Big Bear Read online

  Big Bear’s vision on Bull’s Forehead Hill took place deep in Blackfoot territory, and its fulfillment gave him particular power against them. To live, both Plains Cree and Blackfoot bands needed horses and buffalo, but they also needed to capture women. There were never enough mature women for the endless labour of a hunting camp: bearing and caring for children, digging roots and gathering berries and continually cooking, skinning and stretching furs, skinning and butchering buffalo before they spoiled in the heat, cutting meat into strips to dry in the sun and pounding it into powder for pemmican, scraping and tanning hides, sewing clothing, packing and carrying the camp by backpack and dog- and horse-travois to follow the herds while the armed men walked wide as guards or rode ahead scouting for animals or enemies, one or the other—who could say what might appear over the next horizon? Only strong women made prairie hunting life possible, and that meant endless raids to capture them from your enemies.

  Though Black Powder’s band still wintered between The Little Hills and Jackfish Lake, the fur animals there were largely gone. The band’s main trade with the Company was no longer in spring with furs at Carlton, but rather in autumn at Fort Pitt with buffalo hides and pemmican. The Company needed prairie pemmican to feed their voyageurs rowing or tracking their huge York boats, filled with trade goods from Hudson Bay and fur from farther north, where there were still fur animals.

  In the fall when Big Bear turned twenty-two, a Blackfoot war party destroyed a Cree camp within sight of Fort Pitt. Chief Man Who Makes the War Whoop survived, and that winter he travelled among bands, persuading them to give him their pledge for a revenge attack when the grass was green enough for horses. Among ten other chiefs, Black Powder pledged his band’s pipe, their sacred commitment to honour and honesty. The artist Paul Kane, travelling among Company posts (1848), drew pictures of both Cree chiefs, which, they thought, would give them special war power. But, unknown to them, the Blackfoot were planning an even larger expedition, and before the Cree could finish their Thirst Dance in preparation, more than five hundred Blackfoot warriors had advanced again toward Fort Pitt. Scouts encountered scouts, the Blackfoot attacked, and though the Cree killed ten attackers and drove them off, eighteen of their huge gathering were killed and forty wounded. Big Bear fought hard; his Bear medicine protected him, and he was not wounded, but in this series of attacks the Blackfoot obviously had stronger medicine than the Plains Cree. The Spirits had told them clearly—who could understand why?—that now was no time for revenge.

  Big Bear had proven himself an outstanding hunter and warrior, a generous man who received deep spiritual vision. He was too young to be a band councillor, but he was recognized as a Worthy Young Man who, because of his hunting and war exploits, soon sat in the Warrior Society circle and took part in their ceremonial dances. One day (1847–48) the father of a Cree-Saulteaux girl named Sayos came to Black Powder’s lodge leading two fine horses. Several days later a lodge of new hides stood beside the chief’s lodge, and when Big Bear entered, Sayos greeted him with a pair of new moccasins that fit him exactly. The families exchanged other gifts, clothing, and horses, and Sayos and Big Bear became wife and husband. He would eventually have five wives: the hospitality and generosity expected of a Cree leader demanded more work than any one or two women could provide, but Sayos would remain his lifelong love and bear him the most children.

  Their first baby was a girl they named Nowakich, their second a son, Twin Wolverine, a name from their Saulteaux boreal past. While they wintered in The Little Hills in 1851, Sayos bore a second son, whom they named Imasees, which translates as Little Wild Man or Little Bad Man. This little man would grow into the stocky, powerful image of his father but with an intense, chiselled face and downturned lips that rarely laughed. No one could know how profoundly that wild or bad would reveal itself.

  (In 1989, Imasees’s mother will be called Na-tachi-skau-n, or simply Joanne in sworn statements deposited at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The same statements will name Imasees as Little Bear.)

  The seasonal cycles of band hunting continued in the 1850s. Not raids, but providing food and protection for his band and growing family, were Big Bear’s daily life. The Cree had established their buffalo territory on the plains, and though there were still clashes with the Blackfoot Confederacy, a mutual need for less violence had Elders in both tribes advocating peace. One Cree in particular, Chief Maskepetoon—who had allowed himself to be touched by Methodist Rundle’s holy water and, it was said, could hear Christian Cree words on birch bark or paper—gradually became a powerful peace negotiator.

