fort Walsh lies rectangular and abrupt. Here, everything is lyrical and connected. I nudge Keith in the seat beside me: Where had the driver said we were going? Something about a massacre? It was hard to believe that this road could lead to anything sinister.

I’m gazing out the window, watching the light play in the grass, when the bus wheezes to a stop and the driver proceeds to answer one of my unasked questions. “Buffalo wallows,” he says, with a broad wave of his hand. “Those hollows in the grass there, they were made by buffalo rolling in the dirt. Protected them from bugs. Must have been a lot of them. Buffalo, I mean.” He pauses and then continues, deadpan. “Bugs, too, come to think of it.”

“And down below—” He gestures toward the front window, and I’m startled to discover that we’re perched on the edge of what looks like a precipice. “Down below there, well, this is a school bus jump, so watch out for the pile of broken buses and bus parts at the bottom.”1

Now that he has our attention, and without missing a beat, he begins to prepare us for what we are about to see. “You have to tell it the way you hear it,” he says, “and this is what I’ve heard.” The story begins in the winter of 1873 (the same year the Métis first settled at Chimney Coulee, I note) when a band of Nakoda people in the Saskatchewan River country were struck by famine. The buffalo had been scarce that winter; by February, none could be found, and the distant refuge of the Cypress Hills seemed to offer the only hope of survival.

The trek across the snow-deep plains was terrible and long. The travelers ate their horses, their dogs and parfleches, made broth from bones dug out of the drifts. No buffalo, no buffalo. A least thirty members of the party died en route of starvation and cold. It wasn’t until the survivors reached the hills that the buffalo reappeared, and a young hunter named Cuwiknak eyaku, or The Man Who Took the Coat, had the honor of making the first kill. Spring found the band camped in the valley down below us, at the confluence of Whitemud Coulee and Battle Creek, recovering their strength, visiting with friends who had shown up to join them, and doing a little trading.

There were two traders in the valley that winter, our driver continued, all trace of jocularity now banished from his voice. Two Americans, Abe Farwell and Moses Solomon, both operating out of Fort Benton and both offering a wide array of goods. “Anything the Indians wanted,” that was their stock in trade: kettles, axes, ammunition, textiles, beads, and, of course, booze. “Whiskey wasn’t the largest part of the trade, but it was the most profitable.” There was money to be made in the illegal sale of firewater.

Liquor had always been part of the fur trade, the matter-of-fact voice went on, though traditionally it had been used in moderation. In the long run, the enterprise had nothing to gain from murder and mayhem. By the 1870s, however, the long run had run out. There was only now, with no tomorrow, and the prospect of a quick buck. This was the situation on May 31, 1873, when a party of wolfers—roughnecks who made their living by lacing buffalo meat with strychnine and skinning the wolves that came to the poisoned bait—rode up to Farwell’s post. They’d been on their way from the aptly named Fort Whoop-up (a center of the whiskey trade in what is now southern Alberta) to Fort Benton, to cash in on their winter’s take of around ten thousand pelts when someone made off with their herd of horses. Had Abe Farwell seen or heard anything about those no-good, horse-thieving Injuns?

Farwell couldn’t help them, but why didn’t the wolfers spend the night, come in and raise a glass? That night and the next morning, almost everybody fell to drinking: the Nakodas, the new arrivals, the two traders and their employees, even some of the Métis teamsters who had been hired to pack out Farwell’s winter trade. The whole place was tipsy, teetering; tempers were on edge. Nothing good could come of this.

Having brought his tale to this point of crisis, our driver falls silent, revs the engine, and rolls the bus over the brink, onto what turns out to be a steep but perfectly serviceable road into the valley. At the bottom, I climb out of the vehicle with trepidation, unsure what to expect, only to find myself beside a crystalline brook, encircled by sunlit hills, in the most benign and picturesque setting one could imagine. Our guide, meanwhile, is intent on continuing his story by showing us the lay of the land. See that willow-fringed meadow, bordered by an arc of the stream? That’s where the Nakodas were camped in their buffalo-hide tipis. The two log buildings on the site, one nearby and the other partially visible through the bushes across the creek, represent the whiskey posts where Messrs. Solomon and Farwell, respectively, conducted their business. And so the scene was set for terror.

