WHOOPING IT UP IN THE CYPRESS HILLS

The post is about THIS book.

Not this book

“Whoop-Up Country” is a familiar phrase, appearing on roadside history signs along nearby highways.  But not so many know the sub-title,  “The Canadian-American West, 1865-1885” by Paul F. Sharp, a professor of Western history.  If you look at my chosen “range,” especially now, when the cross-border ecology -- esp. in terms of energy sources -- is more relevant than ever, and yet we confront the same political issues that have made trouble since before the 49th parallel was determined as the border.  In fact, politicians have slammed the border shut again.  I will not be able to cross to Lethbridge (130 miles away and a major city with good shopping and an excellent university) unless I get my passport renewed.

Most histories of the East Slope of the Rockies are either wilderness-focused (most recently) or early-contact conflict tales meant to reassure the present historical society supporters that their ancestors were in the right, or at least on the winning side.  Sharp is not afraid to confront the ambiguity of violence and to include in his accounts the forces from far away.

Some time ago, a friend encouraged me to think about Clare Sheridan, an author, artist and relative-by-marriage to Winston Churchill.  Under the cover of art and romance, this intrepid female had gone to Russia to “case the joint” and befriend major figures by doing busts of them.  Just before WWII she came to Glacier Park, supposedly to work with the art colony run by Winold Reiss.  Indeed, Winold’s brother taught her how to carve logs.  His example portrait of an Indian still stands at the Big Hotel in East Glacier.  But quietly, Clare spent a lot of time with the family of Reiss’ star pupil, Gerald Tailfeathers, who was from Standoff, the Blackfoot reserve in Alberta.  His mother was Irish.  The motive was that WWII was about to begin and Winston wanted to know about the Fenians on the prairie, because to this day they have not given up resistance to England.  They were neutral during that war, but an idea was circulating that if they could capture Canada, possibly with the help of the Metis Red River Nation, they could use that to control England at a time when England was weakened.

Ken Robison, the pre-eminent Montana and Fort Benton historian explains,  “The Fenian Brotherhood was an Irish republican organisation founded in the United States in 1858 by John O'Mahony and Michael Doheny. It was a precursor to Clan na Gael, a sister organisation to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Members were commonly known as "Fenians". O'Mahony, who was a Celtic scholar, named his organisation after the Fianna, the legendary band of Irish warriors led by Fionn mac Cumhaill

All along I’ve been aware of how many Irish were part of Montana, even the horseback statue of Meagher brandishing his sword in front of the state capitol.  Wiki: “He was most notable for recruiting and leading the Irish Brigade, and encouraging support among Irish immigrants for the Union.”  I thought it was partly because of the Boston connection (the banks and mining moguls) and partly because Ulstermen tend to cluster on frontiers. But until I read Sharp’s chapter entitled “Massacre at Cypress Hills” I didn’t realize how strongly the international political sentiments entered into Blackfeet life.

The short version of this tale is that it was not a “massacre.” (The Baker massacre, entirely separate, was absolutely a genocidal massacre.)  But it was a precipitating precursor, entangled with Fort Benton where merchandizing tried to both evade and profit from crime.  (Meagher, the first territorial governor of Montana was lost overboard from a boat anchored on the levee and never found again.)  By the time in question, the controlling interests of the Hudson’s Bay Company had pretty much ended with the wiping out of beavers.  Bison hide hunters with new accurate long guns and wolvers with strychnine were roving the land, interfering with the tribes.  The big preoccupation was stealing horses back and forth.  The little obsession was whiskey and all sides craved it.  In a time of short lives and epidemic disease, it was one of the few ways to get a bit of relief.  Even the judicious Clark, like a ship captain, had given out a bit of “grog” as celebration and reward.  

The next influential man in this turmoil is “Colonel John J. Donnelly.” http://fortbenton.blogspot.com/2012/01/larger-than-life-frontier-character.html

Ken Robison says:  “Frontier Fort Benton was a town of colorful characters, but they broke the mold with John J. Donnelly. In the span of six decades, Colonel Donnelly fought with distinction through the Civil War, led Irish Fenian Army invasions of Canada, led a civilian army in the Nez Perce War, served as Fenian agitator, Louis Riel advisor, attorney, county clerk and recorder, and probate judge, and was elected Speaker of the Montana House of Representatives.”  

