Read Ebook: The Book of the West The story of western Canada its birth and early adventures its youthful combats its peaceful settlement its great transformation and its present ways by Kennedy Howard Angus

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Passing Mexico by, other bands thread their way along the isthmus of Panama, or skirt the coast till they come to South America, and there they settle and grow into a nation, high up among the mountains of Peru. Here also the people build cities, and roads, and aqueducts, and temples adorned with sheets of dazzling gold. They farm, and spin, and weave. They tame the wild llama, and make it their beast of burden; its cousin, the wild alpaca, too, they raise in flocks for its wool.

Wild tribes of men continue streaming down from the north. Some of them conquer the Mexicans, and settle down among them and learn their arts. Some hover on the outskirts of the new civilization for a while, and learn how to spin and weave and raise corn, but then wander on to the east along the Gulf of Mexico, or north up the Mississippi. A group of these tribes, finding their way at last into the St. Lawrence Valley, settle down there and join forces in the great Iroquois alliance of the "Six Nations." Their women grow corn, melons, beans and pumpkins, but the favorite occupation of the men is fighting, as the first white Canadians will discover to their cost in the seventeenth century. Between fights, they play a magnificent game of their own invention, which we call lacrosse. The goals are the two villages in which the teams live.

There was one tribe that never went south at all. When they landed in Alaska these folk struck inland and wandered away to the east, past Hudson Bay, some of them spreading then through Labrador, others crossing the St. Lawrence and never stopping till the Atlantic rolled at their feet in Nova Scotia, where a remnant of them may be seen to-day. Some of them had fallen out at various points along the way, finding hunting grounds that suited them, and others turned back to the west, so that the early white fur traders found them scattered all through the forest lands from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the west of Hudson Bay. The Crees, a western branch of this Algonquin stock, were still a woodland folk, although, as they depended mostly for food and shelter on the caribou, they followed the herd in its yearly migrations out of the wood and across the treeless country towards the Bay.

Our fertile prairie was still an unpeopled wilderness, long after a multitude of tribes had spread over the rest of the continent.

What sort of country was this vast empty space, "the granary of the British Empire" to-day?

It is not hard to imagine, for white men are still alive among us who remember it pretty much as it was when the "Indians" first came, a thousand years ago. A great grassy plain dotted with pale anemones in spring, pink roses and white strawberry blossoms in summer; mighty herds of buffalo grazing over it, and wallowing in little pools; parts of it flat, but most of it rolling, up and down, like a sea of earth suddenly stilled after a storm. Poplar bluffs rise here and there, but for hundreds of miles not a tree is to be seen. Two great rivers, the North and South Saskatchewan, have carved deep valleys across from west to east; their water, and that of many smaller rivers, pours into the Manitoban lakes, and out again to lose itself in Hudson Bay. Those lakes, great as they seem, are but the remnants of one vast lake which covered nearly all Manitoba long after the ice-cap had retreated.

Beyond the prairie northward stretches the forest, poplar and willow and birch, tamarack, pine and spruce. North-east the forest dwindles and fades away into the "barren lands," which are not really barren, for countless caribou and musk ox pasture there. North-west, great rivers pour through the forest and away to the Arctic Sea; north-east, more rivers drain out to the Bay.

The plains rise gently for a thousand miles from east to west; so gently that we do not notice the change, till we see the foothills swelling up and the sharp-edged mountains towering high beyond in a heavenly rampart of white and grey. Beyond the prairie, mountains on mountains, range after range, with roaring torrents in deep ravines; wider valleys, and placid lakes reflecting stately trees; the country smoothing down to the north, in a thick cloak of poplar and pine, and sinking in the south-west to a level plain, dark under thronging regiments of giant firs and cedars, along the coast of the western sea.

No voice of man is heard upon the untilled plains; but the land is not silent. The coyote screams and howls. High overhead the wild-goose honks. The air is musical with songs of little birds and gay with their colors. No hand of man is raised to kill; but hunters are busy killing. In the woods, the rabbit squeals as the weasel catches him by the throat. On the prairie, the hovering hawk drops swiftly to seize a gopher. On the lake, the skimming gull darts down and snatches out a fish. In the mountains, the eagle swoops and carries off a marmot; the prowling bear claws at a rotting stump and gobbles down grubs by the mouthful.

