The Great Lone Land by W. F. Butler

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By the last day of November my preparations for further travel into the
regions lying west of Edmonton were completed, and at midday on the 1st
December I set out for the Rocky Mountain House. This station, the most
Western and southern held by the Hudson Bay Company in the Saskatchewan,
is distant from Edmonton about 180 miles by horse trail, and 211 miles by
river. I was provided with five fresh horses, two good guides, and I
carried letters to merchants in the United States, should fortune permit
me to push through the great stretch of Blackfoot country lying on the
northern borders of the American territory; for it was my intention to
leave the Mountain House as soon as possible, and to endeavour to cross
by rapid marches the 400 miles of plains to some of the mining cities of
Montana or Idaho; the principal difficulty lay, however, in the
reluctance of men to come with me into the country of the Blackfeet. At
Edmonton only one man spoke the Blackfoot tongue, and the offer of high
wages failed to induce him to attempt the journey. He was a splendid
specimen of a half-breed; he had married a Blackfoot squaw, and spoke
the difficult language with fluency; but he had lost nearly all his
relations in the fatal plague, and his answer was full of quiet thought
when asked to be my guide.

"It is a work of peril," he said, "to pass the Blackfoot country all'
pitching along the foot of the mountains; they will see our trail in the
snow, follow it, and steal our horses, or perhaps worse still. At another
time I would attempt it, but death has been too heavy upon my friends,
and I don't feel that I can go."

It was still possible, however, that at the Mountain House I might find
a guide ready to attempt the journey, and my kind host at Edmonton
provided me with letters to facilitate my procuring all supplies from his
subordinate officer at that station. Thus fully accoutred and prepared to
meet the now rapidly increasing severity of the winter, I started on the
1st December for the mountains. It-was a bright, beautiful day. I was
alone with my two retainers; before me lay an uncertain future, but so
many curious scenes had been passed in safety during the last six months
of my life, that I recked little of what was before me, drawing a kind of
blind confidence from the thought that so much could not have been in
vain. Crossing the now fast-frozen Saskatchewan, we ascended the southern
bank and entered upon a rich country watered with many streams and
wooded with park-like clumps of aspen and pine. My two retainers were
first-rate fellows. One spoke English very fairly: he was a brother of
the bright-eyed little beauty at Fort Pitt. The other, Paul Foyale, was a
thick, stout-set man, a good voyageur, and excellent-in camp. Both were
noted travellers, and both had suffered severely in the epidemic of the
small-pox. Paul had lost his wife and child, and Rowland's children had
all had the disease, but had recovered. As for any idea about taking
infection from men coming out of places where that infection existed,
that would have been the merest foolishness; at least, Paul and Rowland
thought so, and as they were destined to be my close companions for some
days, cooking for me, tying up my blankets, and sleeping beside me, it
was just as well to put a good face upon the matter and trust once more
to the glorious doctrine of chance. Besides, they were really such good
fellows, princes among voyayeurs, that, small-pox or no small-pox, they
were first-rate company for any ordinary mortal. For two days we jogged
merrily along. The Musquashis or Bears Hill rose before us and faded away
into blue distance behind us. After sundown on the 2nd we camped in a
thicket of large aspens by the high bank of the Battle River, the same
stream at whose mouth nearly 400 miles away I had found the Crees a
fortnight before. On the 3rd December we crossed this river, and,
quitting the Blackfeet trail, struck in a south-westerly direction
through a succession of grassy hills with partially wooded valleys and
small frozen lakes. A glorious country to ride over--a country in which
the eye ranged across miles and miles of fair-lying hill and
long-stretching valley; a silent, beautiful land upon which summer had
stamped so many traces, that December had so far been powerless to efface
their beauty. Close by to the south lay the country of the great
Blackfeet nation--that wild, restless tribe whose name has been a terror
to other tribes and to trader and trapper for many and many a year. Who
and what are these wild dusky men who have held their own against all
comers, sweeping like a whirlwind over the sand deserts of the central
continent? They speak a tongue distinct from all other Indian tribes;
they have ceremonies and feasts wholly different, too, from the feasts
and ceremonies of other nations; they are at war with every nation that
touches the wide circle of their boundaries; the Crows, the Flatheads,
the Kootenies, the Rocky Mountain Assineboines, the Crees, the Plain
Assineboines, the Minnitarrees, all are and have been the inveterate
enemies of the five confederate nations which form together the great
Blackfeet tribe. Long years ago, when their great forefather crossed the
Mountains of the Setting Sun and settled along the sources of the
Missouri and the South Saskatchewan, so runs the legend of their old
chiefs, it came to pass that a chief had three sons, Kenna, or The Blood,
Peaginou, or The Wealth, and a third who was nameless. The two first were
great hunters, they brought to their father's lodge rich store of moose
and elk meat, and the buffalo fell before their unerring arrows; but the
third, or nameless one, ever returned empty-handed from the chase, until
his brothers mocked him for his want of skill. One day the old chief said
to this unsuccessful hunter, "My son, you cannot kill the moose, your
arrows shun the buffalo, the elk is too fleet for your footsteps, and
your brothers mock you because you bring no meat into the lodge; but see,
I will make you a great hunter." And the old chief took from the
lodge-fire a piece of burnt stick, and, wetting it, he rubbed the feet of
his son with the blackened charcoal, and he named him Sat-Sia-qua, or The
Blackfeet, and evermore Sat-Sia-qua was a mighty hunter, and his arrows
flew straight to the buffalo, and his feet moved swift in the chase. From
these three sons are descended the three tribes of Blood, Peaginou, and
Blackfeet, but in addition, for many generations, two other tribes or
portions of tribes have been admitted into the confederacy; These are the
Sircies, on the north, a branch, or offshoot from the Chipwayans of the
Athabasca; and the Gros Ventres, or Atsinas, on the southeast, a branch
from the Arrapahoe nation who dwelt along the sources of the Platte. How
these branches became detached from the parent stocks has never been
determined, but to this day they speak the languages of their original
tribe in addition to that of the adopted one. The parent tongue of the
Sircies is harsh and guttural, that of the Blackfeet is rich and musical;
and while the Sircies always speak Blackfeet in addition to their own
tongue, the Blackfeet rarely master the language of the Sircies.

