Big Bear Read online

  The Woods Cree recognized that if they joined into large bands on the plains for the summer and hunted the shifting herds, they could live well and also dry enough meat for pounded pemmican and tan enough hides for clothing and lodges to take them comfortably through the winter inside their familiar forests. Avoiding the isolated bush loneliness of small family groups stalking a solitary moose to survive the winter darkness, they could now enjoy year-round the comfort and safety of many People living together. All they needed was more horses.

  Only the prairie Blackfoot Confederacy of Siksika, Blood, and Peigan could provide horses in numbers. Gradually their peaceful trading partnership turned into conflict. As the pressure for additional hunting space and horses grew, trading evolved into raids. Why trade when, if you were daring and clever enough, you could steal twenty Blackfoot horses in one night? To return home riding a magnificent buffalo runner and singing a personal song of triumph (and your opponent’s humiliation) became a Cree warrior’s high honour. The more horses you captured, the more horses you could give to your friends, the better you could all hunt, the more stories you could recite during communal festivals, and the more swiftly you could ride over hill and prairie, the wind whistling happiness in your ears.

  By the mid-1820s, the peaceful trading partnership between Cree and Blackfoot was largely an Elder’s memory. For decades the Horse Wars shaped both societies: endless repetitions of swift, brutal raids and short-lived peace treaties. After 1810, Hudson’s Bay Company traders typically recorded events such as these: “Blackfoot warriors attacked a Beaver Hills Cree camp, destroying 16 tents,” or “100 Cree warriors attacking a Blood camp of 30 lodges on the Red Deer River and killing a good many and bringing away 96 horses and six women.” European trade goods had intensified conflict among communities over tribal territory.

  The Plains Cree lived and hunted in loose, shifting bands following a senior, prestigious civil chief; in times of attack or emergency, a younger war chief took command and organized band response. An official crier would walk through camp, shouting the news of the day, the chief’s orders, or the call to council. The council circle advised the chief about necessary decisions, the youngest men speaking first. But anyone, including women, could voice opinions until the chief made a, usually consensus, decision. In 1872, English officer William Butler (later The Right Honourable General Sir William Butler), commissioned by Prime Minister Macdonald to travel across the North-West, described the Cree society he encountered in this way:

  “ [The Cree] who first welcomed the [White] newcomer 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.… He kills a moose and to the last bit the coveted food is shared by all.… If a stranger comes and he is hungry, let him be first served and best attended to. If one child starves in an Indian camp, you may know that in every lodge every stomach is hungry.”

  Butler’s colonial-romantic style describes an historic reality. The last quarter of the nineteenth century would prove that such a communal hunting and gathering world of independent Peoples could not survive the relentless pressure of eastern Canada’s agricultural and industrial society.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Plains Cree Boy

  So in 1825, Big Bear was born at Jackfish Lake into a hunting horse-warrior band. His father, Black Powder, was chief of eighty mixed Plains Cree—Saulteaux People, and they were true nomadic hunters. They avoided the prairie Horse Wars and raiding as much as possible by wintering in the forests around Jackfish Lake and The Little Hills, trapping beaver and hunting moose. In spring they travelled to Fort Carlton on the North Saskatchewan River to trade their furs; in summer and autumn they followed the buffalo herds as far west as Buffalo Lake or south to the Red Deer River. Like many Woodland Saulteaux who moved onto the prairie, Black Powder was a powerful fighter, though he did not flaunt his warrior reputation and tried to avoid confrontation with the Blackfoot. He was widely known for his spiritual and medicine powers.