Far away in the south, the prairie is invaded by man. Not suddenly, or by a great armed host. Don't imagine that the buffalo-hunting tribes known to our fathers came riding out on to the plains one day in a picturesque and mighty horde, as the invading Tartar host swarmed out over Europe. The first hunter of the plains had never heard of a horse.

This is more likely what happened.

The Indians who settled in the Mississippi Valley were far from "civilized," but they were no longer mere wandering hunters. They hunted deer and beaver and other animals, but they also cultivated the soil, growing corn and beans and squash. They made real homes beside their fields. They stayed there long enough to build great mounds, which are still to be seen, grown over with grass and trees. Some of these mounds are very curiously shaped, like serpents, turtles and other animals, which the people superstitiously reverenced as their protectors. Some of the mounds, however, are like fortifications, high dykes or ridges enclosing great squares of land, large enough to protect whole villages. These needed all the protection they could get, and often more, for the wilder tribes were constantly raiding the weaker.

One night a war party breaks in upon a village of the grain-growers, rushing over the dykes and killing the owners of the fields. A few escape, and scatter in all directions. See! There is one whole family, stealing away through the woods to the west--a man and woman, with deerskins thrown over their shoulders and tied with rawhide thongs around the waist; two naked children trotting behind, and a dog at their heels. They stop when tired out, snatch a few hours' sleep, and flee on again. Day after day they hurry on. Their old hunting ground is left behind, and they slacken the pace, but still they press on to the west. The woods get thinner and thinner, till there is only a fringe of trees in a valley, sheltered from the wind of the plain above. The fugitives keep close to the rivers, where they can be sure of fish and birds and berries to eat.

At last they come to a place where two rivers meet. The narrow valley here spreads out wide; its banks slope more gently, and are covered with brush; but a mile farther on both valleys are narrow again, and almost bare. "This place looks good to me," says the man; "stay here by the river while I go exploring." Climbing through the brush and out of the valley, he stands on the edge of a bare and boundless plain. He shades his keen eyes to see the end of it,--in vain. The gentle waves of turf stretch away--surely to the edge of the world!

"If we go farther," the man says, coming back to his wife, "we shall find nothing to catch; if we go back, we may be caught ourselves. We shall camp here." He takes his bow and arrows to shoot a few rabbits for supper; his wife with a sharp stone axe cuts down branches for a shelter,--and that is the first prairie home.

Time passes. More families come straggling up and join them. There is not enough food for all, and they often go hungry. There are coyotes on the plain, but they run like the wind; and antelopes, but they run like the cyclone. One day, the children climb up to the plain with their little bows and arrows to shoot gophers, but come running down again. They have seen monstrous animals up there, they say. Their father goes up with a spear. Sure enough, there is a herd of shaggy brown beasts grazing on the turf, with huge heads, fierce eyes, short horns and woolly manes. He has been used to hunting deer and moose in the woods, where he could creep silently from tree to tree until he got within easy range. It is quite another matter to attack a herd of fierce-looking buffalo, out on the bare plain where no shelter is. But the temptation is greater than the risk, when other game is scarce or small or hard to catch.

"Let us go boldly out and attack the buffalo in the open," says the brave man. He shouts down to his friends in the valley camp. Two other hunters climb up to where he stands, and together they glide over the prairie, slower and slower as they near the herd, till you can hardly tell they are moving. The buffalo stop grazing, lift their heads, and stare at these two-legged creatures they have never seen before. The men come close, and fling their spears. One spear goes home, and brings down a beast; but the rest of the herd wheel round and thunder away over the sounding turf, carrying two spears with them.

That troubles the hunters, for a good spear-head of sharpened bone or antler takes long to make. Next time, they use bows and arrows, and shoot from a distance; but now all the buffalo get away, with arrows sticking in their tough hides. Many spears and arrows are lost, and every now and then a hunter is killed, for sometimes the desperate animals rush at the men who have attacked them, instead of rushing the other way.

"If we can drive the buffalo off the prairie into the brush," says a thoughtful Indian at last, "they can't run away so fast; and if they run at us we can get behind trees." So the hunters do that. Still, most of the hunted animals get out of the wood again, and escape.

