{nine} The Hunger Camp

Our people realized they had lost their land and they scattered all over like little birds.

ISABELLE LITTLE BEAR, granddaughter of Big Bear, in 1958, recalling the early 1880s

A commemorative site like Fort Walsh inevitably has its ghosts, who may be either remembered with pride or prudently kept in the dark, their memory buried in archives or the dust of old books. But an ordinary place is different, and no place on earth could be more ordinary than the puddle on the prairie known as Cypress Lake. Located partway between Fort Walsh and Eastend, it’s an oversized slough that has been “enhanced” by a dam, giving it the bloated outline and mucky, crusted shore of a water impoundment. Hydrologically speaking, the lake is more interesting than it at first appears, since it not only stores spring floodwaters from Battle Creek but also serves as the source of the Frenchman River. All the same, it’s hard to believe that anything of importance could ever have happened here.

If you happen to be in the vicinity, the lake is easy enough to find. It can be reached from either Fort Walsh or Eastend via pavement that gives way to gravel and then dwindles to a rough track before debouching at the optimistically named Cypress Lake Provincial Recreation Site. But if people actually come here to recreate, they clearly don’t come in droves. The site is equipped with an uneven rank of picnic tables (sans picnickers) set under drought-stressed trees, a serviceable wharf and boat dock (sans boaters), and—as an unexpected touch of cheer—a couple of pots of petunias tagged with a wistful request for anyone who happens by to please water them.

The atmosphere is thick with silence, and when you move, you seem to leave ripples in your wake. You might be swimming through quicksilver. And this unearthly mood is not quite broken by the delight of watching butcher birds—rare loggerhead shrikes—plunging from the trees to the ground to catch grasshoppers, which they then stuff, one by one, into the beaks of their insatiable young. The heaviness doesn’t even lift entirely when you gaze across the lake and discover that the bright dots along the far shore, viewed through binoculars, are actually a flotilla of white pelicans, huge and dazzling in the glimmer. Everything that is here carries an echo of something that is not. Trapped between lake and sky, this is a world that has been hollowed out.

That same description could be applied to an old photo I came across one day, on the website of the Canadian national archives in Ottawa. In a sense, it’s a picture of nothing, the same kind of emptiness that you find at Cypress Lake. It might even have been taken there, and I used to think that it was, though after examining it more closely I’m not so certain. In the photo, a featureless sky hangs over a featureless prairie landscape inset with a featureless pond that bleeds out of the picture frame along the right margin. In the foreground, two horses are drinking, hock deep in the water, while nearby, along the shore, two child-sized figures are seated in identical slumped postures. Their faces are turned away from the camera and from one another as well, and each figure appears to be lost in its own small world. Across the center of the image, a scattered line of conical tipis, some distinct, others smudged by distance, extends along the horizon, spanning a low run of hills. By my count, there are more than sixty dwellings in the encampment, with shelter for several hundred souls. How odd that except for the huddled figures in the foreground, no one else is in view. And how disconcerting that some kind of corrosion has set in around the edges of the picture and appears to be creeping toward the center, like an incursion of fungus.

According to the archival records, this photograph shows “Big Bear’s (Cree) Camp, Maple Creek, Saskatchewan” on June 6, 1883, as it was seen through the lens of one George M. Dawson of the Geological Survey of Canada. Just as a matter of interest, it is worth noting that Dawson also deserves credit as the first scientist to discover dinosaur bones in southwestern Saskatchewan and as one of the first to appreciate the stratigraphic importance of the Cypress Hills. In the summer of 1883, however, he was merely passing through, bound from Ottawa via Fort Benton to the Crow’s Nest Pass, on a mission to survey that region’s massive coal deposits. (Settlement could not proceed without a railroad; trains could not run without fuel; it was all part of Macdonald’s transcontinental megaproject.) But it’s a shame Dawson was in such a hurry that summer that he didn’t have time to stop. If he’d ridden into the Cree camp and asked for a cup of tea, he would have encountered the nightmare side of the national dream. Sit back and light your pipe: it’s quite the story.