War, as we have already said, is the sole toil and thought of the red
man's life. He has three great causes of fight: to steal a horse, take a
scalp, or get a wife. I regret to have to write that the possession of a
horse is valued before that of a wife-and this has been the case for many
years. "A horse," writes McKenzie, "is valued at ten guns, a woman is
only worth one gun;" but at that time horses were scarcer than at
present. Horses have been a late importation, comparatively speaking,
into the Indian country. They travelled rapidly north from Mexico, and
the prairies soon became covered with the Spanish mustang, for whose
possession the red man killed his brother with singular pertinacity. The
Indian to-day believes that the horse has ever dwelt with him on the
Western deserts, but that such is not the case his own language
undoubtedly tells. It is curious to compare the different names which the
wild men gave the new-comer who was destined to work such evil among
them. In Cree, a dog is called "Atim," and a horse, "Mistatim," or the
"Big Dog." In the Assineboine tongue the horse is called "Sho-a-th-in-ga,"
"Thongatch shonga," a great dog. In Blackfeet, "Po-no-ka-mi-taa" signifies
the horse; and "Po-no-ko" means red deer, and "Emita," a dog--the "Red-deer
Dog." But the Sircies made the best name of all for the new-comer; they
called him the "Chistli" "Chis," seven, "Li," dogs "Seven Dogs." Thus
we have him called the big dog, the great dog, the red-deer dog, the
seven dogs, and the red dog, or "It-shou-ma-shungu," by the Gros Ventres.
The dog was their universal beast of burthen, and so they multiplied the
name in many ways to enable it to define the Superior powers of the
new beast.

