"Firewater" by Hugh Dempsey

A successful Browning businessman recommended that I read “Firewater: the Impact of he Whisky Trade on the Blackfoot Nation,” by Hugh A. Dempsey. (Fifth House Ltd., 1511-1800 4 Street SW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, T2S 255. Copyright 2002. ISBN 1-894004-96-5) For him and for me many of the stories in this book have the status and electricity of gossip. Many of the names are familiar, belonging to people we know. They are generations beyond whiskey-trading now, or even any kind of drug dealings, though methamphetamine is doing much the same thing now as “firewater” did in the 19th century.

What is hard to grasp is that such destructive substances don’t get their power to destroy from the action of the substance itself -- though obviously the persons who use drugs and alcohol are soon destroyed -- but rather from the economic and political situations that make them uncontrollable. In this case Dempsey is explaining and describing the impact on the western Canadian plains just after the Hudson’s Bay Company pulled out -- in part because the area was stripped of the beaver they were after, in part because beaver hats went out of fashion anyway, and in part because their grip on trade depended on pushing a constant oversupply of alcohol. It wasn’t even always alcohol -- often diluted with nasty and poisonous substances, the same as modern cocaine is cut with baby powder and marijuana is mixed with catnip. To test alcohol content, the Blackfeet held a match to the liquid -- if it burned, it passed. Intoxication flambee.

The vacuum of law and order created by Hudsons Bay closing up shop was not immediately addressed by the new nation of Canada. Labeled Assiniboia, it was one of those “here be dragons” parts of the continent. It didn’t take long for the entrepreneurs and dubious characters pushing their way up the Missouri into the heart of Blackfeet country to realize that this was an opportunity.

Traders on the Montana side had not been reluctant to depend upon alcohol-based trade in spite of laws -- depending upon the subverting of judges and juries, playing off the territory of Montana against the federal government, and moving the reservation boundary around until no one was really very sure where it was. Since arrests depended on whether the traders were in Indian country, this was an easy out for juries.

The real point of the story is that there was finally a bad enough incident of murderous violence, called the Cypress Hills Massacre, that political pressure forced the Canadians to grasp the nettle. They convened the legendary Royal Canadian Mounted Police, gave them the power to arrest, sentence and detain traders -- to guarantee it would really happen -- and to impound trade goods in payment for fines imposed. (The first thing that had to be impounded was enough buffalo robes to make coats and moccasins so the Mounties wouldn’t freeze. The second thing was hay for the horses.)

Mounties always look wonderful in images, their red coats and neat hats made elegant with braid and buttons. The design changed somewhat over time. (Part of the Scriver artifacts bought by the Edmonton Provincial Museum consisted of a collection of Mountie uniforms, which are included in Scriver’s book, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains.”) The men themselves are always presented as young, vigorous, competent and impressively mustachioed. No doubt it was a little harder to look that way when they were struggling through hip-deep snow against a blinding wind, unsure of where they were headed -- some vague description of a whiskey fort. But they were up to the job and soon the whiskey traders were pushed back down the Whoop Up Trail where they fizzled a little while more and then caved in to the inevitable.

The Conrads were involved, though mostly in the background -- they were rich enough to sub-contract the risky stuff. Hazlett’s descendents show up again in Rosier’s notes. Weatherwax descendents turn out to have a flair for words -- Marvin teaches Blackfeet at Blackfeet Community College. Joe Kipp’s namesakes one way or another include Woody Kipp, the journalist, and Darrell Kipp, founder of the Piegan Institute as well as dozens of other industrious, talented Kipps.

Dempsey does not spare the reader the gory details of one shooting, knifing, exploding, strychnine-poisoning, freezing, and drowning after another, because that’s the legacy of the substance. When I came to Browning in 1961, it was going on, and when I returned in 1990, it was going on. I won’t live long enough to read the stories of the Napi Bar, the Businessman’s Club or Minyards, much less the Town Pump. The main difference from the stories in “Firewater” is that a horse could get a drunk home safely, but a car doesn’t always. Innocents were killed -- women, children, old folks -- then and now.

Only in the last decades has the tide begun to turn against drunkenness with dry-out programs, AA meetings, and mental health support. Now the “rum runners” are much fewer. No doubt that’s part of the reason this book can be published to the approval of a Browning businessman who is a tribal member. The tribal council now has enough support to close down liquor sales during Indian Days and other key events. The grounds are closed to alcohol, even if it means searching cars.

What haunted me all through this book was the ghosts of all the gifted young people I’ve taught who died of alcohol-related causes. And even more vividly (if less painfully) than that, the heart-breaking performance of the great Canadian actor Graham Greene in “Skins,” the powerful movie based on the book by Adrian Louis. For once we could see the heartbreak under the jokes and clowning around.

My paternal grandmother was a devoted member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union because she lost a brother to alcoholism. It’s not limited to Indians by any means. For a while it was a devil’s partnership enabled by a vacuum in law and order and and an excess of simple commercial greed that still probably haven’t really been addressed.