It is summer 1883. Four years have elapsed since Whitebeard made his first tour of the Canadian North-West, dispensing gifts and promises. Life had been hard before he arrived, and it has been worse ever since. That first fall, 1879, the Métis at Chimney Coulee had enjoyed a reasonable harvest, filling their carts with buffalo hides and pemmican for transport to Fort Qu’Appelle, but it would never happen again. By early winter, grass fires had broken out all along the border, keeping the buffalo south of the line. Some people, including the Canadian authorities, said that the fires had been set by American soldiers under orders to starve out the Lakota “hostiles,” who were still holed up at East End and Wood Mountain. Others pointed a finger at the commercial hide hunters or at the Aboriginal people themselves, whether “British” or American. Worst of all was the possibility that the fires had been an act of nature, or an act of the gods, and that the buffalo people had been forsaken by the powers who had sustained their ancestors.

Then, as if to compound the misery, the weather turned brutally cold. With the backing of the Canadian government, hundreds of people—including Métis families from Chimney Coulee and Cree bands led by Big Bear, Little Pine, and Lucky Man, among others—fled south to the Milk River in Montana to search for buffalo. As many as five thousand other half-starved people huddled at Fort Walsh and in tattered camps around the Cypress Hills, hoping against hope that the Great Mother would keep her word. And so, for a time, she did, sending her red-coated policemen into the cold and storms with rations of flour and beef. When spring finally came, the Queen continued to keep her commitments by doing what she could to help her “red children” make the transition from hunting to agriculture. As soon as the frost was out of the ground, the two farmers who had arrived with Dewdney set to work breaking the land and, with the assistance of Native crews, seeding small fields of grain and vegetables.

Soon, everything was clicking along exactly as Whitebeard had said. When The Man Who Took the Coat requested a reserve for the Nakoda at the westernmost end of the hills, from the summit all the way down onto the plains to the north, his proposal was accepted at once. Within months, an official survey had been completed, and the documents were sent off to Ottawa for an approving rubber stamp. Meanwhile, Cowessess and his people (one of the other bands who had taken treaty during Dewdney’s initial visit) selected land along Maple Creek, north and east of the fort, although in their case, the survey had to be postponed. All over the country, bands were eager to select their lands and start producing crops, and the government surveyor simply could not be everywhere at once. His services were urgently required in the Qu’Appelle Valley and along the North Saskatchewan, where numerous signatories of Treaties 4 and 6 had elected to settle down.

But no need to worry: everything in due course. As soon as the surveyor was freed up, he’d be back not only to look after Cowessess but also to establish reserves for several other leaders—notably the new Treaty 6 chiefs Little Pine and Lucky Man, together with two chiefs from Treaty 4,Piapot (Payepot), or Hole-in-the-Sioux, and Nekaneet, or Foremost Man—all of whom had requested land in the Cypress Hills. Too bad about the delays. Simply unavoidable. New country, blah, blah, blah. But rest assured that, given time, all the t’s would be crossed and i’s dotted, and everything would be arranged.

Meanwhile, on the height of land at the Nakoda reserve, wheat was pushing out of the ground for the first time in history, and the carefully hilled fields of potatoes looked green and promising. For a crazy, fleeting moment, it was almost possible to believe that Dewdney had told the truth and that things would be coming up roses before you knew it.

Disaster struck in late summer, in the form of a killing frost—not entirely exceptional at an altitude of four thousand feet—and Dewdney’s too-easy promises were blighted in a single night. The grain had to be cut for green feed; the potatoes turned to slime in the bin. Although the red coats continued to provide rations, there was never enough to eat. Thus began the terrible winter of 1880–81, when the Nakoda were forced to kill and eat their precious horses to keep from starving.

But even in the face of this setback, the Canadian government kept up its front of good cheer. Quoth Sir John A. Macdonald in his wrap-up report for 1881, “The condition of Indian Affairs in the Territories has, on the whole, been satisfactory during the past year.” 1 In private, however, he and his officials had begun to acknowledge the unpalatable truth: the entire North-West was in crisis. Although ragged groups of buffalo were still occasionally found north of the border, they were walking dead, too few and too far between to sustain even themselves. The only significant herds, while they lasted, were in Montana, around the Missouri and the Milk, mostly on the large but soon-to-be-diminished Indian reservation that flanked the American side of the border. In theory, the Canadian government had obtained emergency permission for “British” Indians and Métis to cross the line and hunt, a concession that, by Dewdney’s estimate, had already saved eastern taxpayers 100,000 bucks. (Bands who were out hunting didn’t have to be rationed.) In practice, however, Montanans were aghast at Washington’s largess and gave the intruders a surly welcome.