He tried three times to raise a Fenian force to invade Canada, working his way West and finally connecting with Louis Riel.  (I haven’t gotten to the Nez Perce yet, but Vollman’s major work, “The Dying Grass” is beside my reading chair.)  And he was very much involved in the Cypress Hills “massacre,” which was more accurately described as a series of skirmishes, some in unsettled country and some in the unsettled courts of Fort Benton and Alberta.  Much of the latter dynamics had to do with fear of Fenian politics.  It’s complex, largely undocumented, and -- in any case -- I lost my interest in history largely because it was all dates, personalities and military events like these, so  if you like that sort of thing, Ken Robison is your excellent guide.  In this period it’s all swords and horses.  

Robison again:  “In 1866 together with many other Irish Civil War veterans Colonel Donnelly joined the Fenian movement to invade Canada to punish the English for their occupation of Ireland. The Fenians dreamed of capturing Canada, forcing the English to free Ireland in exchange for return of Canada. A thousand strong force of Fenian troops took the field in June, 1866, crossed the Niagara River into Ontario, defeated a company of Queen’s Own Rifles of Toronto, and captured Fort Erie. Shortly afterward the Battle of Pigeon Hill practically ended this outbreak. In this battle Col. Donnelly had 200 men in his command, and was able to hold his position from 9 o’clock a. m. until sundown, with 2,300 men opposing him. He had twelve men killed and seventeen wounded, with Donnelly among the wounded. He was captured, but escaped, and a large reward was offered for him.”  In the end he committed suicide.

Canada deployed the mounties about this time and things settled down, comparatively, but the political forces still linger.  When I taught in Cut Bank for those ill-fated few months. there was an Irish citizen high school student who became disgusted with the way I ran the classroom, gathered up his books and stalked out, declaring he came for an education.  I don’t know what the administration did with him, but he got away with one of my best ecological histories of Ireland.  The American rabble was nonplussed.  They came to be athletic heroes and were succeeding rather well.  This student had recently inherited land in Ireland and probably went back there.  He wore the band-collared pin-striped flannel shirts associated with Ireland.

I had not realized how many Irish studies classes are offered in Missoula, but I’m hoping that one of them will revive this material and get a bit more clarity about it while local paper trails and people like Robison, who is retired, still exist accessibly.  Also, it is way past time to realize that the Blackfeet people and land have been part of the story from the beginning.  I’ll keep you posted as I follow the trail that Sharp laid down.

ON AN IDYLLIC DAY IN METIS COUNTRY

"Many Tender Ties"  Women carry the heritage.

June 5, 2015, on the Montana East-Front High-Line was as idyllic as this place gets.  In fact, it was almost exactly like June 5, 1961, when my parents and I visited -- heading from my graduation at Northwestern University with a BS in Speech Education (actually theatre) back to home. We were on the way through Glacier Park and stopped at the Museum of the Plains Indian.  I got out of the car, where I’d been sulking the whole way, stood there in fragrance and said, “Just throw out my stuff.  I’m gonna live right here.”  And I did, at least for more than a decade.

In 2015, now old and living in Valier just off the rez, it was warm enough to drive with my elbow out the window and a big enough occasion to wear a silk shirt and a straw hat.  I was going to listen to a talk by Nicholas Vrooman who has just finished a study contracted by the Little Shell Tribe, which the US government refuses to recognize.  (The state of Montana does recognize them.) The talk was a redacted pictorial slide version of Nick's book, “The Whole Country was ‘One Robe’”: The Little Shell Tribe's America," funded by the State of Montana.  He is not an anthropologist but a folklorist.  The distinction is lost on me, but I wonder whether there is such a thing as salvage folklore.  Salvaging “folk” instead of ceremonial objects as in “salvage anthropology.”

blooming chokecherries

Going north up the Old North Trail, now called Highway 89, one travels along the the Rockies as people and animals have done for millennia, moving in swirls and cycles through the seasons.  I think that at the low altitude the berries of several sorts are blooming now.  The good thing about living on this long slope is that as the summer heightens, the berries develop a little higher and will bloom a little later, extending the season.  

