The chiefs and councillors of the 1,678 People officially listed as alive in the Carlton District sat motionless as rocks, sweat running down their faces. Big Bear spoke softly:
“It sometimes comes to me that we have been breathed over. Like the trance that falls upon us when Windigo is coming. Our power songs call helplessly into the night, our wisdom cries through the trees but we cannot find it. Ice forms in our bodies, we are terrified of the sun rising in another day, eiya, eiy-a-a-a, O Great Spirit, have pity.
“I speak what the Only One gave me to see. Don’t allow anyone to poison my words. Speak to your People, and we will altogether make one Grand Council, everyone from the Peace Hills and Edmonton in the west to Piapot in Qu’Appelle, and also Crowfoot on the Bow. I say, we must speak with one thundering voice to that one in government than whom there is none higher!”
The Carlton chiefs did begin speaking with one voice: three days after Big Bear’s speech they presented a paper listing eighteen grievances to agent John Macrae. Big Bear told him: “These chiefs should be given what they asked for, all treaty promises must be fulfilled.” Macrae promised to send the list to Governor Dewdney—eventually “Old Tomorrow” Macdonald in Ottawa would see it and initiate an investigation—and the chiefs agreed with Big Bear that next year “when the leaves come out” they would gather for a Grand Council of all Treaty Six chiefs, and as many of Treaty Four (Piapot) and Treaty Seven (Crowfoot and Red Crow) as would come. Then, together, they would choose a representative to go speak for them in Regina and Ottawa. Big Bear recommended—perhaps thinking of the Cree sacred number—“The choice of a representative should be given us every four years.”
Dewdney knew what Big Bear said; his police had hirelings report on every word the chief uttered. In a twenty-five-page handwritten letter to “My dear Sir John,” Dewdney reported on the Duck Lake Council and affirmed: “The Indians … desire to come to see me in Regina, and you in Ottawa.” And in particular, it was Riel’s return and the possibility of a Cree-Métis coalition on the Saskatchewan that pushed Macdonald to read the eighteen grievances with great care. And when, upon Riel’s invitation, Big Bear met the charismatic Métis, all officials were even more concerned.
Riel welcomed Big Bear in the luxury of a Prince Albert home, with couches and a long table overloaded with food. Riel exclaimed, “Yes, my brother, these are nice things, but if you do as I tell you, you will have grander things, and plenty to eat. I am poor, but you will be rich.… What I say to you I say to all my brother chiefs, and I want you to tell them my words.”
Big Bear had eaten in enough claustrophobic houses not to be impressed, but Riel’s words made sense. Aggressive White settlers were searching out the best soil along the rivers, and the Métis had no paper title to lands they had lived on for a generation. Always it was land, the Mother Earth. If the Métis made common cause with them in their Grand Council—but Riel and Dumont were such
overwhelming leaders, they thought so unlike People. Riel spoke no Cree, he wore a silver cross around his neck, and listened continuously to priests. Could the Great Spirit and Riel’s God work together?
Nevertheless, the Cree would convene a Grand Council when the leaves came out, and after that one speaker for all the People would finally face The Highest White Boss. That prospect made Big Bear very happy.
But as his band moved again toward Fort Pitt, Twin Wolverine told him that he and six families were remaining near Battleford; they were considering joining People in the Peace Hills. His thoughtful son, who with him had waved poplar branches during the Poundmaker confrontation, wouldn’t wait another year for a reserve. Big Bear told him sadly, I’ll send you a message when we decide on the way that is best for us. You are my first son.
Inspector Dickens reported to Crozier in October 1884 that Big Bear’s five hundred and four band members had fifteen Winchesters and twenty-five smooth-bore muskets.
During the treaty payments at Fort Pitt that month, Big Bear saw a picture of himself for the first time. A glass eye in a box captured on paper black and white shadows of himself and his men without revealing their vivid trading colours. Travelling photographer Cornelius Soule told him that sunlight was the power behind the mystery of his picture. On the right half of it are nine police and Company men; Big Bear stands in the centre beside Bad Arrow, his son Kingbird, and Four Sky Thunder, with Iron Body seated on a buffalo robe in front of them. The Cree are dressed in the ceremonial costumes the Hudson’s Bay Company annually gives them to celebrate what is now their 214th year of mutual trade. Big Bear wears a beaver hat decorated with
three ostrich plumes, a stripped blanket, and clasps a spray of eagle feathers. Kingbird, also in plumed hat, holds across his body a thick club with a spiralling pattern of spikes sticking out of it.