Hundreds of blue-coated soldiers—now garrisoned at a massive brick stronghold called Fort Assinniboine, just across the line—kept the intruders under close watch, ready to pounce at the first hint of possible trouble. One day, for instance, members of a hunting party from Big Bear’s camp on the Milk River were butchering sixty buffalo that they’d had the good fortune to kill when a troop of American cavalry, armed with cannons, descended on them, confiscated their horses, and ordered them back to camp. When two of the hunters protested, the soldiers beat them up and left them injured on the ground.

Back in the Cree village, Big Bear and his councilors decided that rather than attempt to retaliate—“Our strength is nothing . . . we are strangers here”—they would send their head chief to Fort Assinniboine on a peace mission. Here is how the meeting went, as recalled in detail by an eyewitness.2

“In peace I come and would speak,” Big Bear told the fort’s commander, through an interpreter.

“Yes, I’m listening,” the tall, thin officer replied curtly.

“I have done no wrong,” Big Bear said. “My people get blamed for everything that happens but we have done nothing. We have come to this land to make our livelihood, to support ourselves.”

“Yes?”

“I come to you today with a good heart, thinking that you will have a touch of sympathy for us, that you will pity us. We are poor and in a bad way. I have come to ask you to give us back our horses.”

The officer did not have to search for an answer. “Obviously you do not understand our laws here,” he retorted. “Plenty of cattle are missing in our country, and we blame you people from Canada . . . If I carried out my orders to the letter of the law, I would take everything you have, not just your horses, but your guns, your lodges, and your clothes, until you would have nothing left.”

“But we have little or nothing now,” Big Bear objected.

“You are thieves from another land,” the officer shouted, “and you should be shot like dogs! If you had behaved yourselves in the first place you would have been treated well and this wouldn’t have happened. You will not get your horses back.”

Here at least was a point on which Big Bear and the Canadian government might have agreed: The Great Father was armed and ornery.

North of the border, the milk of human kindness was drying up as well, not that it had ever been very abundant. Faced with a choice between the barren teat of the Great Mother and the armed embrace of the United States, the Lakota refugees had been brought to the breaking point. As the months of exile crept by with no action, it had become apparent that the Macdonald government meant exactly what it had said and that Canada was prepared to stand by and watch the refugees starve to death. This conclusion was reinforced, in the summer of 1880, when Inspector Walsh was suddenly taken off the case—“Sitting Bull’s Boss” no more—and a hard-line officer was sent in as his replacement. (Walsh had drawn the ire of his superiors by trying to be the hero, getting chummy with Sitting Bull, and generally playing both ends against the middle.)

A few months later, Chief Spotted Eagle and his followers left their camp near the East End police post and headed across the line, where they surrendered their guns, their horses, and their freedom. Sitting Bull held on for one final winter, but by July of 1881, he too had given up, and he and his people turned themselves over to American authorities at Fort Buford. A number of families chose to remain at Wood Mountain, still hoping for a reserve, and their request would be granted, in a token way, after a wait of forty-nine years.

If the Lakota refugees were on their way down and out, Canada’s treaty Indians were supposed to be on their way up, on a fast track toward prosperity and independence. Yet, in the spring of 1881, when Indian Affairs had sent a chief from the Qu’Appelle Valley to Fort Walsh on a mission to persuade people who were receiving rations there to head east and settle on their reserves, things had not gone as planned. Instead of staying on message, the chief had spoken urgently about sickness and hunger in the Qu’Appelle and told everyone to stay where they were. The tension had continued to intensify throughout the summer, as twelve hundred people from the Saskatchewan River country deserted their reserves and fled to the Cypress Hills. The nights throbbed with drum songs, and the atmosphere crackled with bitter stories about shoddy farm equipment, wild oxen, stringy cattle, incompetent instructors, inedible rations—hunger, always hunger—and the blatant inadequacy of the treaties.

