By August 1882, the Canadian Pacific Railway was ripping up the earth past Old Wives Lake and bolting down its double-steel belt for their Iron Horse, as the Sioux called it, to blast across the prairie. Little Pine was not allowed to take his reserve in the Cypress Hills because, despite all treaty declarations of freedom of choice, the government had decided to remove all Indians from near the border by closing Fort Walsh and allowing no reserves south of the railroad. Edgar Dewdney, now Lieutenant-Governor as well as Indian Commissioner, told Big Bear
he was building a new headquarters for government where the railroad passed through Where The Bones Lie. Foremost Man, with several dozen followers, disappeared into the eastern Cypress Hills (they would be granted a reserve there thirty-four years later), but the other treaty People around Walsh were forced, by the withholding of rations, to return north for the annuity payments. Nevertheless, Big Bear refused to sign Treaty Six, or to move.
But with bare fishing and nothing to hunt in Canada, unable to cross the border, and receiving no rations, Big Bear’s band was dying of malnutrition. Finally his second daughter, who was married to French Eater, broke the band deadlock. Her ten children, Big Bear’s grandchildren, were starving, and so were his own children Horsechild and little Earth Woman, and Imasees’s two small daughters, and Twin Wolverine’s five—what would changing the treaty help if all the children were dead? In October, 133 members of the band, including Big Bear’s daughter and Twin Wolverine and Imasees with their immediate families, signed the treaty at Fort Walsh and received signing bonuses and six years’ back pay and full rations.
Friday, December 8, 1882. On that day of blowing snow over Fort Walsh, Big Bear gave an incisive four-hour oration
explaining how, by lies and deceit and promises never kept, six years of Treaty Six had stolen from his People the Great Spirit’s greatest gifts, their independence and their homeland. More support in tools and skill, and above all, more land, was needed for them to live a good and honourable life the way every human being should live in a good and honourable country. But he could refuse no longer. He chose for his councillors Wandering Spirit, Four Sky Thunder, and The Singer. And then, witnessed by Chief Piapot and translator Peter Houri, Indian Agent Allan McDonald and Police Colonel Irvine, Big Bear made his X mark to “transfer, surrender and relinquish … all his right, title and interest whatsoever … in and to the territory described in treaty Number Six … to have and to hold the same unto and for the use of Her Majesty the Queen, her heirs and successors forever.”
In so doing, he and the 114 members remaining in his band—including his three wives; his eldest daughter, Nowakich, and her husband, Lone Man, and their five children; his sons Kingbird and Horsechild; his daughter Earth Woman; and adopted children Small Magpie and Thunder—received treaty annuity back pay and full rations for the winter months. Sir John A. Macdonald’s government had won its battle to subjugate the Plains People, even the
most independent and self-reliant band of Cree, by a deliberate use of convenient starvation.
And Edgar Dewdney, who had rigidly enforced the hunger policies, congratulated himself on the signing in his 1882 report to the prime minister: “I expect that Big Bear who has, I think, borne unjustly a bad character, will make one of our best chiefs.”
In the Plains Cree oral tradition, the difficult stories of hunting exile in Montana and the return to the North Saskatchewan under treaty shape-shift into one another. In April 1958, Isabelle Little Bear told her memories to the Bonnyville (Alberta)
Tribune
. She was Imasees’s youngest daughter, born in 1873.
“Prior to Chief Big Bear’s last big hunt, our people realized they had lost their land and so they scattered all over like little birds. We who lived under that great Chief Big Bear stayed together and decided to follow the buffalo as far south as we had to go. I don’t remember this passage in our history, but have been told very often.… We were not welcome [in Montana]. While waiting to decide what we should do, soldiers arrived with five wagon loads of provisions for us, distributing these supplies amongst our people to make sure we
would be able to reach the Big Line and then be back on Canadian soil. To make sure we did not stop along the way we were escorted by many militaries right up to the Big Line where there was one lonely Red Coat to receive us. The trek back to our former home at Frog Lake [Fort Pitt] was a hard one to live through because of the lack of food and the scarcity of game. We traveled forever northwards and ran into severe storms. Deaths were numerous, we stopped only briefly to bury our dead, amongst the victims of the cold and hunger were my mother and sister. I survived, and was cared for by Mrs. Peter Thunder whom I learned to love as a second mother. My father, Little Bear [Imasees], performed many feats of bravery, which contributed greatly to some of us reaching our destination, Frog Lake.”
