 |
 |
|||||||||
|
|
Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 21
by Philip Goldring The CharactersThe Indians of the northwestern plains of the North American interior, long before recorded time, were drawn towards the Cypress Hills. To the traveller, the hills present a sudden and pleasant vista of deep green, a curious relic of a pre-glacial age, standing alone since the dusty plains around were scoured flat by the great moving pack of ice. Vegetation flourishes and the hills are even now a natural sanctuary for all sorts of animals which are otherwise not to be seen for miles around. The hills mark part of the divide between the plains which stretch away towards the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and the vast territory which drains northeastward into Hudson Bay. The region is remote, wildly beautiful and sparsely peopled: but for centuries it had much to offer the Plains Indians. In a mechanical age the hills are scantily populated in comparison with the prairies which surround them, in earlier times, before the horse was seen on the plains, the hills had many attractions to a native population. Ample wood and wafer, shelter and plentiful game brought the people whose innumerable tipi rings and flint artifacts still litter the Cypress Hills. This peaceful occupation became impossible in the increasing clash of tribal organizations which followed the arrival of the horse. No tribe completely mastered the region; it lay on the fringes of territory controlled by the Cree, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre and Blackfoot. The hills remained the same, but they no longer offered secure refuge and if a few bands hunted the prolific game, they did so at constant risk of being surprised by a hostile party of some other tribe. This sporadic and inconclusive skirmishing persisted until gradually, after 1850, the Métis hivernants, or winterers, controlled the area by their fighting superiority. [1]
A new cause of instability appeared in the early 1870s with the arrival of whisky traders from Fort Benton. Throughout the winter of 1872-73, a succession of Indian bands came to the valley of what we now call Battle Creek, near the gap which divides the central from the eastern plateau of the hills. Their large camp consisted of several bands, the principal chief being an Assiniboine named Manga. Snowbound, the chiefs were not able to prevent demoralization of their people due to the trade of two whisky posts, Fort Farwell and Fort Soloman, located a few hundred yards from the camp. The chiefs fretted impatiently, waiting for spring and a chance to move on, while the camp was impoverished by the ruinous trade and split by feuds originating in drink. A warm spell in early spring liberated these bands and they moved on toward their customary summer hunting-grounds. Their campsite, however, did not long remain empty; it became the temporary home of a number of different Indian parties. In the middle of April a war party of some 17 Stonies spent two days at the whisky posts and vanished before dawn of the third day, taking three horses with them from Fort Farwell. Another Indian party was the remnant of a band under Manitu-potis (Little Soldier), which had set out from an intended winter camp on Battle River and was driven by starvation across 200 miles of frozen prairie to seek the shelter and food the Indians knew could be found in abundance in the Cypress Hills. Thirty members of this band failed to reach the hills, but two dozen lodges encamped to recuperate in the old campsite near the whisky posts. There they were joined by other small bands of Assiniboine, one led by Minashenayen and about a dozen lodges under Inihan Kinyen. [2] They were a sorry lot. The survivors of the winter trek had retained little but their lives; Minashenayen's band had lost all its horses; the Indians were scantily armed with bows and arrows and obsolete firearms. Yet they were numerous enough; in that one spot were camped more than 40 lodges, about 250 people. The Cypress Hills cover more than 200 square miles and there was obviously a special reason for the concentration of Indians on one site at this particular time. The attraction was a variety of American merchandise at the two trading posts — blankets, tobacco, simple implements and trinkets, and the ever-present whisky. These goods were purveyed by a number of traders who used Fort Benton in Montana as a supply base and drew their supplies from the burgeoning T.C. Power Brothers Company at Benton. The fraternity of frontier traders encompassed a wide variety of men, but they all had one thing in common: they were engaged in illegal trade which by its nature was destroying morale and social organization among their native customers. The whisky traders were driven by many influences. Failure elsewhere, adventuresome spirits or plain lack of scruples prompted them to move beyond the law and hasten the disruption of native life which was bound, in any case, to change soon because of the spread of white settlement. Unhappily for the Northwest Indians, the whisky traders were beyond the law in more than one sense. Their penetration of the lands which now make up southern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan was propelled not only by the normal motives of commercial expansion, but also by the growing pressure of law enforcement in Montana, where it was illegal to trade spirits to Indians. No such prohibitions inhibited the trader in the adjacent Canadian territory, where the law was the same, but was not enforced. The Hudson's Bay Company was the only European authority which had hitherto reached far beyond the bounds of settlement in northwestern British North America, but even the Company had not managed to plant firm roots in the Cypress Hills or in the Blackfoot country. The boundary line, though still unmarked, was reasonably well-known and after 1869 the Montana merchants extended their efforts to extract the skins of bison, wolf and other animals from Canadian-owned territory. An observer reported in 1871 that