The official response was unsympathetic. Yes, there may have been a few glitches, the authorities admitted, but that was no excuse for getting all riled up. Just go home, get back to work, and stop “exciting sedition.” 3 Indians were such awful complainers; you just couldn’t satisfy them. Meanwhile, emergency updates and instructions were crisscrossing the continent in frantic telegrams—Fort Walsh to Dewdney in Winnipeg, Winnipeg to head office, Ottawa to Winnipeg to Fort Walsh—their meaning carefully enshrouded in a secret code. In the absence of an all-Canadian telegraph system, the messages had to be sent by mail to Fort Assinniboine and east via the United States. If the Americans found out what was happening or, worse yet, if the Canadian newspapers were to catch on, there would be no end of hell to pay in Ottawa. Better to keep the trouble hush-hush.

Telegram, Dewdney to Ottawa, July 16, 1881 [reporting from Fort Walsh]: abridge suspicious decayed Jeweler incommoded propitiously Moral Persuasion about explaining Incommoded relax transaction inertness Granulate nutmeg fornication resumes redeemable overturned abrogating Walsh amulet fornication abridged Fergus ottoman unconscionable transaction Inertness zenith be left there to their own resources thwarting articulately nowadays Shears transaction surgery from our pursuing such a course4

Translation, scribbled in pencil, between the lines [reporting from Fort Walsh]: A sumptuous dance is in progress. Moral Persuasion about exhausted in regards to Indians going north for reservations. Recommend our abandoning Walsh altogether for a year or two. The Indians would be left there to their own resources. There are no settlers to suffer from our pursuing such a course.

In the government’s codebook, “Inertness” stood for “Indians,” to be pruned back by “settlers,” or “Shears.” An “unconscionable transaction” remained as unconscionable as ever.

The tension that had been simmering all summer came to a boil that August 1881. By then, there were about 3,300 treaty people congregated in the hills, against a garrison at Fort Walsh of 97 police. The balance tipped even further when Chiefs Little Pine and Lucky Man, with all their followers, came in from the south to receive their annual treaty payments. (The treaties provided for a yearly dispersal of $5 per person, $15 for a councilor, and $25 for a chief, as a reaffirmation of goodwill and the terms for a lasting peace.) As members of the Cree camps in Montana, the newcomers had spent most of the previous two years struggling to support themselves. Now, they joined the struggle to hold the Canadian authorities accountable for their errors and omissions. My people and I will not accept our payments, Little Pine declared, unless our relatives whom the government describes as “half-breeds” are added to the treaty lists and allowed to share in the meager benefits.

The officials at the fort dismissed this idea out of hand, arguing that the Métis had been dealt with back in the 1870s when, after the Riel Rebellion, each adult male had been granted either a half-section of land or an equivalent in “half-breed scrip.” Not so, Chief Little Pine said. These people in the hills had never been given land, and anyone could see that they were in a bad way now. Admit them to the treaties, Little Pine said, or—

Well aware of their precarious position, the police wasted no time in responding to the unspoken threat. A fatigue was immediately ordered to clear out the bastions (which had been used for storing oats) and to build emplacements for the four seven-pound cannons. A field gun soon stared vacantly in each direction, armed and dangerous. Meanwhile, the constables were issued with extra Winchesters and confined to the fort, ready for action at a moment’s notice.

And then the whole protest fizzled even faster than it had blown up. If there is a force stronger than the call of justice, it is the call of clothing, shelter, and food. Buffalo had been sighted just east of the hills. Otapanihowin: Livelihood. In their relief, the hunters set aside their grievances, collected their treaty payments, and prepared to set out for the plains. Drums pounded in jubilation and brightly dressed riders galloped around the parade ground, performing precision maneuvers, swinging under their horses’ necks as if, for the moment, life was worth celebrating again. But the Canadian government was in no mood for partying.

By the end of the summer, the Great Mother had snapped. As embodied by bureaucrats like Edgar Dewdney, she was officially fed up with trying to keep control of the “large numbers of Worthless and lazy Indians” who had been drawn to the Cypress Hills.5 If only the Indians had done as they were told, Dewdney argued, if they had stayed on their reserves and put in an honest day’s work, they would not now be in such a fractious and perilous condition. As for suggestions that the government might be partly to blame for the failure of its Indian policies—well, honestly, such statements hardly deserved a response. Let me tell you, the bureaucrats blustered, what the real problem is: Indians are too primitive and childlike to know what is good for them. It is time for a firm hand to take over, in loco parentis.