There are two kinds of “refugia” in this country.  One is the volcanic mountains out in the middle of the prairie that were never entirely scraped by the glaciers and therefore still harbor pre-glacier species and a cool place for summer lodges.  The other is the many-fingered east slope where valleys reach back into the cordillera, offering shelter for hunted folk, esp. the Metis, the mixed people -- down south they might be called Meztizo or even Creole. 

Little Shell and his council.

Mostly they’ve been thought of as “white-and” -- Indian hyphenated French, Scots, African, Irish and English.  As they were pushed out of their previous places in a turbulent and greedy Europe, they wandered into the prairies inventing new things (the Red River carts with two giant wheels that could handle prairie travel -- Nick calls them the equivalent of pickups and showed a photo of Sitting Bull in front of his lodge with four “pickups” parked nearby, one for each of his wives.) and improvising to make up for losses, dressing in wool “citizen’s clothes” because there was no more buckskin or buffalo robes.

Gradually they sorted themselves out along a continuum so that one photo showed three brothers, each at a different point between “Indian” and “white”.  The mixed people were inevitable because men came without wives and found females among the indigenous.  They brought fiddles and jigging, finger-woven sashes and beards, so that all those things are part of life in Heart Butte, near here and one of those valley refugia.  The smooth hairless full-blood Blackfeet called them “hairy noses.”

Charlie Russell wore one of these.

Pickup of the Plains

The spectrum of indigeneity was overlain by a spectrum of economic opportunity.  Nick’s talk explained the nature and self-declared identity of the small groups who traveled and settled together and why some settled into poverty that made dump grounds into a source of survival and some assimilated, building nice homes and dressing well.  Dominant whites judged them according to their prosperity.  They thought in categories: tribes, nations, affiliations, but not all these mixed people even considered such distinctions.  They were busy staying alive.

So the government decided on a strategy they have managed ever since to keep secret, knowing it was scandalous.  They sent out the “buffalo soldiers” (black cavalrymen produced by the Civil War) to circle through all Montana communities big enough to have dump grounds or shanty towns, to round up the people -- hundreds of them -- and push them into Canada at least as far as Lethbridge.  The money allocated for transportation was as usual not enough, so the People ended up on foot being herded across the vast land in the wind and sun.  It was a genocide.  No one knows how many died.

Hill 57 near Great Falls

Of course, many of them managed to escape and slip back “home,” fueling the resistance that became the Red River Rebellion and ended in the hanging of the leaders, including the extraordinary visionary named Louis Riel.  Many “Blackfeet” names are from those people.

Nick’s slides started way back at first contact with drawings of people and communities and worked forward through photographs until he was naming the grandparents of those in the room.

This museum is not a patronizing white institution teaching about the curiosities of the Red Man, though it was founded on assumptions about Blackfeet crafts.  Nor is it an AIM-powered demonstration of emotion.  Gregg Paisley is from the half of the tribe that lives in diaspora, pulled away by the World War II need for workers and much transformed by Internet technology.  http://www.americanindianpartnership.com/the-blackfeet.html is meant to support friendship.  One way to avoid the stigmatizing of “mixedness” is to keep on mixing, celebrating the richness of what is sometimes called “thick description.”  

Another way is by adding image to print.  This museum has specialized in lifting up Indian artists.  Below, I scanned-in the work of Louis Still Smoking, the current exhibitor.  The manager of the art scene in the museum is David Dragonfly, an artist himself.  I know these families though it’s been fifty years so I mix up individuals.  David’s mother, Dorothy Dragonfly, I confused with Delores Butterfly, whom I taught in 1961 when she was in the Seventh Grade.  She herself became a teacher.  But David recognized some of the names: Gerald Butterfly, Geraldine his twin.  He knew I felt real relationship.

After the talk Nick and I walked across to the “gambling den,” Glacier Peaks Casino, to sit in the sun and gossip.  Along came a “character” intent on sharing his part of the movement to revitalize the Blackfeet Language.  “Oki,” he said, and in Blackfeet welcomed us.  “You understand what I said?”  I did.  He was staggering drunk and transparently leading up to asking for money.