  When Black Powder’s son had grown enough to be taken out of his moss bag, the child ran through the summer days playing with other children, or puppies, or grass or sand or in lake or stream water. He could do whatever he pleased in the complete world of his parents’ camp, wander into any group of women working, into any lodge or council circle. He could even enter the sacred Thirst Dance Lodge and sway to the big drums’ beat, the singers’ ever-rising song. He wore nothing but a small pouch on a thong around his neck, which contained his umbilical cord and tobacco. When an Elder smiled at him, he might weave among the dancers to that Person, who would touch him and take a pinch of tobacco from the pouch and offer it to the Spirits in prayer for the boy. That could happen any day, in any season, a continual communal supplication for their chief’s first-born son, even when he climbed through the lodge door after watching Sun flame down to rest below the circle of Earth. Inside the lodge was a blue fire of buffalo chips behind which Black Powder sat, thinking, and People talked around him, the lodge a great cone of light drifting through the rising smoke of laughter. The boy would snuggle down to a story.

  “Here is another one, from long ago. Wîsahkêcâhk the trickster was walking around, and he saw young partridges in a nest. My little brothers, partridges, what is your name? But you just named us, they cried, when you said partridges. That is the only name we have. No, said Wîsahkêcâhk. Everything has two names. No, they told him, we have only this name, partridges. No, little brothers! Think, you have some other name too. Finally the oldest one said, It’s true, our mother does say to us Little Startlers, and Partridges, too. Yes, we do have two names. Acchh, Wîsahkêcâhk told them sarcastically, you couldn’t startle anybody! You’re so little, you.…”

  The little boy is thinking what his second name might be. Will he ever startle anyone? He will think about his name through all of Wîsahkêcâhk’s other tricks and blunders, when he is chased by a rolling stone and it begins to crawl up his leg—but by the time the storyteller says, This is the end of this sacred story, the little boy is curled among the hides close against his warm mother, far away in sleep.

  Life shifted when the boy was seven. A mentor began to teach him a Cree’s necessary knowledge: how to ride, how to use the bow and knife, how to see distance and distinguish between the dust of buffalo and a wisp of Blackfoot smoke while lying on a prairie hill, how moose could stand submerged to their nostrils in forest sloughs, how the entrances of beaver lodges hid under water. The year he was eight, starvation slowly stalked all the northern prairie People through the winter until in spring heavy snowstorms drove Black Powder’s band into dying. There were no buffalo; the Company trader at Carlton reported he had seen none for more than nine months and had no food himself. So they had to move quickly south, deeper than ever into Blackfoot country, beyond The Forks of the South Saskatchewan and Red Deer rivers to the Great Sand Hills. Why had the animals gone so far away? It almost seemed a threat: we will never return north.

  And there was worse to come, in the south. Smallpox, the invisible enemy that could not be fought; it could only be run away from. In the spring of 1837, smallpox came in a White boat up the Missouri River and destroyed most of the Mandan People; of 1,000 Assiniboine only 150 survived, and it spread from them west and north through the Blackfoot and Cree bands on the plains. Flight, horrifying sickness, death: two-thirds of the Blackfoot Confederacy died, while the Cree fled, scattering into the boreal forest. Whole circles of lodges with rotting bodies were left for prairie vultures and wolves.

  Black Powder’s band was badly infected. His oldest son also became desperately ill, but unlike so many, the twelve-year-old boy did not die. He had the strength and spirit to endure the dreadful pain in his head, neck, and back; the almost unstoppable bleeding of his nose; and the agonizing red pustules that erupted over his head and body. Eventually they ruptured into stinking pus, and he began to recover. When after two months he could walk again, the once-perfect skin of his face
was disfigured by scars, deep pits that would shift and fold with age but never be gone.

  On an autumn evening Black Powder helped his son walk out into the prairie air. The grass swished like slow breathing against their moccasins. The stinging whine of mosquitoes had disappeared, and in the silence they heard the bellow of buffalo bulls, far away. From beside a pond came the chitter of prairie chicken hens running in the long files of their autumn dance as the cocks drummed to their echo: boom boom booooo! For a moment the boy could not control his hands: they touched the scars on his ravaged face, then dropped to his sides.

  I’m lucky, he said. I’ll always be behind it, I’ll never have to look at my face!

  Black Powder laughed aloud with him. Yes, he said. And everyone who does look will know, instantly, that your Spirit medicine power is stronger than the worst White disease.