Despite the celebratory clothes, the Cree are not trading; they are buying what they can with their five-dollar treaty money. And a year from now the Young Men Bad Arrow and Iron Body will stand on a gallows at Battleford with ropes around their necks.
Dickens’s report of January 12, 1885, reads: “Big Bear’s Indians are working [at Frog Lake], cutting logs and hauling wood for the Indian Department. As long as they work, they will receive rations. All quiet at present.”
The settlement at Frog Lake was already much larger than the six Company buildings at Fort Pitt. John Gowanlock was building a grist mill, George Dill a small store, James Simpson ran the Company store and post office, and a Catholic church had been built, in which school was held for whatever children came. Sub-agent Tom Quinn and Farm Instructor John Delaney had the largest houses, and together they controlled the Agency rations. A six-man detachment of police from Fort Pitt maintained White order; they could not, of course, “order” the fact that Delaney’s flour ration was thirteen hundred
pounds short, nor that the logging the Cree were commanded to do was clearing Quinn’s land for better sale to expected settlers.
Isabelle Little Bear was twelve that harsh winter. In 1958 she remembered:
“As I started attending school taught to us by the resident priest [Father Leon Fafard], I noticed that my people complained all the time while seated around their campfires after sundown. I and the other children played at our games, but could not help hear and see that our friends and neighbors were unhappy, therefore, we felt insecure. Our Chief Big Bear was quite elderly [59] and always tried to tell the other men to wait and be patient, that someday things would be better. The younger men, including my father Little Bear [Imasees], forever bemoaned the fact that we had failed to obtain ourselves a new home amongst the Big Knives [Americans]. These remarks would cause my grandfather to feel very humble because it reflected on his inability to lead his people. It was at this juncture that my father quite unofficially became our leader, although Big Bear was still our chief.
“Around the campfires the conversation centered on the meager rations and how dark the future was. Many times a delegation would go to Mr. Quinn and try to obtain provisions on credit. He always repeated the same words: ‘My orders are not to let any provisions out of the agency unless I receive money or trade. Go back home and work.’
“My people are not lazy because I know how hard my foster mother had to work to get enough hides ready for a teepee. It took more than a dozen to make an ordinary sized teepee, and tanning 12 to 17 hides is an awful lot of work. No, our people were not lazy, but we had no ambition to become dirt farmers, nor the habit to go to school and live like the White man. My people have the nature to roam the prairies and follow the buffalo like they did less than 100 years ago. To be told by Quinn to go home and work was like saying, ‘Go home and starve.’”
The band men chopped six hundred cords of wood that winter and their families received minimum, increasingly arbitrary, rations. After long council debate, a reserve site was decided upon at Dog Rump Creek, between Frog and
Saddle lakes, though both Imasees and Wandering Spirit opposed the location. The splits about leadership; the growing contempt for Big Bear and his eternal “wait”; the continuous humiliations of having to beg for a relentless diet of bannock and salt bacon; deadly monotony; and a black, helpless future slowly gathered into rage.
Big Bear could not endure the misery and anger. He snow-shoed into the boreal forest with several family members. He followed a deer trail through deep snow and waited where he sensed it would return, leaning between giant aspen whose branches sprayed high over him like prayers spoken into the brilliant air: prayers for understanding, for wisdom, for what more he must know about Whites with all their paper, their slavish impossibilities, their overwhelming weight of more and evermore
things.
And especially for how to negotiate one unified land from plain to parkland to this forest—where all People could live together and the Great Earth feed them, hunting or trapping or gardening or farming or ranching as they pleased. Because here they belonged!