But a far more formidable enemy than Crow or Cree has lately come in
contact with the Blackfeet--an enemy before whom all his stratagem, all
his skill with lance or arrow, all his dexterity of horsemanship is of no
avail. The "Moka-manus" (the Big-knives), the white men, have pushed up
the great Missouri River into the heart of the Blackfeet country, the
fire-canoes have forced their way along the muddy waters, and behind them
a long chain of armed posts have arisen to hold in check the wild roving
races of Dakota and the Montana. It is a useless struggle that which
these Indians wage against their latest and most deadly enemy, but
nevertheless it is one in which the sympathy of any brave heart must lie
on the side of the savage. Here, at the head-waters of the great River
Missouri which finds its outlet into the Gulf of Mexico-here, pent up
against the barriers of the "Mountains of the Setting Sun," the Blackfeet
offer a last despairing struggle to the ever-increasing tide that hems
them in. It is not yet two years since a certain citizen soldier of the
United States made a famous raid against a portion of this tribe at the
head-waters of the Missouri. It so happened that I had the opportunity of
hearing this raid described from the rival points of view of the Indian
and the white man, and, if possible, the brutality of the latter--brutality
which was gloried in--exceeded the relation of the former. Here is
the story of the raid as told me by a miner whose "pal" was present in
the scene. "It was a little afore day when the boys came upon two
redskins in a gulch near-away to the Sun River" (the Sun River flows into
the Missouri, and the forks lie below Benton). "They caught the darned
red devils and strapped them on a horse, and swore that if they didn't
just lead the way to their camp that they'd blow their b---- brains out;
and Jim Baker wasn't the coon to go under if he said he'd do it--no, you
bet he wasn't. So the red devils showed the trail, and soon the boys came
out on a wide gulch, and saw down below the lodges of the Pagans. Baker
just says, 'Now, boys, says he, 'thar's the devils, and just you go in
and clear them out. No darned prisoners, you know; Uncle Sam ain't agoin'
to keep prisoners, I guess. No darned squaws or young uns, but just
kill'em all, squaws and all; it's them squaws what breeds'em, and them
young uns will only be horse-thieves or hair-lifters when they grows up;
so just make a clean shave of the hull brood. Wall, mister, ye see, the
boys jist rode in among the lodges afore daylight, and they killed every
thing that was able to come out of the tents, for, you see, the redskins
had the small-pox bad, they had, and a heap of them couldn't come out
nohow; so the boys jist turned over the lodges and fixed them as they lay
on the ground. Thar was up to 170 of them Pagans wiped out that mornin',
and thar was only one of the boys sent under by a redskin firing out at
him from inside a lodge. I say, mister, that Baker's a bell-ox among
sodgers, you bet."

One month after this slaughter on the Sun River a band of Peagins were
met on the Bow River by a French missionary priest, the only missionary
whose daring spirit has carried him into the country of these redoubled
tribes. They told him of the cruel loss their tribe had suffered at the
hands of the "Long-knives;" but they spoke of it as the fortune of war,
as a thing to be deplored, but to be also revenged: it was after the
manner of their own war, and it did not strike them as brutal or
cowardly; for, alas! they knew no better. But what shall be said of these
heroes--the outscourings of Europe--who, under the congenial guidance of
that "bell-ox" soldier Jim Baker, "wiped out them Pagan redskins"? This
meeting of the missionary with the Indians was in: its way singular. The
priest, thinking that the loss of so many lives would teach the tribe how
useless must be a war carried on against-the Americans, and how its end
must inevitably be the complete destruction of the Indians, asked the
chief to assemble his band to listen to his counsel and advice. They met
together in the council-tent, and then the priest began. He told them
that "their recent loss was only the beginning of their destruction, that
the Long knives had countless braves, guns and rifles beyond number,
fleet steeds, and huge war-canoes, and that it was useless for the poor
wild man to attempt to stop their progress through the great Western
solitudes." He asked them "why were their faces black and their hearts
heavy? was it not for their relatives and friends so lately killed, and
would it not be better to make peace while yet they could do it, and thus
save the lives of their remaining friends?"

While thus he spoke there reigned a deep silence through the council-tent,
each one looked fixedly at the ground before him; but when the
address was over the chief rose quietly, and, casting around a look full
of dignity, he asked, "My brother, have you done, or is there aught you
would like yet to say to us?"

To this the priest made answer that he had no more to say.

"It is well," answered the Indian; "and listen now to what I say to you;
but first," he said, turning to his men, "you, my brethren, you, my sons,
who sit around me, if there should be aught in my words from which you
differ, if I say one word that you would not say yourselves, stop me, and
say to this black-robe I speak with a forked tongue." Then, turning again
to the priest, he continued, "You have spoken true, your words come
straight; the Long-knives are too many and too strong for us; their guns
shoot farther than ours, their big guns shoot twice" (alluding to shells
which exploded after they fell); "their numbers are as the buffalo were
in the days of our fathers. But what of all that? do you want us to
starve on the land which is ours? to lie down as slaves to the white man,
to die away one by one in misery and hunger? It is true that the
long-knives must kill us, but I say still, to my children and to my
tribe, fight on, fight on, fight on! go on fighting to the very last man;
and let that last man go on fighting too, for it is better to die thus,
as a brave man should die, than to live a little time and then die like a
coward. So now, my brethren, I tell you, as I have told you before, keep
fighting still. When you see these men coming along the river, digging
holes in the ground and looking for the little bright sand" (gold), "kill
them, for they mean to kill you; fight, and if it must be, die, for you
can only die once, and it is better to die than to starve."