  But this White “present” made me so sick.…

  Yes, said his father, and that proved your medicine power.

  You will always have more, the White stinking disease can never kill you now.

  That winter the boy’s voice, so quick for laughter and stories, began to deepen. The following summer, when the band was again hunting near The Forks, in the darkness of early morning Black Powder paddled his son across the South Saskatchewan River. Together they walked through the valley cottonwoods and climbed up the slopes and knobby bends of Bull’s Forehead Hill. When they reached the top, they saw the circle of the earth beginning to brighten, saw where the two rivers joined into one to curl east toward the light and the grass spread away under the coming sun to a southern ripple of Great Sand Hills. Together they erected stick frameworks and hung offerings on them, red cloth and patterned brown and yellow. They set the buffalo skull under the shelter and spread the bearskin; then his father offered up a pipe and left him.

  The boy saw Sun rise over the rim of Earth, and he faced Him all day. Praying for vision, crying out and lifting his arms in supplication when it seemed he could no longer stand in the fierce light of the endless summer day. Stripped to a breechcloth, his feet in the bear fur, he stared over the prairie and the long bend of the South Saskatchewan and the valley hills folded down like green blankets until Sun sank at last into the bloody loops of the Red Deer River and he could collapse.

  On the second day he did not stand, nor move. He was not hungry; thirst tried to break his concentration. He did not look at the point where the two rivers merged and bent away together. He wept and prayed, and at night spirits began to come. Not one, many—but he refused them. Bear spirits came, and he would not listen to them either. He fasted and prayed into the third day, with not a cloud in the burning sky to grant him a drop of rain, until finally out of his accepted suffering the overlord of all bear spirits came: the Great Parent of Bear reared up over him with his arms wide and fangs bared, growling dreadfully. Then He dropped down to become what the Cree also called Him: Four-legged Person. From dry ground Bear scooped up wet clay and clawed it over the boy’s face in five great slashes, taught him his vision song and the words of it:

  “My teeth are my knives,

  My claws are my knives.”

  And he instructed him how to make the core of his sacred bundle. All his life, this sacred object was to be his sign that his prayer had been answered, that, under the Creator, the most powerful Spirit known to his People had come, and would come again, to help him whenever he prayed for guidance and strength, especially in war.

  Big Bear named the core of his bundle Chief’s Son’s Hand and made it as it was revealed to him in his vision quest. He skinned out a giant bear paw very long, with its five enormous claws still attached, and with buffalo thongs sewed the paw onto a piece of scarlet stroud. Then he cut the cloth into a bib, so that when he tied it around his neck with thongs, the black fur would wrap round his neck like a scarf and the paw with the great ivory claws rested below the hollow of his throat. The Cree understand that a person’s soul is given to them at birth and resides along the back of the neck, and so, when Big Bear had offered up all the sacred ceremonies and tied the thongs around his neck and felt the weight of Chief’s Son’s Hand warm against his soul, he knew himself to be in perfect, assured communion with the Great Parent of Bear. He had Bear power.

  After each prayer ceremony and wearing of the neckpiece, he would wrap the paw in a new gift of cloth, place the bundle inside a tanned leather bag, and store it carefully. The whole object—Chief’s Son’s Hand, wrapping cloths, and bag—was called That Which Is Kept In A Clean Place.

  And his name was now Mistahi Maskwa. Maskwa meaning “bear,” but mistahi in particular, so together meaning “Much … or A-Whole-Lot-Of Bear.” Which, upon contemplation, could shape-shift into More-Than-Enough Bear. For Whites of course, and their frozen English comprehension of names, he would simply be Big Bear.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Warrior and Chief

  Big Bear was growing into a Young Man; he would now ceremonially unwrap the cloths around Chief’s Son’s Hand and wear it around his neck for protection in a horse raid or war or to defend his camp. He became a renowned warrior; the stories of his exploits against the Blackfoot are still remembered and retold by his great-great-grandchildren.