Big Bear’s reunited band did not reach Frog Lake until October 1883; Isabelle’s eighty-five-year-old memory has conflated several difficult childhood treks. In spring 1883, the North West Mounted Police moved their post to the railroad at Maple Creek, and in June Big Bear, with five hundred and fifty People, left the Cypress Hills for the last
time. They reached Battleford on July 21. A few elderly were transported on ox carts, but most of them walked more than three hundred miles escorted by fifteen Mounted Police and driving a herd of cattle for daily food.
The
Saskatchewan Herald
, August 4, 1883, greeted their arrival with racist venom: “Repatriated pets. The Indian is nothing if not a nuisance. We have Lucky Man and Big Bear with their followers here, and the next thing is to find what to do with them.… On the 22nd the chiefs had a conference with [Indian Agent] Rae.… The situation looks very much like a contest between the good nature of the agent and the gluttony and laziness of the Indians.”
When Rae demanded why they refused to go directly to Fort Pitt, where Dewdney had decided they must take their reserve, Big Bear gestured to Poundmaker and his band: “We came here to see our old friends, before they too die of starvation.”
Seven years of fighting Treaty Six had curdled his genial wit into gallows humour.
He responded to Anglican priest Thomas Clarke in similar fashion: “You wish to speak to us of the Great Spirit. No, no … at present our ideal religion is flour and pork, pork and flour. Let us discuss nothing more serious. It is the one
thing needful today and tomorrow. I am the Black Bear and Black Robe of this band.”
Walpole Roland, an itinerant photographer from Port Arthur, comments in his diary:
“A short, black and shaggy-looking figure clad in a suit of broadcloth [a chief’s treaty coat], Balmoral boots, and wearing a large bearskin cap surmounted by three plumes. This is the unwelcome visitor Big Bear, and as his unwieldy body bends backward and forward and his dirty paws dart up and down, while he shows his white teeth to the self-possessed looking Agent, his looks certainly are suggestive of his name; but not withstanding his waving plumes, he does not, when erect, stand more than about four feet four inches, with a chest measurement of perhaps 42 to 48 inches.”
In Roland’s diary, policemen and Anglicans are invariably “muscular and nearly six feet,” and his ludicrous estimate of Big Bear being barely taller than his chest circumference merely underlines his derision. Stony Mountain Penitentiary records list Big Bear’s height as five feet, five and a quarter inches, average for Europeans at that time.
With sub-agent Tom Quinn approximately translating, Big Bear and Roland exchanged mockery. When the photographer asked the chief what his picture would cost,
“His reply almost astounded me, fifty dollars! After giving him some presents I said I could not afford so much … and further that I would try to find if possible a more repulsive looking Indian between here and the Rockies and call him Big Bear. At this he laughed very heartily for a hungry bear, and wishing me good day, gave me a parting shot by adding that I would probably have to go beyond the Rockies to find his rival in ugliness.… He has strongly marked features and is altogether the most obstinate and influential chief in the Northwest.”
Little Pine was finally allowed to choose his reserve along the western boundary of Poundmaker’s land. Big Bear’s many descendants hold to a tradition that he wanted his “land set aside” at Sounding Lake in the shadow of the Neutral Hills but that location, contrary to the treaty, was denied him. He then chose land between the Poundmaker and Strike-Him On-The-Back/Sweetgrass reserves but, with Thunderchild and Lucky Man just east on the Battle River, that would
cluster six influential leaders into one area—and Red Pheasant, Mosquito, Grizzly Bear’s Head, and Lean Man were circled in the Eagle Hills barely twenty miles away. Such a Plains Cree landmass near Battleford was too dangerous for “Big Tomorrow” Dewdney. So, as usual, Rae gave Big Bear orders that had no basis in treaty promises: choose your land one hundred and thirty miles upriver, beyond Fort Pitt at Frog Lake; otherwise, you receive no rations.
“Then don’t send any police to escort us,” growled Big Bear. “My Young Men might be tempted to eat their pretty horses.”