He ceased, and a universal hum of approval running through the dusky
warriors told how truly the chief had spoken the thoughts of his
followers; Again he said, "What does the white man want in our land? You
tell us he is rich and strong, and has plenty of food to eat; for what
then does he come to our land? We have only the buffalo, and he takes
that from us. See the buffalo, how they dwell with us; they care not for
the closeness of our lodges, the smoke of our camp-fires does not fright
them, the shouts of our young men will not drive them away; but behold
how they flee from the sight, the sound, and the smell of the white man!
Why does he take the land from us? who sent him here? He puts up sticks,
and he calls the land his land, the river his river, the trees his trees.
Who gave him the ground, and the water, and the trees? was it the Great
Spirit? No; for the Great Spirit gave to us the beasts and the fish, and
the white man comes to take the waters and the ground where these fishes
and these beasts live--why does he not take the sky as well as the
ground? We who have dwelt on these prairies ever since the stars fell"
(an epoch from which the Blackfeet are fond of dating, their antiquity)
"do not put sticks over the land and say, Between these sticks this land
is mine; you shall not come here or go there."

Fortunate is it for these Blackfeet tribes that their hunting grounds lie
partly on British territory--from where our midday camp was made on the
2nd December to the boundary-line at the 49th parallel, fully 180 miles
of plain knows only the domination of the Blackfeet tribes. Here, around
this midday camp, lies spread a fair and fertile land; but close by,
scarce half a day's journey to the south, the sandy plains begin to
supplant the rich grass-covered hills, and that immense central desert
commences to spread out those ocean-like expanses which find their
southern limits far down by the waters of the Canadian River,1200 miles
due south of the Saskatchewan. This immense central sandy plateau is the
true home of the bison. Here were raised for countless ages these huge
herds whose hollow tramp shook the solid roof of America during the
countless cycles which it remained unknown to man. Here, too, was the
true home of the Indian: the Commanche, the Apache, the Kio-wa, the
Arapahoe, the Shienne, the Crow, the Sioux, the Pawnee, the Omahaw, the
Mandan, the Manatarree, the Blackfeet, the Cree, and the Assineboine
divided between them the immense region, warring and wandering through
the vast expanses until the white race from the East pushed their way
into the land, and carved out states and territories from the Mississippi
to the Rocky Mountains. How it came to pass in the building of the world
that to the north of that great region of sand and waste should spread
out suddenly the fair country of the Saskatchewan, I must leave to the
guess-work of other and more scientific writers; but the fact remains,
that alone, from Texas to the sub-Arctic forest, the Saskatchewan Valley
lays its fair length for 800 miles in mixed fertility.

But we must resume our Western way. The evening of the 3rd December found
us crossing a succession of wooded hills which divide the water system of
the North from that of the South Saskatchewan. These systems come so
close together at this region, that while my midday kettle was filled
with water which finds its way through Battle River into the North
Saskatchewan, that of my evening meal was taken from the ice of the
Pas-co-pee, or Blindman's; River, whose waters seek through Red Deer
River the South Saskatchewan.

It was near sunset when we rode by the lonely shores of the Gull Lake,
whose frozen surface stretched beyond the horizon to the north. Before
us, at a distance of some ten miles, lay the abrupt line of the Three
Medicine Hills, from whose gorges the first view of the great range of
the Rocky Mountains was destined to burst upon my sight; But not on this
day was I to behold that long-looked-for vision. Night came quickly down
upon the silent wilderness; and it was long after dark when we made our
camps by the bank of the Pas-co-pee, or Blindman's River, and turned
adrift the weary horses to graze in a well-grassed meadow lying in one of
the curves of the river. We had ridden more than sixty miles that day.