  But the mystic power of Chief’s Son’s Hand also came to him as a gift when he contemplated his People living, when he walked among the spring aspen or rode under the thunderheads of prairie sky—long thoughts that circled back as far as his faintest memory of the Elders’ stories and into the shadows of what was coming. For if Whites they had never seen could destroy People with sickness, wipe them away like snow before a winter chinook and leave children with parents rotting before their eyes, the smell of death choking them while they barely knew whether they themselves were alive or dead—if Whites could do that from unseeable distances—what might they not do when they confronted his People in massive numbers? Like they already did south of the Medicine Line border, where forts contained not only a few traders with helpers but also packs of blue soldiers who marched around stiff-legged, carrying guns that ended in bright steel knives.

  Enough eyes had seen them. Stories were told in every camp how some Plains Cree had been taken aboard a boat that sailed down the Missouri River and then up another and another until they rode wagons over mountains to a place of endless square houses called Washington and a man they called their Big White Father (President Andrew Jackson, 1832) hung silver medals around their necks. The next summer these Cree men came home with many gifts and more horses than they had left with, the silver medals still hanging from their necks.

  There were no soldiers at Carlton or Pitt or Edmonton along the North Saskatchewan River, but there were “God-men” who said they spoke for the Great Spirit, men named Thibault and De Smet who wanted to be called Father and walked in their black dresses onto the prairie to the buffalo with the Métis and sometimes even visited the Plains Cree bands of Chief Sweetgrass to talk about water and spirit and blood. And now (1840) another God-man, named Rundle, had passed by upriver to Edmonton, and it was said that a Cree who once wore a silver medal, the renowned warrior Chief Maskepetoon (The Broken Arm), was talking to him.

  Big Bear had met those “fathers,” but he could think of no use for what they said or for the holy water they carried. The gifts of the Bear Spirit and of The Only Great Spirit, who had given his People the whole Earth and everything good for life with it—that was more than enough for him. As was the ecstatic, dangerous joy of Blackfoot raids: stealthy approach, retreat, silent stalk and circle, counter-raid, attack, and night herds of horses galloping.

  One spring young Big Bear with his companions ran west to haunt Blackfoot camps all summer. They captured scores of horses, and Big Bear sent all his horses back to Black Powder while staying on the prairie till autumn, living a season of daring, pursuit, and raid. When the youths returned at last, all alive and with still more horses, Big Bear told a story during his honour dance that is still recounted in the Cree oral tradition. His g
reatest summer adventure was not horse stealing: it was a dream. A Spirit guided him to a vision of horses in a huge cave. They were his, hundreds of them; he could just walk into the herd and take the one at the centre. So he walked forward, but a giant stallion reared his black hoofs beating over him, and he stooped to protect himself. Instantly the horses vanished. Too bad you stooped, said the Spirit. Now you’ll never be rich in horses.

  Therefore, to fulfill the stooping vision, Big Bear gave away every horse he had taken that summer, keeping only one because no one would accept the last. His People celebrated him even louder with songs and dancing until Big Bear laughed with them, shouting, Now I feel very handsome! And the band rejoiced; they had a fine chief, who had a brave and generous son who received powerful guidance from visions but nevertheless could still laugh at his scarred appearance. A Young Man to be cherished, his stories to be remembered.

  Good years of growing into complete manhood followed. Sometimes, alone on the evening prairie, Big Bear heard the grass tear between his horse’s teeth, sensed the gentle burble of its stomach, and a sadness would come over him. His world was changing. The Elders said, Something is wrong with the buffalo. Their raids on the Blackfoot were becoming less about the prestige of horse stealing and much more about having enough buffalo to eat. The once-great herds seemed to be shrinking farther south, and to find them, the Cree had to push farther into the lands of the Blackfoot, who in turn pushed harder against the Crow, the Shoshone, the Cheyenne. How would it continue if, as they heard, more Whites than ever were rushing in beyond the border, not only by cart and boat, but on iron rails laid down for a smoke-blasting machine that dragged wagons full of them faster than a horse could gallop. How, under the Creator, would the world go on?