The trouble began around noon on June 1, 1873, when one of Farwell’s men got in a drunken tizzy about a “stolen” horse. Although the animal was quickly recovered—it had just wandered off—voices were raised, shots were fired, and things flared from bad to worse. While some of the traders looked on in horror, others (led by two hard-case wolfers, John Evans and Tom Hardwick, who later became a Montana sheriff) rushed out with their repeating rifles to take cover in the bushes and fire into the Nakoda camp. Undone by adulterated drink, armed only with muskets and arrows, the Nakoda were unable to defend their exposed position. “What had looked for a while like a battle,” our guide said quietly, “soon became a horrible massacre.” By day’s end, the violence had claimed the lives of one wolfer (a French-Canadian named Ed LeGrace) and somewhere between fifteen and eighty Nakodas, a variance that obscures the fate of many women, children, infants, and elders.

When the guns finally fell silent, the attackers swarmed the Nakoda campsite, helping themselves to anything of value and setting fire to the rest. In one lodge, they came upon Hunkajuka, or Little Soldier, the chief who, a few weeks earlier, had led his people across the plains to the safety of the hills. One of the wolfers raised his rifle and shot Hunkajuka at point-blank range, while another busily mutilated the corpse of an old man named Wankantu, and yet another rounded up five women and took them captive. That night four of the women were raped repeatedly inside Solomon’s trading post, while the severed head of Wankantu looked mutely down from the top of a lodgepole in the smoldering Nakoda camp.

The fifth woman, a teenager, was spared the same fate as the others through the courage of Horse Guard, Abe Farwell’s seventeen-year-old Crow wife, who marched over to Solomon’s fort, pistol in hand, and demanded the young woman’s release. The rest of the women were held prisoner until morning, when the traders packed up and fled, leaving both posts in flames behind them. As for the Nakoda, many of them headed for Chimney Coulee, at “the end of the mountain,” with what little they had left. There the Métis gave them dogs, kettles, and other goods and treated them with kindness. From there, they went on their sorrowful way, aghast at what they had learned about the bitterness of the white intruders.

I can’t be sure how much of the story I actually absorbed on that first encounter and how much has sunk in over the years, either on return visits to the site or through reading about it. I can’t even be sure exactly what happened after our driver had finished his sorry tale, though I do have a vague recollection of being handed over to a summer student in the red-serge uniform of the North-West Mounted Police, who took us to Farwell’s post and did his best to beguile us with the romance of the Wild West. As I recall, there was something about how the whiskey traders doctored their rotgut by flavoring it with tobacco, coloring it with red ink, and even adding strychnine to give it that extra kick. For the most part, however, whatever it was the good “constable” had to say was wasted on a mind still reeling with gunshots and children’s screams.

Better to go outdoors. Better to see the flash of warblers in the willows, to smell the spicy aroma of sage, to hear the bright gurgle of the creek as it speeds under the footbridge. Better just to be here and try to accept the solace of this land that refuses to let us forget.

So there you have it, the story of the Cypress Hills Massacre in its essentials, though inevitably there’s more to tell. As John Donne almost put it, no story is an island entire of itself; every story is a piece of the continent, a link in an ecology of narrative. For at the same time as chaos was descending on Battle Creek, a separate but ultimately related chain of events was playing out on what might almost have been another planet. Far, far away, across the vastness of the plains and the almost impassible barrier of the Precambrian Shield lay the national capital of Ottawa, and there Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and his grand project of nation building were running into trouble.

One thing had led to another. Building a nation required western settlement; settlement could not proceed without a railroad; the railroad depended on winning elections; winning elections called for funds; funds could be extracted from the fat cats who were competing to build the railroad. Ergo, building a nation meant accepting large sums—some would say bribes—from railway proponents. By the summer of 1873, as the government’s financial misdeeds were exposed, Macdonald’s ambitious plans for western expansion were in serious hot water.

It was in this context that the prime minister learned, two months after the event, of the spasm of violence in the Cypress Hills. Even before this communiqué reached him, Macdonald’s advisers had been pressing him to send an armed force to the plains to establish law and order, keep Native discontent in check, and generally promote the colonization of the country. In fact, Macdonald had already begun to act on this recommendation with the passage, just days before the tragedy in Whitemud Coulee, of an act establishing a paramilitary service to be called the North-West Mounted Police. So far, the force existed only on paper, but news of the Cypress Hills atrocities gave the project a political boost. Americans were spilling over the border, threatening Canada’s claim to the promised land and bringing their gunslinging racial violence with them. It was time for Canada to act.