“What’s your name?” I asked.  He turned out to be the son of Alfred Guardipee and he’d mistaken us for strangers.  Alfred was also in my classes that first year, called “Small Fry” then, and part of a sort of spontaneous family out at boarding school.  They traveled together and protected each other.  There was adult “supervision” but that always turns into “us against them.”  They left their imprint on me in ways I didn’t even recognize.

Nick knows the family names and origins of almost everyone on the big prairie spread, not just the Blackfoot Nation but the one next to the east, mostly Chippewa/Cree/Assiniboine.  Plus the white settlers.  It’s a jigsaw puzzle except that the pieces don’t come to rest.  Darrell Kipp used to call the moving forces “the hydraulics of the prairie.”  Of course, they fit into the hydraulics of the planet, where we are all fish following currents.

It is to the credit of Montana Humanities that they have pulled Nick Vrooman into their speaker bureau and made him available to everyone across Montana.  Metis have always been moving out of consciousness, not like the scattered “sheep” cumulus that filled the sky yesterday -- more like the thin silk sliding shadows they make against the land.  The Metis learned to keep their heads down in order to survive.  But that’s over now.  Mostly.

The cover image of the boy is by Louis Still Smoking.  Dorothy Still Smoking was also in those first classes I taught.  Dorothy earned a doctorate 

and presented her thesis at a conference in London, England.

"THE ORENDA" by James Boyden: A Reflection

A quote from "The Walrus," a Canadian on-line magazine:

“There is a long history of writers being, in some way, leaders in society,” [John Ralston] Saul says. “Not that they necessarily write political books. It’s more that a great writer has a compelling belief system.”  [Saul] toured the country with [James] Boyden to promote the series ["Extraordinary Canadians"], and noted his authority and gravitational pull within the First Nations community. “Aboriginal kids see him as a role model,” he adds.   

"Margaret Atwood directs me to the chapter on First Peoples in Survival, her influential study of Canadian literature. The book, published in 1972, envisioned a time when First Nations Canadians would not be “made into projections of something in the white Canadian psyche, a fear or a wish.” Instead, they would be “considered in and for themselves.” 

Citing Alberta novelist Rudy Wiebe as an underappreciated interim figure, she says she predicted that “Joseph Boydens would arise” to tell those stories fairly and fully. Atwood sat on the Giller jury that chose not to short-list "The Orenda", a decision she prefers not to discuss.”

-- from an essay about Boyden in “The Walrus”

John Ralston Saul, writer, publisher, president of International PEN

Amazing.  Saul, Boyden’s publisher, actually went on the book tour with him.  Saul commissioned Boyden to write a book about Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont for his series “Extraordinary Canadians.”  I’ve just ordered it.   

Here’s Allan Gregg in conversation with Boyden.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVpwAb37voI

Usually book manuscripts are said to go to publishers “over the transom” on the way in, but this time Darrell Reimer (AKA Whiskey Prajer) has more-or-less thrown two books at me “over my transom,” both of them bound, reviewed, celebrated, and embroiled in the eternal obsession of Canada with itself and its origins.  And they happen to transect something I think about, which may be why this blog accumulates middle-aged men who have a “young man” vibe and who write, but not necessarily successfully in terms of money.  They tend to obsess about heroism and mysticism. They are quite willing to tell me all about it, so I do reflect.  (Am I Margaret Atwood?  In part.  But where are the voices of the aboriginal kids these white folks want to tell us about?)

Gabriel Dumont

Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont are vital to this part of the world, since Red River Nation people took refuge on the US side, some of them among the Blackfeet.  Riel is the visionary, the sometimes crazy mystic, and Dumont is the guy who knows how to negotiate.  Regina at the time was something like St. Louis at the same time, except that up there the fur buyers had to go overland to Hudson’s Bay so weren’t as interested in bison hides as in high-value small creatures, like mink or beaver.  But this particular group of Metis -- who lived on plots that had one small riverfront side for water access, since water was a highway, and then acreage extending away (like St. Louis) -- wanted to own their own land as a group with a boundary within what was just changing from a Hudson’s Bay property into proper provinces of Canada.  They didn't intend to displace Canada so much as claim their own space within it, but the authorities saw them as terrorists.