Presently another clever Indian thinks of a better plan. "Let us build a corral in the brush, and drive the beasts into it," he says. So the men cut down trees and make a rough stockade of upright logs, leaving a wide entrance. They manage to drive a herd of buffalo into the corral, and there the poor beasts are crowded together and rush round and round while the hunters behind the trees shoot them down by the score.

There is plenty of food now; too much, in fact. So the Indians just cut out with stone knives the tenderest parts of the meat, the hump and the tongue, and leave the rest to be eaten by coyotes. Some of the lean meat is dried and beaten into powder, and mixed with fat and crushed into bags of skin. This is pemmican, and it keeps a long time, so the tribe has a store of meat to use without hunting.

The buffalo-hunting tribes increase, and spread out over the southern plains. Some of them have never been anything but hunters, in the woods; and whether they have once grown corn or not, they come to despise the corn-growers. The buffalo is their only crop.

Unknown to these southern plainsmen, after a time the plains were invaded from the north as well. Bands of the northern Wood Indians, first perhaps the Blackfeet, long afterwards the Crees, began to creep out on the prairie. Like the southern Sioux, they could not travel fast on land; the Indians had no horses. Ages before the first men came there had been horses here, at first of a dwarfish kind, with three toes. The horse tribe may have had its beginning here and spread over to Asia when the sea between Siberia and Alaska was dry land; but nothing was left of them in all America except their fossil bones.

To be sure, the Indians had dogs; but at first these were only camp-followers, and their only use was to be killed and eaten when better meat was scarce. In the far north, the Eskimo learned to hitch dog teams to a sleigh; and presently the Indians south of them put their dogs in harness, too.

The Wood Indians, living in a country full of lakes and rivers, in summer did all their travelling by canoe. In winter they stayed idle in camp, down in some sheltered valley or forest glade, living in rough shelters or tents of birch-bark or caribou hide. Presently, when they came out into the open to follow the buffalo, they had to leave their canoes behind. They did not like carrying loads on their backs; and one day an Indian, no lazier than the rest, but with more active brains, thought of a new way to make the dogs do that work. They had already been trained to haul toboggans in winter, and sometimes in summer; but the toboggan is a poor sort of cart except when it has smooth snow for its flat surface to glide over. To be sure, the travoy was not very much better, but it was less easily upset, and as the Indian never thought of inventing wheels let us give him all credit for inventing the travoy. You have probably seen it in action,--two poles crossed over the dog's back, and trailing wide apart behind, with cross-pieces to carry the load.

To these Indians spreading slowly over the prairie from the north, the buffalo was everything, as it was to the plainsmen of the south. They made their tents of its skin. They lived on its meat, though when the pemmican gave out and no herd was near they ate rabbit, gopher, beaver, crow, dog, anything and everything they could get. As for vegetable food, they were content with berries and roots, especially the "pomme blanche" or prairie turnip, which the women scraped and dried for winter use. The early explorers found the Mandans of the Missouri growing corn and tobacco, beans and pumpkins, and sunflower--for the seed,--with a hoe made of the buffalo's shoulder-blade and a wooden handle; but the prairie Indians as a whole despised farming.

They hunted the buffalo in the same wasteful way as the southern plainsmen, from whom they probably learnt the trick of driving the beasts into an enclosure. They made some progress in a few of the arts. Many of them tried their hands at pottery; they also plaited bark and other fibres into baskets. They decorated articles of hide with geometrical designs, in paint or porcupine quill; their famous bead-work only came into fashion when white men gave them glass beads in trade. The beaten copper with which they fastened the plaits of their long black hair, they got from tribes who found it on the shore of Lake Superior. They could not write, but they could draw. They drew maps, of their land and water trails, on bits of birch-bark. They painted figures of animals on the outside of their skin tents.

They would hunt a band of other Indians or a herd of buffalo with the same ingenuity and fierce delight. Having spent all their energy in this violent collection of human scalps and buffalo meat, they dropped into idleness. But time did not hang heavy on their hands. They were never bored by lack of occupation; they enjoyed doing nothing, as a cow enjoys chewing the cud. They smoked dry willow-bark, when they could not get tobacco, in carved stone pipes. They used no strong drink, till the white man brought it to them. They did not lack the pleasures of imagination; endless and agreeable were the hours they spent telling and hearing tales of enchantment and mythical legends of the past, many of which I have borrowed for my "New World Fairy Book."