  Years before, while the chief was away raiding, Blackfoot warriors had destroyed his camp, killing his aged father. Maskepetoon was told the name of his father’s killer, but instead of pursuing revenge, he led his People into the Beaver Hills for healing. He began to talk aloud about the wisdom of peace. Now, it was told, Cree warriors had brought several Blackfoot into Maskepetoon’s camp and called out the name of the killer. The Blackfoot men were surrounded; the killer stood motionless facing the chief, waiting like a warrior for whatever would hit him.

  Maskepetoon turned, went into his lodge, and emerged with his ceremonial warrior clothes, the suit of beads and quills and scalps he had not worn for years. Put this on, he said in Blackfoot, and after the man had done that he told him to mount the horse tied beside his lodge. Then Maskepetoon looked directly at him.

  Both my hands are empty, he said. You took my father from me, so now I ask you to be my father. Wear my clothes, ride my horse, and when your People ask you how it is you are still alive, tell them it is because Maskepetoon has taken his revenge.

  The Blackfoot warrior slid off the horse; he took Maskepetoon in his arms and held him hard against his heart.

  My son, he said. You have killed me.

  As this story was carried across the plains and along the rivers of the boreal forest by both the People and White missionaries, the Cree and Blackfoot Elders had a powerful teaching for their Young Men. Perhaps there were greater, braver honours to be attained than stealing and bloody coups and killing. Consider the profound pre-eminence of magnanimity and hospitality, the hard discipline of forgiveness. Who showed the greater courage: a warrior who fought wars with enemies or a man who rode unarmed into an enemy camp and tried to talk peace? Slowly, peace treaties—the Cree called them âsotamâkêwin, meaning “promise”—among the tribes reached over the prairie, lasting almost four years.

  Big Bear had given up the canoe of his boreal ancestors and become a superb horseman. The Hudson’s Bay Company now brought goods up the North Saskatchewan to Carlton and Pitt and Edmonton and Rocky Mountain House in huge York boats dragged by men with ropes over their shoulders, but Big Bear remembered the Company governor, George Simpson, crowned by a black beaver hat and sitting stiff like a grand chief in his canoe while his voyageurs paddled him past so swiftly that the evening sun rippled the river into floating fire. He never met “Little Emperor” Simpson, not even at Pitt, where he now traded most often.

  Then one spring (1861), after a Cree war party had ruined the always precarious peace promises by killing a Blackfoot chief and the tribe had retaliated by killing twenty Cree camped near Fort Pitt, the chief factor there told Big Bear something very strange.

  The factor’s name was James Simpson. Big Bear had known him for fifteen years as a trader, always fair with his weights and counting. Now, drinking tea with him in his log house inside the high spruce palisades of the trading post, Simpson told him that his mother had been a Cree-Scots woman and his father the Little Emperor.

  James Simpson said, I was his first son. I heard he died last fall (September 1860), in the far east, Montreal.

  First son. After a moment Big Bear asked, What is that, Montreal?

  A place where many Whites live close together. Sixty thousand, more people than there are on the prairie, or were, even before the smallpox.

  More Whites than Red River?

  Twe
nty times. I went to school there. They have houses six floors high on an island where their river is three times wider than our Saskatchewan. Ships come from across oceans, from everywhere in the world. They have a railroad too, though not as long as the Americans’. My father told me they were talking about it.

  About what?

  Building a railroad to Red River. My father didn’t like that, he said too many Whites would come and ruin the Company trade. But he’s gone, so they must be thinking about it again. Maybe a railroad over the prairie.

  Could that be believed? Simpson sat on his thick buffalo robe as lightly as a Cree, but it was spread on a wooden floor, not good earth. His face slanted into a straggly brown beard—he looked so White, but spoke the language clear as any Elder.