Western people, barely identifying as Canadian, were sympathetic, but the Protestant Anglo power structure -- paranoid as usual -- set out to destroy them and seemed to succeed, though the Metis only went underground.  Or to Montana.  The many French names around here are traces of them. Riel was their saint, Dumont was their rational, effective general.  Joseph Kinsey Howard told an early version of the story in "Strange Empire."  My other tie to this story is that my paternal family homesteaded in Manitoba and were briefly wealthy in Brandon.  My father’s bachelor’s degree was from the U of Manitoba.  No one in that family ever even mentioned the Red River rebellion.  I'm not sure they knew about it, but how could they not?

In his youth I think my father had literary pretensions, though he never carried through on them or had any notion of how to get hold of ideas to turn them into something real.  They say that oldest daughters try to fulfill the goals of their fathers.  (Or was it mothers?  Not in my case -- though she tried hard to be the high-status respected person that HER father wanted to be.)  John  Pinkerton was a defiant Irishman as opposed to my defiant Scots paternal great-grandfather, Archibald Strachan.

The Canadian authorities, extensions of England, had more animosity against Irish and Scots than against the French Catholic Metis.  “The Orenda” is about war between two huge aboriginal nations -- Huron and Iroquis -- which a Jesuit priest walks into and ends up influencing, both in history and "The Orenda".  I got that off a review.  I’m finding this book very unpleasant to read.  (One can imagine boys reading it and exclaiming, "Jeez!" and "Gaw!")  The introductory ordeal is about capture of a Jesuit in winter -- twenty pages written in an airport concourse.  It's convincing, but last winter went to thirty-below, it was not comfortable, and I’ve thought about it enough.  Anyway, I’m not big on Woodland Tribes and their involvement in the entering wedge of Europe, warriors fighting on both sides, sometimes determining outcomes.  Too bad they didn’t have guns, horses, walls and flags.  

Recommending Rudy Wiebe to me as an exemplar of writing about First Nations backfires.  I’ve met him.  Here's his voice:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOM597JMexs   He explains that his version of Mennonite comes through Russia -- Darrell Riemer’s version is gentler and more American in the sense of North America.  Wiebe in person is arrogant, stiff, opinionated, thinks he owns indigenous people and is incredibly naive about women.  That IS Ukrainian Russian.  Darrell is farther to the east.  I don’t know his particulars, but I certainly prefer his style.   I'd love to spend some time with John Ralston Saul.

Maybe some of this stuff accumulates into a certain kind of man created by expectations of place, family and self.  How heroic does a man have to be?  How famous?  How rich?  What counts? How much does a man have to suffer?  We sit in our Christian churches pondering an example splayed in front of us.

I suppose the sub-type of these men that I’ve known best have been grandiose narcissists.  (I don’t see why that has had to be pejorative and stigmatized.  It's a feminist obsession.)  Coping with such men at the very least keeps a person on their toes, but they are hard on male children unless the man has reached some kind of moral center in himself, possibly based on mysticism of some kind.  Then they attract boys the way iron filings cling to magnets, so naturally and so irresistibly.  In my opinion, Bob Scriver never did reach this moral center, but he certainly pressed me hard to find my own -- not on purpose -- and maybe that was part of his search.  He hoped I'd teach him.  Pretty tough since he needed to be always right, which is a self-defeating way to go.  In the end, I abandoned morality, at least the conventional version. Mine is much stricter.

I'm attracted to competent people.  He was a skilled, focused, powerful person who pushed through barriers.  I suppose he was like "Dumont".  His French-Canadian brother-in-law, the one who posed for the Scriver Jesus portraits, was more of a "Riel."  Two men with strong ties but not brothers go back to the beginning of being human.  Bob Scriver and James Welch Sr. as kids exploring the railroad snowshed and nearly being squashed; Tom and Huck; Gilgamesh, in tales from both Old Testament and New; the man who became friends with the beaver's son.   The story seed grows some powerful adventures, some of them deadly ordeals.  This still doesn’t quite explain to me why critics would admire Boyden’s description of a man’s frozen testicles in an agonizing restoration of circulation.  But then, I didn’t really want to know about Margaret Mead’s small waist and wide bum, either.  It’s as though writers can’t write about “primitive” people without telling us the things forbidden in polite society.