What the situation demanded, Dewdney decided, was a complete clear-out of the Cypress Hills. Fort Walsh would be closed at the earliest possible juncture, not just for a year or two but permanently. The farm on Maple Creek would be abandoned—too bad, since it alone of the government’s efforts had proven a success—and past commitments regarding reserves in the hills were hereby suspended. From now on, all efforts were to focus on “persuading” the Indians to accept reserves in the Battleford district or the Qu’Appelle, in accordance with the government’s sense of their tribal affiliations and homelands. To encourage compliance, rations would be withheld from anyone who lingered, except in the most dire of circumstances, when agents were allowed to provide just enough aid to keep people from starving to death. If anyone suffered under these directives, it would be their own fault. “The longer they continue to act against the wishes of the Government,” Dewdney wrote, “the more wretched will they become.” 6

These orders were in violation of the oral and written texts of the treaties, which had promised freedom of movement, an equal say in reserve selection, and kindness in times of urgent need. But what did those flowery old promises matter when Macdonald’s railway was finally a-building and the long-anticipated inrush of settlers was about to be unleashed. The Indians had to be brought into line, whatever the means.

It was under this draconian rule that a hunger camp began to assemble on the shores of Cypress Lake. Piapot and his people were among the first to arrive, in December of 1881, in the twilight of pawacakinasisi-pisîm, the Blizzard Moon. Fortunately, fish could be drawn up from under the ice, and pathetic clusters of bachelor bulls still sometimes wandered by, providing the camp with the means to survive. Every couple of weeks, someone would walk to Fort Walsh and ask for a handful of cartridges, a few fish hooks, or a small ration of flour. “The Indians are certainly doing their best to hunt and gain their own living,” the Indian agent observed.7 Still, when he tried to get them to do chores around the fort in return for his assistance (since it was universally agreed that charity without a return of work would cause irreparable moral harm), he noticed that they were sometimes reluctant to comply. “As a great many had no moccasins and all were poorly clad, it was difficult to get them to go out in the cold,” he reported.8

When spring came, the camp at the lake was enlarged by several hundred additional souls, as the people who had been hunting in Montana again began fleeing north. The American military, tired of playing its lethal game of cat-and-mouse with the “British” intruders, had finally resorted to a full-out assault to get rid of the “foreigners.” Little Pine and Lucky Man arrived at the lake in early April—ayik-pisîm, the Frog Moon—to the dismaying news that they were also being evicted from the Cypress Hills. To compound the injury, the Great Mother, with whom the two returning chiefs had smoked the pipe in treaty less than three years before, was now threatening to starve them into obeying her orders.

By the time Big Bear came into camp a few weeks later, the program of removals was already well advanced. Cowessess and The Man Who Took the Coat were among the first to leave, though both were “very loath to go.” 9 Piapot and his people followed in midsummer. Their six-week journey east to the Qu’Appelle was marred by unfit rations, sickness, and several deaths. One old man was so distressed by the death of his granddaughter that he killed himself en route by thrusting a sharp stick down his esophagus.

At Cypress Lake, meanwhile, the last holdouts from the government’s plans were getting by as best they could. A collective appeal to the fort for help accomplished nothing—the police just rolled out their cannons again—and tangling with the American forces was now out of the question. Perhaps the best option would be to bow to the Great Mother’s wishes, as the other leaders had done. Weeks dragged into months without easy answers, and the children became so exhausted by hunger that they could no longer even cry. Surely, life on one of the government’s reserves could not be worse than this misery. Then, in kaskatinow-pisîm, the Freezing-up Moon of October, Piapot and The Man Who Took the Coat, with their people, straggled back into camp with stories of their horrific experience in the Qu’Appelle, where the ground was littered with the bones of people who had died of smallpox years before. The government had sent them to a place called the Skull Mountainettes to sicken and starve in the land of the dead.