As the Benton merchants grasped for the trade of the Saskatchewan (threatening to assume there the role already taken by St. Paul in Manitoba), the isolated region between the Hudson's Bay Company posts of the Upper Saskatchewan and the mining towns of Montana began to attract traders. The most costly and most celebrated of these posts was Fort Whoop-Up, erected in 1869 at the junction of the St. Mary and Oldman rivers; but the years that followed brought a string of less famous whisky forts. By 1872 the trade had penetrated the Cypress Hills. There were 13 whisky traders within three miles of Little Soldier's camp in the spring of 1873, in the valley of what was then known vaguely as the north fork of the Milk River. Half a dozen or more of these traders were within two minutes' walk of the Indian camp, trading at Forts Soloman and Farwell. On the same side of the creek as the camp, Moses Soloman and George Bell had a considerable stock of whisky even after most of their competitors had run out; on the opposite side, a cluster of traders lived in loose association with their host Abel Farwell. Of these, James Marshall, Petersen and perhaps George Hammond all traded whisky to the successive inhabitants of the camp across the creek. In the neighbourhood, too, were Paul Rivers and William Rowe. Rivers was killed by Indians in the spring of 1873; Rowe moved out shortly afterward, turning over his stock of whisky to Farwell. Farwell swore after the event that he had never traded whisky to the Indians and had only bought out Rowe's stock to keep him out of the trade. Yet it hardly seems likely that Farwell travelled 170 miles from Fort Benton to winter in bitter cold among the Indians without taking along ample supplies of the most profitable trading commodity known on the frontier. Fewer than half, probably, of the white men on Battle Creek that winter are known, but details about some of them have survived. Abel Farwell, 35 that year and married to a Crow Indian named Mary, came originally from Fort Peck, but had traded out of Benton for a number of years. His interpreter was Alexis Lebombard, an aging Métis who had worked for Moses Soloman the previous year before coming to Farwell in the autumn. Lebombard also kept his wife at Fort Farwell, as did George Hammond, a French Canadian (despite his name) whose function at the fort is unclear. Attached to the rear of Farwell's fort was a log house where Marshall and Petersen lived and dealt in whisky. Apart from these people there was an indeterminate number of helpers and hangers-on, including one man called Kerr and another name Garry Bourke. [4] Fort Soloman was built in the fall of 1872 by Moses Soloman, a trader from Fort Benton and, like Farwell, a customer of the T.C. Power Company. A part share in Soloman's business was owned by George M. Bell, an ex-soldier who as recently as 1869 had fought against Indians while he was enlisted in the United States 13th Infantry. John C. Duval, a Métis from Fort Benton, had accompanied Soloman to the hills in some indeterminate role; so had Antonio Amei, a native of New Mexico. Also present was Philander Vogle, who had come north with Farwell, helped him build his fort, then moved over to work for Soloman. Vogle's feet had been badly frozen during the winter of 1872-73, but by spring he could walk reasonably well. Another occupant of Soloman's fort at the time of the massacre was John MacFarlane, a hunter who had wintered in the hills. Altogether, the occupants of the two forts were not an exceptional lot among frontiersmen; they were engaged in a dirty trade, but there is nothing to suggest that they were any better or worse than the general run of men on the American frontier at the time. During the fight between the Assiniboine and the white men which took place on 1 June, another group was present but took no part in the affray. They were Métis winterers, another strand in the fabric of human life in the hills that year. They came from a temporary settlement of more than 500 people, a cluster of 50 tents about a day's ride (25 miles) from the trading posts. [5] Métis, many of them natives of Red River, had been frequenting the hills, hunting buffalo, since the middle of the century. Their role, appropriately, combined those of Indians and whites. They were hunters, killing animals for food and skins. A few, like Moses Soloman, were in trade in a small way; others served the Benton traders as interpreters or freighters. It was in the latter role that a number had been summoned to Fort Farwell in the last days of May. Farwell had ridden off to their camp and hired enough men and carts to pack up his season's returns of furs and his unused stock of goods and carry it all back to Fort Benton. The Métis came to Farwell's even though there had been rumours of trouble in that neighbourhood. An Assiniboine had come to the winterers' camp the night before the men set out for Farwell's and told them that the band had planned an attack on Fort Soloman and that he had come away rather than take part in such an affair. Such tales must have been commonplace in the hills for the Métis shrugged off the danger and went to Farwell's anyway. [6] Some of their names are remembered: Louis Bellegarde, John Joe, François Desgarlats, Baptiste Morin, John Daunais, Joseph Laverdure, Baptiste Champagne and his unnamed father-in-law, and Joseph Vital Turcotte. Like the other characters in the Cypress Hills drama, none of them would now be remembered if it were not for the events of 1 June. The villains of the piece, arriving under cover of darkness on the last night in May, were a party from Fort Benton, a dozen or so men under the leadership of John Evans and Thomas Hardwick. They were not traders, but a gang of men to whom the traditional perjoratives "outlaws," "desperadoes," or "frontier ruffians" might very well apply. At least two of them were well-known as horse thieves and the remainder were reliably reported to be "a set of scamps who have no permanent home or abiding place" and "persons of the worst class in the country." [7] Were it not for their character, they might have deserved some sympathy for the situation which led them to the Cypress Hills that spring. They were wolfers, part of that unpopular fraternity which hunted wolves, not with traps or guns but with strychnine. After a busy season of this activity they made their way back toward Fort Benton where men of their type habitually congregated toward the end of May to sell their furs, drink away part of the proceeds and plan their activities for the coming season. So the Hardwick gang was making its way toward Benton with the season's catch and a large number of horses. They made their last camp a day's journey from their destination; here a passing band of Crees, venturing far out of their own territory, caught the wolfers unaware and turned the tables on them by riding off with 40 head of horses. Hardwick and his friends immediately took their furs into Fort Benton, stashed them there and made an unsuccessful plea for military assistance to recover their stolen property. The local garrison was already depleted by the dispatch of a detachment on a special mission and Hardwick's request was turned down. Frustrated, the wolfers reassembled to follow the trail, still fresh, of the Cree raiders. [8] The horses were stolen on 17 May: two weeks later, Hardwick and his little band of followers had to admit they had lost the trail. They were by this time well into the Cypress Hills where they camped for the night on the thirty-first. They knew, however, that traders were established in the area and Hardwick and Evans agreed to find the forts and scout the camps of whatever Indians were located nearby. If the horses were there, "then the whole party would slip in and try to recover our horses in Indian fashion," as Evans wrote afterward. [9] They were most unhappy, then, to find how utterly destitute the encampment was of horses and they stopped at Fort Farwell to inquire further about possible news of their missing animals. Farwell received them coolly, knowing their reputations and not wishing to have much to do with them. He told them, "No, the camp has only five or six horses, and they have not got yours." [10] He was, nevertheless, sufficiently hospitable to listen to their story and to tell them to bring their party in for breakfast. Hardwick stayed all night, while Evans returned to the remainder of the party. By eight in the morning the dozen men were sitting around a fire in a temporary encampment about 80 yards from Fort Farwell. [11] During the years which followed, a fair amount came to be known about some of the members of this party although a full and authentic list of all the men was never compiled. Sketchy biographical details are available for five of them. Thomas W. Hardwick of Carrollton, Missouri, was about 29 at the time of the massacre. John H. Evans, 26, was a native of Fort Dodge, Iowa. Trevanion Hale, 32, was also from Iowa and 24-year-old S.A. Harper was from Ohio. The only recorded Easterner was somewhat older: Elijah Jefferson Devereaux was born in Maine and was probably a French Canadian. [12] Less is known of the other members of the frontier band. S. Vincent and Charles Smith were in the party; Charles Ladd was a witness to the massacre and probably belonged to the Benton group. Edward Legrace, the lone white killed in the massacre, was one of the Benton group as was James Hughes, the only member of the party subsequently tried in Canada for murder. There were two Métis in the Hardwick group. Joseph Lange and Xavier Faillon. [13] There may have been a thirteenth man, a young Scot named Donald Graham, but his version of the massacre is unconvincing and his claim to have participated with Hardwick's gang is substantiated only by his own statement 50 years later. [14] Even if we knew nothing of the composition of the party, its actions betrayed its character. Hardwick and his men were impetuous, unscrupulous and more than ready to settle disputes with the Winchester and Henry repeating rifles which all of them carried.
|
|||||||
|
|
|
||||||