Is this how to be a model for aboriginal kids?  Oh, just NOTICING THAT THEY EXIST is a beginning.  They still today freeze their balls, get captured and knifed, go into visions, live off rage, and form close relationships with other boys.  But I don’t think that’s what James Ralston Saul had in mind.  It’s just an effective selling point.

Aboriginals are really into the hospitality industry.

Of course, the great hue and cry about whether Boyden is “Indian enough” is underway, but it makes a lot more sense up north where the tribal people still have an obvious ethnographic identity instead of just a membership entitlement card.  For Boyden to recover some of the past farther east and south -- where today to be Mohawk is to be an ironworker on skyscrapers in Manhattan -- can’t be a bad thing.  To recapture the massive injustice and pure greed, the terrible suffering imposed on innocents on both sides, is probably beyond any writer.  An exercise in grandiose narcissism.  But, you know, some good work can come out of the attempt.  And it may be helpful when the great reconfiguration of nations that I see coming actually lets All Peoples sit at the table.

THE RIEL REBELLION ENDS

My UPS man is a Salois but his great-grandfather’s name was Toussaint and he came to Montana’s high-line in flight after the disastrous sequence of events that ended the attempt of the Red River people to break away from Canada, first in 1870 when it was “Rupert’s Land” and then later when it had become a British Commonwealth country, in order to form their own nation. In the preceding century, the French trappers who came to the prairies had married Cree women and created Metis families. The classic account of the people, “Strange Empire,” was written by one of their own, Joseph Kinsey Howard, a key member of the Montana literary community, who had a cabin up Blackleaf Canyon near Choteau though he employed as a newspaperman in Great Falls.

Salois had bet a friend, another amateur historian, that the the events of Duck Lake and later Frog Lake had happened in the early spring of 1885 rather than 1886, because Toussaint had taught Salois directly about what had happened. He wanted me to document that he was right, so I got down my copy of “Strange Empire” and confirmed that the year was 1885. Over a century ago and yet still bright in some minds, though others have never heard of the Red River Nation nor Louis Riel, their religiously obsessed leader, nor Gabriel Dumont, Riel’s cousin, general and protector. Metis names are well-represented on the Blackfeet rolls, because they took refuge in St. Mary’s valley, in Heart Butte, and other niches and pockets of the area. Riel himself taught school at St. Peter’s Mission School near Sun River.

Last night my movie was Gore Vidal’s “Lincoln,” gently told with Mary Tyler Moore in a sympathetic version of Mary Todd Lincoln and Sam Waterston as a martyr Lincoln. That was on my mind when I sat down to read Howard’s account of Duck Lake and Frog Lake. (So was Gaza.) According to Vidal, Lincoln’s problem was generals who would not fight relentlessly, as is necessary to win a war. But Riel’s problem was his religious conscience which made him urge restraint on Dumont, a man who knew how to fight without giving quarter. When Dumont could nearly taste victory, Riel would worry about the number of dead and call him off. Dumont was only restrained by his love and admiration for Riel.

Catholic by upbringing and education, Riel was caught between breaking away and making peace with the standing order -- he was “half-assimilated.” He tried to see himself as a part and representative of his people, whom he called the Exovidat, a word he invented to mean “of the flock.” But ovine, sheep, are not suited for warfare. He proclaimed universal salvation in the form of a time-limited hell and tried to make his local priests join the movement. When they were defiant, he declared himself a priest and said the Holy Spirit had left the Roman Pope.

Howard felt there were three causes for the defeat of the Rebellion: alienating the priests, restraining Dumont, and terrifying the Anglo-Saxons who had begun to filter in to the trading posts and early settlements. He also points out that if the Blackfoot/Blackfeet (both sides of the line) had not been devastated by starvation (no more buffalo) and disease (small pox) and if they had backed the rebellion, there might very well have been a new nation brought forth upon this continent. The Fenians (Irish diaspora) were very interested in all this and might have participated.

The numbers involved were very few, in the dozens on both sides, but the archetypal pattern was that of many rebellions. Discontent, denial on the part of those who should respond, an end to patience, desperation, and blind fear. Then, violence more like train wrecks than battles. When Father Moulin was threatened in Carlton before the action began, he said, “My country is the universe. I am not afraid.” Would that more people thought that way.