Within weeks, a force of 150 red-coated recruits had been dispatched to Manitoba, where they were joined by a second contingent a few months later. Although Macdonald resigned in disgrace midway through this deployment and despite a shambolic march across the plains that nearly ended in disaster, the force arrived in southern Alberta late in 1874 and at Fort Walsh the following summer. The whiskey posts were disbanded, and the police, in concert with the Canadian government, proceeded to do their level best to bring the perpetrators of the Cypress Hills Massacre to justice.

By this time, of course, the malefactors (at least half of whom were technically Canadian) had retreated to Montana, where their many supporters rallied vociferously to their defense: The Canadian authorities were deluded. The Indians had to be kept under control. No white man should ever stand trial for killing a savage. The wolfers were “the advance guard of civilization.” Etc. Etc.2 In the end, only three of the accused ever faced charges, and none was convicted. Curiously, however, a rumor spread across the Canadian prairies that the murderers had been severely punished, a belief that burnished the reputation of the red coats and helped them win hearts and minds in the West. Across the line, the U.S. Army was mopping up the last of the “hostiles” and claiming the plains by force. In Canada, the thin ranks of the mounted police were already learning to be more artful.

The last time I returned to the massacre site, that valley of the dead, I came on a very specific mission. Parks Canada had sent a team of archaeologists to reopen and extend an earlier excavation at Farwell’s trading post, and members of the public were encouraged to come and help. I’d never been on a dig before, so I was in a cheery mood as a dozen or so of us assembled at the visitors’ center and climbed on board the bus for the short, dramatic drive up and over the hogback and down its steep face. The dome of the sky was already hazed with heat when we arrived in the valley—it was going to be blistering hot—and I was relieved when my mentor for the day, a pleasant young archaeology student named Tasha, pointed out a patch of shade inside the reconstructed palisade of Farwell’s little fort.

“Here you go,” she said, holding out a knapsack filled with the tools of the trade: an assortment of trowels and brushes, a dustpan, a collection of dental picks, and a stylish pair of pull-on pads to protect my knees. Patiently, master to apprentice, she showed me how to measure out a square of dirt and mark it with string so that if we uncovered anything important (or anything at all) its location could be mapped to the last centimeter. “You do it like this,” she said, as she picked up a trowel, grasped it at a sharp angle, and scraped away a thin film of earth. “The dirt goes into your dustpan and then you dump it into this pail. We’ll run it through a screen later in case we’ve missed anything.”

So scritch scritch scritch, I set to work under her watchful eye. After perhaps half an hour of this hypnotic repetition, I uncovered a precious artifact (“Should I pedestal this?” I asked, trying to sound as if I knew what I was talking about), but alas my prize turned out to be an ordinary pebble. Fifteen minutes afterwards, a bent nail appeared. (“Looks recent,” Tasha said doubtfully, “but I guess we could bag it.”) Lumps of what might have been chinking from a log building surfaced, but it was hard to tell for sure. Then, about two hours and one hand’s width below the surface, my trowel bumped against something solid and came up tinged with soot. “Let me see,” Tasha ordered. “Yes, I think that’s it. That’s a charred floorboard from Fort Farwell.”

All around us, other teams were also hitting pay dirt in the form of buried sill logs, floor joists, and what might have been fallen timbers from the original palisade. Every discovery spoke to the day, 137 years earlier, when the post had been abandoned in the aftermath of slaughter. Yet none of us seemed troubled by this attribution—I know that I wasn’t. Instead, I was having quite a nice time grubbing around in the dirt, chatting with my companion, and enjoying the everyday pleasures of a fine summer morning. Although we were literally in touch with the charred testament of an atrocity, everything that we were doing felt remarkably ordinary.

The boundary between the banal and the momentous is often eerily thin. Kneeling inside Farwell’s post, scraping away at the dirt, I found myself remembering a story that I’d read in one of my new favorite books, Recollections of an Assiniboine Chief. It was written by the late Dan Kennedy, or Ochankugahe, and published in 1972, a year before its author died, in his nineties. Ochankugahe was born sometime in the 1870s, somewhere in the Cypress Hills, and although he did not witness the massacre, he heard about it at first hand from survivors. What he did see with his own eyes, however, were the signs and symptoms of an even larger and more devastating disaster, and whiskey traders like Farwell again figured in the story.

Unlike the pemmican traders at Chimney Coulee, whose main interest had been in acquiring buffalo meat as a source of food, Montana-based operators like Solomon and Farwell were intent on acquiring buffalo hides as a source of leather. As a result of recent technical innovations at a tannery in far-off Pennsylvania, otapanihowin, the peoples’ livelihood, had suddenly been transformed into a source of industrial-strength belting material. Henceforth, for as long as the buffalo lasted, the natural capital of the prairie West would literally be used to power the machines and factories of eastern cities. Like Charlie Chaplin’s horror-struck little tramp, the buffalo were now trapped in the whirring cogs and wheels of modernization.

