10
The Test of Winter

Winter in the north country was a brutal test of endurance and survival. Algonquian peoples had developed a way of life that was finely adapted for dealing with those hard months. Everything from their material culture to their diet and metabolism conformed to the rhythms of the northern winter. Their pared-down social structure was specifically tailored to get them through it. But, well adapted as Algonquian peoples were to the harsh conditions, individuals and families still had little leeway in the event of accidents. The line between survival and death was very fine. If a wigwam burned down and a family was left without shelter, it might perish in a single night. A hunter who got his clothes wet could succumb to hypothermia in a matter of minutes. The loss of a subsistence group’s hunter might lead to starvation for the whole group.

The fur trade may have affected the Indians’ odds of survival through the winter. The trading posts functioned as emergency shelters. They were fixed points where people could go for assistance when they found themselves in dire straits. Moreover, the fur trade introduced new goods and technology that made it easier for Indian peoples to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves. The contrary view is that the fur trade made winter survival more problematic, as the hunt for furs diverted energy away from the basic hunt for food. Moreover, as the decades passed, the commercialization of hunting led to overharvesting of various resources, including vital food resources. Thus, by disrupting aboriginal patterns, the fur trade weakened the Indians’ safety net and left them more vulnerable to starvation, despite what the trading posts offered by way of emergency assistance.

The latter view presents something of a paradox, for it suggests that Indians, by participating in the fur trade, acted in ways that were counter to their own best interests. As historian Calvin Martin stated so provocatively more than thirty years ago in Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade, “What we are confronting is a monumental case of improvidence. It is difficult to imagine how an individual whose subsistence economy was underpinned by a reliance upon fish, game, wild plant foods, and in some cases, cultivated plants could have been so oblivious to wildlife population dynamics as not to see that his present course of hunting was far too exploitative.”¹ Martin goes on to suggest that Indians acted as they did because they somehow came to blame wildlife for the devastating epidemics that raged through the Indian population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When Indians took part in wildlife overkill, according to Martin, it was in retaliation for the animals’ betrayal of the sacred trust relationship between humans and animals.

While Martin’s thesis met with considerable skepticism, it served to heighten historians’ debate about how Indians fared in the fur trade. Other studies have taken the same general view as Martin did—that Indian participation in the fur trade led to an overall decline in the Indians’ well-being—but they explain this seeming paradox in more nuanced terms. Because of the fur trade, hunting territories became smaller and more localized as each hunter concentrated on killing fur-bearing animals and transporting the furs to the nearest trading post. As the hunter operated within a smaller geographic area, he was deprived of access to multiple ecological niches and a wide array of other food resources. This narrowing of the subsistence base carried serious risks. Instances of starvation became more common, not just as a result of overharvesting of certain animal species, but because hunting territories grew smaller. Changes in the spatial geography of hunting territories were accompanied by changes in the social geography of the various bands and even the Indian culture itself. When subsistence groups confined their movement to smaller territories, it had an atomizing effect for the culture, reducing the amount of sharing and mutual assistance between groups. Indians who specialized in hunting beaver for white traders had less incentive to engage in resource-sharing with their kinsmen. The fur trade tended to discourage reciprocity and to promote economic behavior based on Christian/capitalist ethics of productivity and the accumulation of wealth through trade.²

Tanner’s experiences do not necessarily support one historical interpretation or the other. To ponder whether Tanner’s family would have been better off in the absence of the fur trade does not really make sense, since the family had migrated to the northern prairie largely to hunt beaver and participate in the fur trade in the first place. What Tanner’s experiences do reveal is how one Ottawa family became attached to the fur trade in ways both good and bad for its own welfare.

The winter of 1798–99 may have been the hardest in Tanner’s life. At the start of the season, the family went to the North West Company house at Rainy Lake to obtain supplies. Having parted with all their furs at Grand Portage, they took credit from the trader to the amount of 120 beaver skins and purchased new clothes and blankets and other supplies for the winter. The debt obligated them to remain in the Rainy Lake area, hunting for the company’s trader to repay their debt. Rainy Lake was already known as a poor area in which to find game, and again they found themselves facing winter without an older hunter to provide for them. Although Wa-me-gon-a-biew had rejoined them (his ardor for his new girlfriend having quickly cooled), neither he nor Tanner could qualify as an experienced hunter. At the trader’s house they picked up an older fellow named Waw-be-be-nais-sa and his wife and children, but he proved to be a poor provider.³