ONE DAY a strange piece of news came to an Indian prairie camp. The men and women, squatting on the grass, and smoking their willow-bark, discussed the great news, and even the children stopped their play to listen and wonder.

A new kind of man had been seen, far away in the south,--a light-skinned man.

How did the news come? The scattered Indian tribes had little to do with each other, except when they fought, and in a fight they generally killed all the men they conquered who did not escape. But they often kept the women and made wives of them.

It may have been one of these women, captured by some raiding party in the south, who told the prairie Indians the story her tribe had heard in the same way from some tribe still farther south. The story was that a lot of these "white" men had come sailing across the big water in monstrous canoes with wings; once ashore, they had come riding over the country on great four-legged animals, as swift and terrible as buffalo, though not so shaggy. Nearly all the tribes had an old story about an agreeable fair-skinned god who had once lived among them and had promised to come back, so the newcomers were at first believed to be that god and his brothers. But they were not at all agreeable, for they took possession of the land and killed the Indians resisting them. They had terrible weapons,--tubes that breathed fire, and shining swords that cut off a head at a blow.

Fortunately for our Indians, these mysterious conquering white-skins never came up to the north. But some of their animals did. Running wild, little herds of horses found their way up at last to the prairie. They were hard to catch; but if buffalo could be driven into a corral, so could they. It was not very long before the Indians were breaking and riding them; and from that time the tribesmen chased the buffalo on horseback instead of on foot.

Presently news came that more white men or gods had appeared,--this time in the east.

Here is what had happened.

While the early forefathers of our "Indians" were spreading north through Asia and wandering over into America, our own forefathers came wandering and hunting west through Europe. Some of them came to the very edge of the sea before they finally settled down, and learned to plow, and gradually joined together to form nations. Five hundred years ago, three of the strongest nations had grown up on the shores of the Atlantic, in Spain, France, and England. They, like other nations in Europe, used to get spices and incense, pearls and precious stones, ivory and silk, from India and the farther East. But the way to India was now barred by the Mahommedans. The goods that they allowed to pass were heavily taxed on the way, and became very dear.

Most people up to then believed that the earth was flat; but some knew it must be round, and one of these was the Italian named Christopher Columbus. He persuaded the King and Queen of Spain in 1492 to lend him three little ships, and with these he sailed away westward to find a shorter and cheaper trade route to India. He discovered a number of islands, and thinking they were close to India he called them the West Indies and their people Indians,--a mistaken name which has stuck to the native tribes of America ever since. More Spaniards followed; some of them landed on the American mainland, in Mexico; and it was their runaway horses which found their way up to our Western plains.

The English, years before Columbus, had sent ships exploring far out into the Atlantic, in search of a new land; but they did not find it. Five years after Columbus had found the West Indies, however, the King of England sent out ships under another Italian, Cabot, who took a more northerly route. That expedition came in 1497 to Labrador, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; so the English were the first white men to discover the mainland of America in modern times. We know now that five hundred years earlier the Norsemen, after settling in Iceland and Greenland, visited Nova Scotia or New England; but they probably sailed away again very soon. Some of them may have been captured and "adopted" into Indian tribes. At any rate they vanished, and their adventure was forgotten. European fishermen, too, had been gathering harvests of cod from the Newfoundland banks long before Columbus was born, and they probably landed; but they wrote no accounts of what they had seen, and their stories attracted little notice.

The French explorers came soon after the English; one of them, Jacques Cartier, of St. Malo, in Brittany, sailed up the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534, and got as far as Montreal on his next voyage in 1535. Another great Frenchman, Champlain, founded at Quebec, in 1608, the first Canadian settlement which has had an unbroken history to our own time. For a long while, however, the towns of "New France" on the St. Lawrence were little more than fur-trading posts, as fur was the only Canadian product that any one in Europe thought of much value.

The real object of the first French explorers was the same as that of Columbus, to find a short cut to Asia. Even the fur trade, rich as it might be, was nothing compared to the trade they hoped to carry on with India and China. Jacques Cartier, when he first sailed into the mouth of the St. Lawrence, hoped he had discovered the "North-west Passage" through America, never dreaming that the western ocean was three thousand miles away across a whole wide continent.