Out on the plains, the result was butchery of unparalleled rapacity and rage. The hide hunters hit the southern plains en masse in 1871, and by the time their campaign ended, the southern herd had been shattered. The death toll reached a million buffalo per year and counting, buyers sometimes took in 200,000 hides a day, and block-long stacks of reeking hides awaited the east-bound trains. As U.S. Army Colonel Richard Dodge noted from Kansas in 1873, land that had once been home to “myriads of buffalo” was now strewn with “myriads of carcasses.”

“The air was foul with a sickening stench,” he wrote, “and the vast plain, which only a short twelvemonth before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.” 3

Mind you, there could be an upside to this picture, depending on your point of view. For as Colonel Dodge himself once cheerfully remarked, “Every dead buffalo is an Indian gone.” 4 Another army officer made the point even more explicitly: “Only when the Indian becomes absolutely dependent on us for everything,” he said, “will we be able to handle him . . . It seems a more humane thing to kill the buffalo than the Indian, so the buffalo must go.” 5 However regrettable the extermination of the southern herd might be, it had to be understood as a necessary phase in the advancement of settlement and civilization.

Of course, young Ochankugahe, the future Dan Kennedy, didn’t know anything about these distant developments. He was just a little kid growing up in the Cypress Hills, far away from the main field of slaughter. Although the southern herd had been exterminated, buffalo still persisted in significant numbers on the northwestern plains, and his family was able to live and hunt in their traditional way. But one day, without really knowing what he was seeing, Ochankugahe caught a glimpse of the change that was advancing from the south. “I have every reason to remember the event,” Kennedy recollected, but not for the reason that you might expect. What made the day so memorable for him was a skunk bite.6

It was a day like any other. Ochankugahe and his family were traveling with a small hunting party (ten or twelve lodges in all) and stopped by a tree-lined creek to spend the night. “The men were watering and tethering the horses and the women were busy pitching camp,” he recalled, “but we boys were excited over what we saw a short distance away. There were acres and acres of dead buffalo packed closely together, bloated and rotting in the sun.

“We hurried and made a beeline towards the carcasses,” he continued, jumping “from one carcass to another, having the greatest time chasing each other over the hurdles, when suddenly a skunk darted out from one of the carcasses. We gave chase but the skunk beat us to its den. When one boy reached the den, he poked in his arm. I and the others did likewise, but unlike the others, the skunk gave me an unexpected reception. I ran back to camp, howling at the top of my voice, holding my bleeding fingers aloft and wringing them in the air.

“Later that evening as we were eating our supper our elders voiced their indignation and anger at the carnage.

“ ‘It is the work of Play-ku-tay, the white vandals,’ they said.”

Throughout the rest of his childhood Ochankugahe wondered what and whom his elders had meant. Then finally, in 1897, he had a chance to put the question to his friend Major Thomas W. Aspdin, a veteran of the North-West Mounted Police.

“I asked him if he knew who the culprits were who had perpetrated this shameless crime, for which we, the Plains Indians, had to endure untold hardships.

“I told the Major of the winter of 1880–81 at Cypress Hills, when we had to eat our horses to survive, and the winter of 1883–84, when five hundred or six hundred of my people [the Nakoda] starved to death at Wolf Point [Montana] because of the ruthless slaughter of the buffalo by Play-ku-tay.

“He listened attentively to my tragic story and must have sensed the bitterness within my soul. I felt certain that, with his experience as an officer of the North-West Mounted Police Force stationed at Fort Walsh and closely associated with the work of maintaining law and order in the West, he should be qualified to know the answer.

“ ‘Do you know who those buffalo killers were?’ he asked and then told me that the ‘Play-ku-tay’ were sent out by the U.S. Government to starve the Indians into submission.”

Staring at the burned floor of Farwell’s fort, I knew that whatever the merits of Aspdin’s claim, he had glossed over an even more uncomfortable truth. Yes, governments on both sides of the border had been determined to vanquish the buffalo people, to sweep them out of the way. But what had engaged the general population in this project was not a covert conspiracy but the irresistible, amoral pull of what we now call market forces. For the whiskey traders, wolfers, and hide hunters who conducted their business at Farwell’s post, the call to destruction had been banal: another day, another dollar, and the gaudy seductions of “civilization.”