As the days grew bitter cold and snow lay deep on the ground, their situation soon became precarious. Net-no-kwa resorted to prayer and sent Waw-be-be-nais-sa and her elder son on a medicine hunt, from which they returned with the meat of one moose. But as the winter wore on, they were gradually reduced to a state of famine. Scouring the country for game, they became more and more desperate. Weary of moving camp day after day, they discarded some of their pukkwi mats and abandoned other possessions to consolidate loads. They ate their last dog when it became too weak to keep up. The children of Waw-be-be-nais-sa were told to eat their moccasins. At last, reduced to eating the inner bark of trees, several members of the group, including Tanner’s older brother, were too weak to stand. They could not go on. In this desperate state, Net-no-kwa sent Tanner to seek help at a trader’s house, which they knew to be about a two-day walk from their camp. It was unlikely Tanner could make it in his weakened condition, but this seems to have been their last hope for survival.⁴

Tanner had to cross a large frozen lake to get to the trader’s house. The wind had risen as soon as he departed, and as he faced into it across the open expanse of lake, it lashed his flesh and sapped his remaining strength. When at last he reached the shelter of the trees on the other side, he sat down to rest. But in another instant he got back on his feet, realizing that the overwhelming urge to sleep meant almost certain death. He had to keep moving. Fortunately, the wind had died away. All through the still, moonlit night he walked, and in the morning he reached the trader’s house. He did not have to tell the men inside the house that he and his people were starving, for they could see it in his face. The trader immediately directed one of the French Canadians to pack some supplies and go in search of the destitute family. Meanwhile, the trader invited Tanner to thaw out in front of a fire. If the trader noticed that the Indian boy with long dark hair was actually a white boy, he said nothing about it to Tanner.

Hearing the wind rise, Net-no-kwa had followed her son out of camp soon after he left, for she feared he would succumb to the wind’s deadly chill. Losing his tracks in the drifting snow, she walked on through the night, not knowing if he was alive or dead. She reached the trader’s house a few hours behind him. Tanner heard her desperate query outside the door: “Is my son here?” When the door was opened wider, she wept with relief: her little Swallow was alive! In a few days the others followed her in, the French Canadian having successfully delivered the aid package to their camp.⁵

After they had recuperated at the trading house, the family joined a band of Rainy Lake Ojibwas. This band numbered three lodges and included four capable hunters, and as long as Tanner’s group remained with them they were well provided for. Much to Tanner’s and Net-no-kwa’s disgust and embarrassment, their erstwhile principal hunter, Waw-be-be-nais-sa, feigned illness and contributed nothing to the band’s collective hunting efforts. However, the other hunters tolerated him well enough and through the rest of the winter gave his family a share of each moose or caribou they brought in.

As winter turned to spring, Tanner’s family left the band and began hunting beaver near the trading house. Freed of the lazy Waw-be-be-nais-sa, they lived for a brief time in the company of another Ojibwa hunter. This man had several dogs that he used for hunting and tracking moose. He was such a fast runner that in certain terrain he could outrun his dogs. With them he could pursue a moose for hours. When the moose at last wearied and they closed in on it, one or two of the dogs would put on a final burst of speed and get around in front of it, holding it at bay while the man came up from behind and killed it.

Tanner, meanwhile, was improving his own skills as a hunter. He seems to have shown a fearless instinct. Once, while hunting ducks with buckshot, he startled a bear out of its den. Before the groggy bear could make its escape, he loaded a ball in his gun and pulled the trigger. As the ball had a load of buckshot behind it, the gun blew apart halfway down the muzzle. Without wasting a moment, he loaded a second ball into what was left of his gun and fired again. His second shot brought down the bear.⁶

Just above the inlet to Rainy Lake was a set of rapids where the Indians sometimes gathered to catch fish. The river dropped into Rainy Lake over a series of rock slabs and short waterfalls, and at the base of some of the falls the water eddied in deep round holes worn in the rock. Sometimes the fish were so dense in these whirlpools they could be scooped out of the water by hand. Tanner was fishing there one day with hook and line when a very large sturgeon came over the falls and got stuck in his fishing hole. Acting quickly, before the fish could thrash its way to safety, Tanner brained it with a rock. As it was the first sturgeon taken in that spot, it became the occasion for a feast with all the Ojibwas who were present.⁷

That summer, the younger widow of Taw-ga-we-ninne rejoined their group. She had traveled to Lake Huron and back to reclaim her five-year-old son, who had been living with relatives since he was an infant. She brought back a valuable piece of paper for Net-no-kwa: a promissory note made out by the fur trader at Mackinac for the value of the seven packs of furs she had delivered on Net-no-kwa’s behalf. This transaction was a rare instance of the fur traders’ credit system recording a debit in favor of the Indian, promising to redeem what the company owed to her at a later date. Whether the trader duly recorded the amount of the note in his ledger book is not known. Since Net-no-kwa would lose this check in a fire the following winter before she was able to cash it, the North West Company never had to make good on it.⁸