  And Big Bear remembered a disturbing boyhood dream of uncountable Whites streaming from somewhere east and south onto the prairie and chopping down trees and pounding together square houses in every river valley, so many houses that there was no wood to shelter People from winter storms. The Elders had marvelled when he told them. Look at the Whites here, they advised him. We’ve known them from Elders beyond Elders, and the places they build with posts are no more than specks four days apart along one river. What can your dream mean?

  Catherine, Simpson’s wife, joined them with a kettle of steaming water for the pot. A beautiful woman, Big Bear thought, with her eyes shining black against her dark skin. How could she be Gabriel Dumont’s, the ugly Métis leader’s, sister?—and he had to laugh at himself. Simpson looked up, and Big Bear could only offer him tobacco for his pipe, though Simpson had bales of it and he had no more than what filled his pouch. Simpson cut off a plug, and Big Bear could ask:

  His first son. So, are you, now, the Company’s Big Boss?

  Simpson watched the smoke curl until he passed the short pipe to Catherine. I have my father’s blood, he said, and name. He paid for my school as long as I could stand it … I saw him five times in my life … no … no, he had enough children, especially all White ones. I’ll never have more from him.

  What more would you need? You’ll grow rich trading with me.

  They laughed together, seated on the robe drinking tea and smoking. As they did every fall at Fort Pitt, and sometimes in summer when Simpson brought his well-bred horses to the Cree on the plains. A good horse could cost four bags of pemmican, but they were needed more than ever because, with renewed enemy attacks, there were not enough Young Men left to steal them from the Blackfoot or Shoshone even when they pushed that far south. And sometimes now whole camps of Blackfoot were naked beggars, on foot because they had given away their horses and everything else for the whisky that Whites carted from the Missouri. Some warriors went crazy drinking it, and often the women and Elders couldn’t stop them.

  Simpson told Big Bear, Those bastards are American. They’re not supposed to drag their rotgut over the border. But there’s no Canadian here to stop them.

  Big Bear snorted. That Medicine Line is for Whites. The land is ours; the Blackfoot have to protect it themselves.

  But you know whisky, Simpson said. You’ve drunk it.

  Enough to feel sick, not become stupid.

  Once that summer (1861), when Black Powder’s band was hunting with their Assiniboine allies so far south that the Sweetgrass Hills in Montana loomed over the horizon, they heard the shriek of carts from beyond the folds of long land. Several Assiniboine whooped Whisky! so loud that their horses leaped, but next morning the Cree left them to retreat north. As bad as whisky men were with their wooden barrels and stinking liquor pails and dippers, they always held a short gun in one hand while pouring, guns that fired six bullets as fast as they could pull the trigger.

  For seasons on end Maskepetoon and his two sons rode to the Blood and Peigan, who were often more open to talk than the Siksika, trying to renegotiate peace treaties with the Blackfoot. He argued, We all want to live, and we all need buffalo. Honour the Creator with prayers, with the pipe and songs, and honour the promises between us in the hard life we all live. He carried a Bible with him now; he read it aloud in Cree and then translated the words into Blackfoot. He told them: This holy book tells of a Prince of Peace who would save all Peoples from evil. Listen to the Prince of Peace!

  But there were always enough Young Men mourning their brothers, both Blackfoot and Cree, who could not endure such words. They would leave Maskepetoon and the Elders to their talk and ride away, ashamed that they had not protected their dead or wounded comrades and dreaming not of peace but of bloody revenge.

  Into these years of the Buffalo Wars came pestilence. Scarlet fever attacked the Blackfoot, and during the winter of 1864–65 more than a thousand died. That same fall the supply brigade from Hudson Bay brought measles to Edmonton, and both Métis and Cree died, including many of Maskepetoon’s and Sweetgrass’s People. That did not stop the inter-tribal violence. Big Bear was trading in Pitt when Blackfoot laid siege to the tiny post on the flats beside the North Saskatchewan; they had a few rifles, bows, and knives, but they galloped around the palisade screaming war cries and taunting the Cree to come out and fight. Simpson had left the Company to breed horses near Red River, and the new factor offered Big Bear and his men Company horses to ride out and drive them off. But Big Bear refused. Let them scream, he said, they’ll soon get tired. And finally the Blackfoot did leave, with nothing.