The Plains Cree found that Fort Pitt was still the haphazard scatter of buildings it had been when they traded there. Now, as they camped on the surrounding flats, a detachment of Mounted Police arrived to “maintain order” in the area. The twenty-five policemen had only six rideable horses and were commanded by Inspector Francis Dickens (youngest son of novelist Charles Dickens), whose ten-year patronage appointment was one of concentrated ineptitude marked by “recklessness, laziness and heavy drinking.” Nevertheless, Dickens did write clear, grammatical reports stating that “everything has, so far, been quiet.”
When the Cree received their annual five dollars in October 1883, Big Bear was told to settle on the reserve that
Hayter Reed, Dewdney’s assistant, had chosen for them near Frog Lake. Big Bear refused categorically. James Simpson was the Company trader at Frog Lake, which was a strong attraction. But Thomas Quinn was the agent there, a Sioux-Irish half-breed whose aggressive stubbornness the band knew very well because his wife was Lone Man’s niece. Also, the Frog Lake farm instructor, John Delaney, had openly lived with a Cree woman after he had had her husband, Sand Fly, falsely jailed for assault and theft. Big Bear and his council wanted none of these problems with government Whites, and no quick encounter with Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs Laurence Vankoughnet would change their minds.
Vankoughnet, the highest Ottawa official Big Bear would ever meet, was a bureaucrat dedicated to his friend Macdonald and to the bottom line of his departmental budget as the Canadian economy slid into recession. He travelled west in 1883 to find how he could cut expenses and, with no grasp of the overwhelming transition from a nomadic hunting to a sedentary reserve life, simply declared that Big Bear’s band had already received more than the treaty required. If they did not move onto the reserve by November, all rations—as usual—would be cut off. Then, after a swift tour of several reserves, he disappeared east and slashed the North-West Indian budget by $140,000.
After a summer of struggle at Fort Walsh, the forced treaty signing in winter, and another summer of dry prairie trails and sad visits with many friends, Big Bear knew more than he wanted to know of the desperate misery, the prostrating boredom the Cree endured on their reserves. Life began with food, yes, but true life was more than intermittent doses of lumpy flour and rancid pork, the endlessness of nothing to do. He and his band remained the largest group that had not yet chosen a reserve: that was the one bargaining power they had left to change the treaty. Could they negotiate one large “land set aside” for all Cree—perhaps even for all the Plains People—one huge united land together, straddling rivers and plains and parkland? Could he convince the Blackfoot Confederacy suffering on their reserves, big as they were, to agree? Crowfoot and the Siksika, Red Cloud and the Bloods, Sitting-On-Eagle-Tail-Feathers and the Peigan—was it possible that the land could again feed them as well as it once had, not these endless dry rations.… O Great Spirit, grant wisdom.
And always, the thundercloud on the edge of his thoughts: his last hunt and the vision Coyote had forced him to see beyond the buffalo cow. Bursting out of the ground, spurting between his fingers, blood, uncontrollable—what
did it mean?—when would it happen?—must it—why? O Great One, O Only One, have mercy.
Winter was upon them and the men scattered into the forest, trying to rekindle their solitary hunting and trapping skills. But the animals were few, their tracks in the snow largely unreadable memories of their passing. Nevertheless, they worked to be able to support themselves without the tasteless White rations; traders James Simpson and Angus McKay paid them good beef for hauling freight. Big Bear and his sons drove freight sleighs to Edmonton, and visited Chief Pakan in his cabin of logs at Saddle Lake, who reminded them that eight years ago he was already thinking of one huge Cree land along the North Saskatchewan. Yes, Big Bear said, yes, we must talk more of this. All of us, together.
The band lived in unsurveyed boreal forest, their worn hide lodges patched with canvas. There was plenty of wood for fires to keep even the smallest, weakest child warm—better than digging buffalo dung out of drifted snow. But eating squirrels, spruce grouse, and porcupines, chopping down trees for White firewood … it was an inconceivable life for hunter warriors who had once galloped along horizons dancing to the thunder of buffalo. Councillors such as Twin Wolverine, Wandering Spirit, Imasees, and Four Sky Thunder could barely endure it, and those who dreamed
of being Worthy Young Men—Kingbird, Round the Sky, Miserable Man, Iron Body, Bad Arrow—found nothing manly in chasing rabbits.