At Stobart (Duck Lake) a small community was invaded and the Mounted Police and volunteers were put to flight, one-fourth of them killed. A supply depot and store there was so well-stocked that it took the invaders two days to remove the commodities. Major Crozier, a seasoned Mountie officer, set out with 56 Mounties and 43 Prince Albert volunteers. (PA wanted all forces kept as close to PA as possible to protect that larger town.) They had a seven-pound cannon. (Is that the weight of the cannon or the weight of the ammunition? My guess is the latter. I’m not good at battle stuff.) They were ambushed and thrashed, while Louis Riel, horseback on a ridge just out of reach, waved a huge cross from a church and exhorted his people. Gabriel Dumont’s skull was creased but he staunched the blood with snow and continued with the help of a brother. The wounded and dead were dealt with in “civilized” fashion, that is, helped and returned. Crozier evacuated Carlton and withdrew to PA, going through a narrows perfect for another ambush, which Dumont itched to perform, but Riel forbade it.

Canada had no Western military force since they had not participated in the Prairie Clearances. The Mounties were police. Moving army to Saskatchewan from both coasts seemed impossible because the Canadian Pacific Railroad was not complete. But the weather was still cold enough that temporary tracks were laid right on the ice of rivers and over the snows of the foothills, the men in open cars with short windbreak sides and straw bedding. In the worst gaps, they had to get out and walk many miles in temperatures well below zero. Their suffering was intense and sometimes fatal.

Riel and Dumont split along the assimilation line, you could say. Riel was constantly preoccupied with being civilized while Dumont wanted to “fight like an Indian.” Now Poundmaker’s Cree people heard the news and wanted to join in. Assiniboine near Battleford lit the fuse by attacking and Poundmaker’s uncontrollable young men joined in. About five hundred whites, maybe three hundred of them women and children, forted up and watched as their pleasant and nicely equipped little homes were trashed and burned. Then surrounding farmsteads were destroyed, fires burning in the night. The warriors returned to stake out the fort and wait for the occupants to starve, but didn’t know the stores were enough for three months plus there was access to livestock across a river.

On April 2 at Frog Lake two Oblate fathers were observing mass when Protestant settlers began to slip in. Then in strode “L’Esprit Errant,” Wandering Spirit, “vain, ambitious and brutal” in his full battle regalia, a man feared even by Big Bear, though Big Bear’s son, Imasees, was his deputy in leading the young and disaffected warriors. Wandering Spirit hated whites. At the end of the Mass, he and his men herded the whites out towards Agency buildings. Quinn, the agent, tried to oppose them and Wandering Spirit shot him in the face. Chaos and murder ensued. The interpreter, a half-blood, saved two women by hiding them in a wagon and getting them out of there. Boundaries between rebels and loyalists were blurred because so many people were of mixed blood as well as mixed allegiances. Friendships crossed the lines. Think Gaza.

The commander of the nearest fort, which was that in name only, was Inspector Francis Jeffrey Dickens, son of the novelist born about a month after the publication of “A Christmas Carol.” He was described as “secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.” He was small, red-bearded, precise and gloomy. When he was small, his father had dubbed him the “chicken stalker.” He stammered and was going deaf. Previously he had served in India with the Bengal Police. He set about organizing the defense of the few flimsy buildings, putting even a couple of teenaged girls on sentry duty. One was fascinated to discover she could spit on her gunsight, rub it with a phospor match, and cause it to glow in the dark.

Big Bear and his band demanded the surrender of the whites and got it, except that the Mounties slipped away in a scow they had built. (Dickens, a year later and out of the Force, died of a heart attack in Illinois.) Meanwhile, the Plains Crees and Woods Cree, related but separate groups, herded the forty-plus captives back and forth over the prairie while they raided supply depots. The Plains Crees suggested killing the captives and joining Poundmaker. The Woods Crees refused. Their women hid the young white women from the rambunctious young men. Finally the Woods Crees set the whites free with enough food and horses to get to Battleford.

Thus ends this part of the story, which goes on, even today reverberating into the politics of Montana as well as prairie Canada. Buy the book. Maybe send copies to Gaza. Or Obama.