The next winter, Tanner went to work for the trader at Prairie Portage. This man the Indians called Aneeb, or Elm Tree. Tanner’s role was to hunt elk and bison and provision the trading house with meat, for which Aneeb paid him in handsome metal ornaments. His arrangement with Aneeb was more along the lines of an employment agreement than the customary trading relationship. Although such an arrangement was not the norm between traders and Indians, it was not uncommon either. The trader at Brandon House also employed an Indian hunter that year. In time, numerous Métis worked for the traders under similar terms, and Tanner himself would return to this occupation at different points in his life.⁹

Working for Aneeb, Tanner hunted and tracked elk on foot, just as he had with the Ojibwa hunter and his dogs the previous year. Once, pursuing an elk for many hours on end, Tanner became so drenched in sweat that when he at last gave up the chase his clothes froze to his body. His leggings, which were made of cloth, turned into tubes of ice on his legs. Wet, cold, and exhausted, he fought the urge to lie down and sleep. Starting for his mother’s lodge several miles distant, he knew that he must get there or die. If Tanner was sometimes slow to perceive danger, he always showed tremendous grit once the danger was upon him. As he trudged on, his fingers and toes ceased to ache—not because they had warmed up, he knew, but because they had grown numb with frostbite. Later, he fell into a trance. In his dream state, his traveling spirit wandered off, while his bodily spirit stayed put, telling his legs to keep walking, never to stop or allow the rest of him to lie down. Waking from his dream state, he realized that he had been walking in tight circles for what seemed like a long time. He set his course for camp again. He was delirious when he finally made it and crawled into the wigwam to collapse on his buffalo-robe bed next to a warm fire. The last thing he saw before falling into a deep slumber was large frost crystals clinging to the underside of the pukkwi mats. Reflecting the firelight, they twinkled overhead like stars.¹⁰

Tanner was a whole month recovering from that ordeal. His face, hands, and feet were frostbitten, and his bodily reserves were so spent that he could hardly get out of bed. Some weeks later, his older brother joined him in convalescence, having fallen into a campfire and burned himself during a drinking bout. With both sons incapacitated, their family would have been in deep trouble had it not been for the generosity of Waw-be-be-nais-sa, the usually lax hunter who had joined them the previous winter at Rainy Lake. Over the summer, Waw-be-be-nais-sa had divorced his wife and married Net-no-kwa’s daughter. Net-no-kwa had tried to prevent the marriage, thinking that he would be nothing but a drag on her family, but she relented when she learned that his ex-wife had married someone else and taken the children with her. In the present emergency, with both her sons unable to hunt, her new son-in-law came to the family’s aid. Waw-be-be-nais-sa placed his lodge about a day’s walk from Net-no-kwa’s lodge and every so often he brought her the present of an elk.¹¹

Yet another calamity befell Tanner’s family before the winter was out. The brothers had by this time recovered from their respective ailments and had both returned to hunting. Net-no-kwa departed on a two-day trip to visit her daughter and son-in-law, leaving the lodge in the care of her adopted daughter, the Gros Ventre girl. A onetime captive like Tanner, her name was Skwah-shish and she was now a runty youth of about thirteen. Somehow Skwah-shish allowed the wigwam to catch fire and burn to the ground. When Tanner returned to camp late that night, he found her crying and shivering under a blanket beside the pile of ashes where the wigwam had stood. All of the family’s wealth was destroyed, including Net-no-kwa’s promissory note from the traders at Mackinac and Tanner’s metal ornaments from the trader Aneeb.¹²

Such a devastating loss in wintertime might have been not only demoralizing but fatal. Yet the family survived and bounced back. Taking stock of what had happened, Net-no-kwa decided that they must go to the trader’s house and obtain new supplies. Aneeb, the trader, allowed them a credit of forty beaver skins, with which they purchased blankets and cloth. They then found temporary shelter at the lodge of Waw-be-be-nais-sa, where the whole family set to work making the pukkwi mats of woven cattail reeds that would give them a snug, new wigwam. While everyone worked long hours to get it done, no one worked harder than Skwah-shish. On the morning after the fire, Net-no-kwa had been so upset with her that she made the girl beg for her life. But now she teased her good-naturedly, and the family was restored to harmony.¹³

So it was that Tanner’s family alternately skirted disaster and enjoyed a relative prosperity.