What they wanted, the returnees told the authorities, was what they had always wanted and what had once been promised to them. They wanted to select their reserves and settle in the Cypress Hills. Speaking for the Nakoda, The Man Who Took the Coat explained that he and his people had been brought up in this country and that, for them, the land was filled with stories and ceremony. It held them close to their ancestors, including the relatives and friends who had been lost to the white man’s anger ten years earlier. This was the first time he had refused to do what the Queen wanted, the chief said, but he loved the hills and hoped that the government would not be angry with him. The officers at the fort nodded as if they understood, but they insisted that the government knew best. The people would have to leave the hills or face the consequences.

As another winter closed in, two officials from the North-West Mounted Police—a visiting bureaucrat named Frederick White and the police physician, Dr. Augustus Jukes—were sent out to assess conditions in the Indian camps. White was an old hand in the civil service, with an insider’s knowledge of government ways and means. Although he recognized human extremity when he saw it—“a more wretched half starved camp could not be imagined,” he wrote—he also knew that Mr. Dewdney would receive this news with a measure of satisfaction.10

“Of course they have asked again to have reservations here,” White reported, “and say they may as well starve to death here as on the reservations North and East, but . . . limited rations, absence of game, scarcity of clothing, and the suffering they must endure this winter...will I hope bring them to their senses by next spring.”

Dr. Jukes, by contrast, was stricken by what he observed. “There are now encamped in the immediate vicinity of Fort Walsh, about two thousand Indians,” he informed his superiors, all “literally in a starving condition and destitute of the commonest necessaries of life.

“The disappearance of the Buffalo,” he continued, “has left them not only without food but also without Robes, mocassins and adequate Tents or ‘Teppees’ to shield them from the inclemency of the impending winter. Few of their lodges are of Buffalo hide, the majority being of cotton only, many of these in the most rotten and dilapidated condition, a few consisting only of branches laid upon the lodge poles, a terribly insufficient protection against the wind, frost and snow of the severe winter of this exposed region.

“The absence of . . . an adequate number of lodges to cover so large a number has rendered great overcrowding of these wretched tenements necessary and in all visited by me today the extreme scarcity of robes, blankets or indeed of any other covering for the wretched inmates at night was painfully apparent. Their clothing for the most part was miserable and scanty in the extreme. I saw little children at this inclement season, snow having already fallen, who had scarcely rags to cover them. Of food they possessed little or none.” (The daily ration had fallen to four ounces of flour and two ounces of dried meat, per person, and was grudgingly dispensed.)

“It would indeed be difficult to exaggerate their extreme wretchedness and need or the urgent necessity which exists for some prompt and sufficient provision being made for them by the Government . . . I have no hesitation in declaring my belief that unless speedy and adequate measures are taken to provide these suffering people with the common necessaries of life the result will be disastrous and even appalling.” 11

Wretched. Disastrous. Appalling. Surely those were words to make a person reflect on the frailty of human life. But not the new lieutenant-governor, the Honourable Mr. Dewdney, who pooh-poohed the reports. “It must be recollected,” he advised the prime minister, “that Dr. Jukes has not had much experience with Indians.” 12 To the officer in charge at Fort Walsh, he wrote: “I hope you will impress upon the Indians that they have brought their present helpless condition on themselves.” His sole concession, assented to “with great reluctance,” was to authorize the payment of the annuities that were due to Little Pine, Lucky Man, Piapot, and the other treaty chiefs, so that they might purchase blankets and clothing.13 Big Bear and his people, as non-treaty, would continue to receive nothing.

As the winter deepened and another Blizzard Moon drew near, the agent at Fort Walsh sent an update to his boss. ”The Indians look very bad,” he told Dewdney. “I know they are not getting enough flour but I like to punish them a little. I will have to increase their rations, but not much.” 14 No need for a cipher to keep this news under wraps: the cold heart of the Canadian government was no secret.

A few weeks later, on December 8, 1882, Big Bear entered Fort Walsh and, concerned as ever to do his best for his followers, signed an adhesion to Treaty 6. When the snow lifted the following spring, all the people who had wintered in the hills packed up their pitiful belongings and set out, under armed escort, to their appointed reserves. Piapot and The Man Who Took the Coat were sent back to the Qu’Appelle Valley. Little Pine, Lucky Man, and Big Bear were instructed to go north. By opaskowi-pisîm, July, when the ducks were molting and flightless, the people had been dispersed, and the land around Cypress Lake lay empty and silent.