To explore the West, then, was the ambition of more than one brave Frenchman who left the new settlements behind and paddled up the St. Lawrence,--not to find homes for their people in this new world, but to find a waterway through to the Pacific. In 1666 one of these explorers, La Salle, set out from Montreal for the Great Lakes. Missionaries and fur traders had already reached Lake Huron, and Indians had told them of a great river, the Mississippi, which La Salle thought might flow into the Pacific. He reached first the Ohio and then the Illinois, but did not follow them to their junction with the great river; for he learned, to his great disappointment, that the fur traders had already discovered it to flow south instead of west.

La Salle gave up the idea of reaching China, and, on another adventurous journey, went down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. He proclaimed the sovereignty of France over all the country through which the great river and its tributaries might flow. Long afterwards, accordingly, when traders from the growing English colonies along the Atlantic made their way farther and farther inland, they found the way barred by French forts. Mother England sent troops to their aid, and the united British force, in which George Washington himself was a colonel, broke down French opposition and enabled the colonists to spread westward into the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. The war was carried on until even Canada in the north was brought under the British flag, by Wolfe's crowning victory at Quebec. It was, in fact, Britain's action in freeing her colonists from French opposition that enabled the colonists to turn on Britain herself a few years later, and, this time with the help of French soldiers, to separate themselves from the rest of the English-speaking brotherhood.

Let us turn back now to the earlier days.

The English, like the Spanish and French, were bent on finding a western route to Asia. Nearly eighty years after Cabot's voyage to Labrador, another little English ship, of only twenty tons, sailed from London on this adventure. Martin Frobisher was her captain's name. Passing Newfoundland and Labrador, he entered a channel, where he verily believed the land on his right was the coast of Asia. As a matter of fact the channel led nowhere, being only the mouth of a bay--Frobisher Bay, in Baffin Land, as we call it now.

A lump of mineral picked up on shore excited a belief that the barren country was a land of gold. Accordingly, the London merchants sent out a second expedition, and even a third. No gold was found; but Frobisher discovered a new inlet, which became a highway of commerce under the name of Hudson Strait.

The great explorer Hudson, however, did not appear on the scene till 1610, and his first appearance was his last. Passing through the strait, he rounded the north point of Labrador, and, turning southward, sailed out upon a body of water so vast that three months' exploration left the work unfinished; but it was pretty clear that no way through to the Pacific existed in that direction.

Caught by winter at the south end of the Bay, Hudson and his crew landed and put up wooden shelters, where they spent an unhappy eight months. They failed to lay in a stock of game, and when the breaking ice set the ship free, in the middle of June, food was running terribly short. The homeward voyage had barely started when mutineers laid hold of their captain, his young son and half a dozen others, and set them adrift in a boat. The few who survived, when the ship reached England at last, professed to believe that Hudson meant to leave them behind in the Bay if they had not played the trick first, as there was not food enough to keep all alive. Nothing was heard again of the great explorer, though ships were sent in search; but the sea that he won for a grave still bears the modest name of Hudson Bay.

Many a brave man after that met his death in the icy chaos, trying to find the North-west Passage to Asia. There were some, however, who had another aim--they saw in Hudson Strait and Bay a new way to the heart of North America, a way by which the wealth of the great North-west might be drained off to England, in spite of the French who barred the St. Lawrence route.

Curiously enough, it was a couple of Frenchmen, named Radisson and Groseillers, who led the English in through this unguarded door.

The first French settlers on the St. Lawrence made friends of the Indians living there, the Hurons and Algonquins, and helped them to fight their enemies, the Iroquois. For many years, therefore, the Iroquois were constantly attacking the French, who could not even cultivate their little fields around the river-side towns without muskets slung over their shoulders. Even so, many of them were killed, and most of those taken alive were cruelly tortured.

At the village of Three Rivers, between Quebec and Montreal, lived Pierre Radisson. One spring morning in 1652, when he was about seventeen, he went out hunting, and was captured by a party of redskins in ambush. His life was spared, for an Indian and his wife took a fancy to him, adopted him as their son, and took him with them on their wanderings. He escaped, along with an Algonquin fellow-prisoner; but only by killing three Iroquois. He was captured again, and tortured; his feet were so badly burnt that he was lame for a month; but his Indian "father and mother" ransomed him with gifts to the head men of the tribe, and as he was a brave young fellow and a "good mixer" he became quite popular with his redskinned companions.

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