He found muskrat dens in a creek bank, trapped the animals, and stripped off their fur the way Black Powder had taught him, a boyhood memory that shimmered like the aroma of buffalo hissing fat into festival fire. And beaver. He found two lodges; carefully dug snares through the ice into
their runways; and caught half of every lodge, including two huge bucks, and dragged them back to camp, to the delight of Sayos and the others. They scraped and stretched the pelts, ate every bit of meat and organs and tail, and Horsechild smeared himself with castoreum and pranced around the lodge smelling so smoke-musky beaver that they finally tossed him out, laughing, to wash himself in snow. And at night there were winter stories:
“Once, long ago when animals talked like People, a man and woman had an only son. It seems they dearly loved him and took good care of him, but one day, when they were working outside, they lost their child. They were very sad, and did not know the child was really alive, and it appears it had been taken by a bear. The bear took care of the child all summer, and winter too, and as often as the man performed his worship, the bear knew it at once. He knew every time the pipe was filled. And this is what he must always have said to the child: ‘Grandchild, again I am being invited,’ he must have said. And then, finally.…”
Henry Halpin, a young trader at Cold Lake who spoke fluent Cree, was listening. He was travelling to Frog Lake for
supplies and had been invited to sleep in Big Bear’s lodge. On March 19, while returning to Cold Lake, he stopped at the chief’s camp for tea and told him, as he later testified under oath, that he had “read in the Saskatchewan
Herald
that Riel had stopped the mails at Batoche.” The chief was “very surprised” and had said “I think it is very strange.” But despite this troubling news, Big Bear did not return to Frog Lake. He hunted moose and visited Halpin at Cold Lake: “He came to my house before dinner on the 21st and went away on the evening of the 22nd,” and his small party did not return to Frog Lake until April 1.
And they instantly heard the astounding news, which Imasees had discovered in a warning letter from Dickens that he stole off Quinn’s desk and had a local Métis read to him: On March 26, the Batoche Métis under Dumont and Riel had fought a battle with Crozier at Duck Lake. Four Métis and one Cree were shot, two police and ten other Whites. Crozier and his men then retreated to Prince Albert. And Fort Carlton, with all its Company and police supplies, had been burned to rubble.
This was electrifying for the Cree Young Men: Crozier’s police killed and in retreat! But, strangely, Quinn had decided that everything was quiet and had ordered the six local police back to Fort Pitt, since “their presence in Frog Lake only
tended to exasperate the Indians.” Big Bear knew the situation to be utterly different, and he sent his caller through the camp calling for a council. But Wandering Spirit refused to attend—a sure sign that the war chief was preparing for confrontation. A Cree head chief has no authority beyond what his People willingly, freely grant him, and Big Bear now faced the ominous reality of being ignored by his councillors. Surprisingly, Imasees agreed to go with him to Quinn, and he listened silently while Big Bear assured the agent, as interpreter John Pritchard later testified, that “he [Big Bear] was not going to rise to war, he was going to be loyal. He wanted to show the Government, he said, that he did not want to do anything at all.”
But even as Big Bear repeated these words in total sincerity, he recognized on his son’s clenched, winter-hardened face that the situation in Frog Lake was no longer dangerous: it was deadly.
That evening Wandering Spirit moved his lodge closer to the lake, and through the night most of the band followed him. In 1982, Jimmy Chief told the story of how his grandfather Little Bear and Wandering Spirit
“… started to build a place [beside Frog Lake] for a war dance, and when it was finished they started to dance. While the dance was going on Wandering
Spirit got up and said, ‘Quiet! Tomorrow I am going to eat two-legged meat! So what do you think?’ No one answered him and pretty soon they started dancing again. Then Wandering Spirit stopped the dance again. ‘Hey, listen,’ he called out. ‘Tomorrow if you don’t want to join me, then go home and put on your wives’ dresses!’ So they started to agree, ‘Okay, okay.’ They started to dance again until it was almost daylight. Then Wandering Spirit stopped the dance again. ‘Look here,’ he laughed at the ones who were leaving, ‘I just made some of our brothers like women!’”
Before dawn on April 2, 1885, the warriors in war paint led by Imasees were in Frog Lake settlement. When Big Bear arrived, some were breaking into the Company store. Unfortunately, highly respected James Simpson had gone to Fort Pitt, and only his terrified young clerk, William Cameron, still in night clothes, was behind the counter. Miserable Man was about to leap over the counter when Big Bear, in the doorway, shouted, “Stop! Don’t touch anything! If you want something, ask Cameron and he’ll write it down.” The Young Men could not yet disobey him to his face; they left with what they had already taken.