  In the winter of 1864–65, Black Powder’s crier walked through the camp in The Little Hills shouting a sad message. The chief was dead. His body lay in his lodge but his soul was gone, his neck cold as ice.

  In deep mourning, the band began their death ceremonies, so that Black Powder’s soul would not need to wander long to reach the land of the dead. In life or death the band was one; communal song and sorrow and happiness and prayer held their world together. They dressed the body in ceremonial clothes, they recounted Black Powder’s war record and his long, wise leadership, they gathered around his body to weep. The family unbound their hair; several gashed their arms and legs until their bare bodies wept blood. Then four aged warriors lifted the corpse on a buffalo hide and, followed by the wailing band, carried it to the platform prepared between the forks of aspen. Big Bear sang the death song over the cries of mourning while the men wrapped the body in rawhide and bound it tight. Then they walked away between the pale trees, still weeping.

  After four days they gathered to the crier’s call for prayers, the pipe ceremony, the ritual opening of the chief’s bundle, and a final honour feast of buffalo meat and dried saskatoon soup.

  The Plains Cree band of some hundred People now needed a chief. Black Powder’s oldest son, Big Bear, was forty years old. All his life he had observed how a chief unites a band, even though anyone is free to leave at any time and join another band. A chief led by communal agreement, not by orders; People respected him for being wise and generous with gifts and hospitality, they followed him because he fought and hunted and cared for every person in his band. Above all else, a chief was a man who served others.

  The band respected Big Bear because he was an even-tempered, thoughtful man who played with children and laughed at himself, who dreamed dreams and received visions, a person whom smallpox could not kill, but even more because his spirit helper was the Great Parent of Bear, who had given him a powerful bundle that protected him from every harm during years of defending his People. His honour stories had been sung at Thirst Dance ceremonies, from his greatest warrior deeds of dodging through enemy arrows or bullets to club a warrior and take his scalp, to facing an enemy with only a war club or a knife, or stealing into a Blackfoot camp and galloping away with the buffalo runner tied beside the lodge of a war chief. And how, when bloody violence between Cree and Blackfoot continued endlessly, one winter he had carried his band’s medicine pipe bundle through the snow to eight Plains Cree chiefs and persuaded them to pledge their peace on the pipe. Then in spring he rode to Blackfoot camps with the pipe and convinced them to come together to make peace with the Cre
e. Like the venerable Maskepetoon, he was a devastating warrior who also had the courage to stop killing.

  There was consensus: Big Bear should follow in his father’s footsteps. He was a mature family man, with a daughter old enough for marriage and two sons already riding with the Young Men to hunt or watch for enemies. And he accepted the band’s communal call to duty. He had no illusions of power; he knew he needed more guidance, so he allied himself with Sweetgrass, the elder statesman among the Plains Cree trading at Fort Pitt. But as they had all feared, the tribal wars over buffalo grew steadily worse.

  About the time that Big Bear was chosen chief, far away in the east the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences were beginning to shape the colonial provinces of British North America into the nation of Canada. Big Bear could not know that John A. Macdonald, one of the leaders of that Confederation movement, would soon become the most powerful person in deciding the destiny of all prairie People.

  The summer after Big Bear became a chief, the northern prairie tribes faced something more ominous than distant White politics or the wars and hunger and disease they continually struggled with. That summer they found that the Iron Stone was gone.

  Reverend Robert Rundle, who listed 592 Cree in his Baptism Book by the Christian names he gave them, left Edmonton in 1848, and a new Methodist missionary came from Upper Canada (Ontario) to build a log church on the North Saskatchewan River halfway between Fort Pitt and Edmonton. He called the place Victoria after the Great Mother he was always talking about. This George McDougall with his son John ripped up large plots of earth for potatoes—very good food, bigger and sweeter than wild turnips—and every spring they hunted buffalo on the prairie with Cree bands led by Chiefs Maskepetoon and Pakan. They were powerful God-men both in talking and acting; it was said they intended to build another church on the Bow River, where even the Company had never had a trading post for more than a year before the Blackfoot burned it down. In 1869, George McDougall wrote to his mission director in Toronto: