Chapter I

_It fell in the quiet night,
There was never a sound to ken;
But all of the woods to the right and the left
Lay filled with the painted men._

STEVENSON

THE FROG LAKE SETTLEMENT

Four hundred miles east of the great continental backbone of North America, the Rocky Mountains, and six miles north of the North Saskatchewan River, a collection of substantial log buildings in the year 1885 had reached the dignity of a small civilized community known as the Frog Lake Settlement.

The Saskatchewan is the grand river of the old Canadian North-west Territories. Rising in the Rockies, it flows east, draining most of that immense sweep of hill and plain, forest, lake and muskeg through its connections into the broad Arctic reservoir of Hudson Bay. Like Mississippi, Saskatchewan is a Cree or Algonquin word and means “Swift-running.” During many years steamboats sweated their way fifteen hundred miles up the tortuous channels of the main stream and its two chief branches, the North and South Saskatchewans, with merchandise for Fort Edmonton, then a trading centre of the Hudson’s Bay Company, now the capital city of Alberta, and slipped back on its hurrying flood with peltries in rich packs on their way to the world’s fur market at London.

Frog Lake, for many years following 1885, as a place of human abode no longer existed. It fell back into the embrace of that wilderness from which it was once in part wrested. The mystery of silence brooded over it. The pilots of its first feeble steps toward an ordered progress slept beneath its grass-topped hillsides, and ashes covered the ground whereon stood their habitations. The traveller passed quickly along the trail leading through it and camped at night away from its sombre associations. Even the savage author of its desolation shunned a spot where in the dark his unquiet fancy conjured up the accusing shades of stunned and martyred victims. For on the morning of April 2nd in that year of 1885 the red man whose home this wilderness was arose with his fierce blood galloping in his ears and casting aside his dissembled amity, struck to the earth the intruder upon his heritage.

That paleskinned stranger had come boldly upon the land as though it had belonged to him. True, a treaty had been made, but he did not regard the gods, the traditions or the customs of its people. He scoffed at the wisdom of its chiefs and prophets. He treated them not as equals and brothers but as children, foolish, untaught. He would have shown them a new manner of life. They cared nothing about any new manner of life; they were satisfied with life as they knew it. Except that they had thought that life would have been easier, somehow, after the treaty was signed.

At first had they made him welcome, sharing their meat and camp fire according to the ancient usages of the red peoples. Then for a time they had marvelled and endured and spoken in secret council. And at length when the opportunity arose they had thrown off the mask of submission to the new order of things that had come uninvited upon them and rifle and torch in hand sped to the work of vengeance and destruction.

It is the story of the Frog Lake Massacre I have to tell. There is nothing pretty about it. A stain dark and bloody on the page of Canadian history, that is all it is. Yet as history it is worth preserving. I lived at Frog Lake, was present at that massacre and narrowly escaped the fate that overtook my luckless fellows. For months afterward the unexpected report of a gun put my heart in my mouth. In my dreams painted savages raced yelling after me at early dawn through belts of dark firs, over knolls, across valleys; bullets sang in my ears or buried themselves in my flesh; and I awoke gasping and unable in the first seconds of consciousness to convince myself that it was not all a horrible reality. Even after all these years I do not often care to dwell in memory upon that dreadful time. But always I have felt that it would one day be my part to set down faithfully what I knew and saw and it is in that feeling that this is being written.

Fortunately I am not dependent on memory alone, which might prove fickle. Copious notes concerning the events, preserved from the time of their occurrence, afford a basis for confidence and make the work comparatively easy. The story is a plain one and I shall endeavour to tell it plainly. Neither is there place in it for much play of imagination, and if the dramatic setting, the romantic atmosphere of a wild and lonely land, the smoke of tepees and the native eloquence of men naked and brown as leaves in autumn, which are inseparable from the bald and simple narrative, do not invite the devourer of the sensational and melodramatic in literature the tale is not for him.

A few words at the outset respecting the country and the various bands of Indians inhabiting it will simplify my work and anticipate the necessity for hindering explanations in the body of the narrative.

The settlement of Frog Lake consisted of three main groups of buildings—government, Hudson’s Bay Company and Roman Catholic mission; the store of a trader named George Dill, and a small grist mill in course of construction. There were the dwellings of the Indian agent, farming instructor, interpreter, the North-west Mounted Police barracks, stores, blacksmith shop, stables and outhouses; the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trading shop, store, dwelling and stable; the mission church and dwelling. The mill and residence of its builder, John C. Gowanlock, lay some two miles nearer the Saskatchewan than the main settlement, located at the foot of Frog Lake, a beautiful sheet of water fifteen miles in length, connected with the Saskatchewan through a creek bearing the same name.

The settlement was in the centre of a reservation of several square miles belonging to three bands of Wood Cree Indians. On this reservation, within a radius of three miles, were scattered the houses of the Wood Crees. The region is rolling and diversified. Small lakes sleep in the hollows between the hills; the prairies are interspersed with bluffs of poplar, willow, birch and spruce. Feathered game, rabbits and fish abound; deer, moose and fur-bearing animals are also plentiful in the vicinity. It was due to these natural advantages, combined with the rich soil, that the land had been chosen by the Wood Crees as a home for themselves and their families.

The Cree nation is divided into two branches which, speaking practically the same language, differ widely in character and mode of life. The Plain Crees are better orators, more active, warlike, crafty and savage than their Wood Cree brethren. Big Bear and Poundmaker were both Plain Crees, though Poundmaker was elected a chief only a few years before the rebellion, while Big Bear was an hereditary chief and bore the reputation of having as a young man been the bravest warrior among the Crees. Big Bear was rather short of stature for an Indian and of stronger and more compact build than the ordinary red man. His chest was enormous. He had a large head, thick neck, broad forehead and small cunning deep-set twinkling black eyes. His nose was long and prominent, the nostrils thick and strong, his lips thin and straight and his chin and jaw square and powerful. His general appearance was that of a resolute politic savage and born leader of men.

The Plain Crees were the hereditary enemies of the Blackfeet. Their territory was the great plains between the North and South Saskatchewans, where in bands and mounted they hunted buffalo, fought their battles and whence they made predatory excursions into the countries of neighbouring tribes.

The Wood Crees, on the other hand, were a race of solitary hunters and trappers afoot. They lived in the wooded country north of the North Saskatchewan and seldom ventured on the plains among their more warlike brethren. They were the backbone of the fur trade in the Saskatchewan country and had for years lived at peace with white traders and missionaries. They had acquired some skill in agriculture, which they followed when not engaged in their regular business of trapping furs. The Indian is always a beggar and the Wood Crees possessed this characteristic along with the other tribes.

Still farther to the north, stretching well down toward the Arctic Ocean, lay the territory of another race of fur hunters, the Chippewyan or Athabascan family of tribes.

Having now distinguished the different nations having a place in this narrative, I may begin my story.