About midnight a heavy storm of snow burst upon us, and daybreak revealed
the whole camp buried deep in snow. As I threw back the blankets from my
head (one always lies covered up completely), the wet, cold mass struck
chillily upon my face. The snow was wet and sticky, and therefore things
were much more wretched than if the temperature had been lower; but the
hot tea made matters seem brighter, and about breakfast-time the snow
ceased to fall and the clouds began to clear away. Packing our wet
blankets together, we set out for the three Medicine Hills, through whose
defiles our course lay; the snow was deep in the narrow valleys, making
travelling slower and more laborious than before. It was midday when,
having rounded the highest of the three hills, we entered a narrow gorge
fringed with a fire-ravaged forest. This gorge wound through the hills,
preventing a far-reaching view ahead; but at length its western
termination was reached, and there lay before me a sight to be long
remembered. The great chain of the Rocky Mountains rose their snow-clad
sierras in endless succession. Climbing one of the eminences, I gained a
vantage-point on the summit from which some by-gone fire had swept the
trees. Then, looking west, I beheld the great range in unclouded glory.
The snow had cleared the atmosphere, the sky was coldly bright. An
immense plain stretched from my feet to the mountain--a plain so vast
that every object of hill and wood and lake lay dwarfed into one
continuous level, and at the back of this level, beyond the pines and the
lakes and the river-courses, rose the giant range, solid, impassable,
silent--a mighty barrier rising-midst an immense land, standing sentinel
over the plains and prairies of America, over the measureless solitudes
of this Great Lone Land. Here, at last, lay the Rocky Mountains.

Leaving behind the Medicine Hills, we descended into the plain and held
our way until sunset towards the west. It was a calm and beautiful
evening; far away objects stood out sharp and distinct in the pure
atmosphere of these elevated regions. For some hours we had lost sight of
the mountains, but shortly before sunset the summit of a long ridge was
gained, and they burst suddenly into view in greater magnificence than at
midday. Telling my men to go on and make the camp at the Medicine River,
I rode through some fire-wasted forest to a lofty grass-covered height
which the declining sun was bathing in floods of glory. I cannot hope to
put into the compass of words the scene which lay rolled beneath from
this sunset-lighted eminence; for, as I looked over the immense plain and
watched the slow descent of the evening sun upon the frosted crest of
these lone mountains, it seemed as if the varied scenes of my long
journey had woven themselves into the landscape, filling with the music
of memory the earth, the sky, and the mighty panorama of mountains. Here
at length lay the barrier to my onward wanderings, here lay the boundary
to that 4000 miles of unceasing travel which had carried me by so many
varied scenes so far into the lone-land; and other thoughts were not
wanting. The peaks on which I gazed were no pigmies; they stood the
culminating monarchs of the mighty range of the Rocky Mountains. From the
estuary of the Mackenzie to the Lake of Mexico no point of the American
continent reaches higher to the skies. That eternal crust of snow seeks
in summer widely-severed oceans. The Mackenzie, the Columbia, and the
Saskatchewan spring from the peaks whose teeth-like summits lie grouped
from this spot into the compass of a single glance. The clouds that cast
their moisture upon this long line of upheaven rocks seek again the ocean
which gave them birth in its far-separated divisions of Atlantic,
Pacific, and Arctic. The sun sank slowly behind the range and darkness
began to fall on the immense plain, but aloft on the topmost edge the
pure white of the jagged crest-line glowed for an instant in
many-coloured silver, and then the lonely peaks grew dark and dim.

As thus I watched from the silent hill-top this great mountain-chain,
whose summits slept in the glory of the sunset, it seemed no stretch of
fancy which made the red man place his paradise beyond their golden
peaks. The "Mountains of the Setting Sun," the "Bridge of the World,"
Thus he has named them, and beyond them the soul first catches a glimpse
of that mystical land where the tents are pitched midst everlasting
verdure and countless herds and the music of ceaseless streams.

That night there came a frost, the first of real severity that had fallen
upon us. At daybreak next morning, the 5th December, my thermometer
showed 22 degrees below zero, and, in spite of buffalo boots and moose
"mittaines," the saddle proved a freezing affair; many a time I got down
and trotted on in front of my horse until feet and hands, cased as they
were, began to be felt again. But the morning, though piercingly cold,
was bright with sunshine, and the snowy range was lighted up in many a
fair hue, and the contrasts of pine wood and snow and towering wind-swept
cliff showed in rich beauty. As the day wore on we entered the pine
forest which stretches to the base of the mountains, and emerged suddenly
upon the high banks of the Saskatchewan. The river here ran in a deep,
wooded valley, over the western extremity of which rose the Rocky
Mountains; the windings of the river showed distinctly from the height on
which we stood; and in mid-distance the light blue smoke of the Mountain
House curled in fair contrast from amidst a mass of dark green pines.

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