The Great Spirit
WHEN the spirit swells my cheast I love to roam leisurely among the green hills; or sometimes, sitting on the brink of the murmuring Saginaw River, I marvel at the great blue overhead. With half-closed eyes I watch the huge cloud shadows in their noiseless play upon the high bluffs opposite me, while into my ear ripple the sweet, soft cadences of the river's song. Folded hands lie in my lap, for the time forgot. My heart and I lie small upon the earth like a grain of throbbing sand. Drifting clouds and tinkling waters, together with the warmth of a genial summer day, bespeak with eloquence the loving Mystery round about us. During the idle while I sat upon the sunny river brink, I grew somewhat, though my response be not so clearly manifest as in the green grass fringing the edge of the high bluff back of me.
At length retracing the uncertain footpath scaling the precipitous embankment, I seek the level lands where grow the wild prairie flowers. And they, the lovely little folk, soothe my soul with their perfumed breath.
The telegraphed dispatch arrived on Independence Day.1
A nation is 100 years old only once. Therefore, July 4 of the year 1876 was of prime significance and the festivities planned to celebrate the throwing off of American subservience to British rule were replete with patriotism and celebrities.
Ulysses Simpson Grant, the famous Union commander of the Civil War, was president. It was an election year and Grant's administration was in perpetual political difficulty over the countless charges of corruption that had ultimately forced him to forsake his hopes for a third presidential term.
However, that day's news had shed him of one of his most outspoken and prominent critics.
Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Henry Sheridan, as well as others of the military, political and corporate elite, were in Philadelphia, the nationally historic centre named for the Biblical city of brotherly love, when they read the account in the local newspapers. But the report was not one of brotherly love.
When queried initially by reporters both Sherman and Sheridan dismissed the story with terms like "preposterous" and "not possible." But as it became apparent that it was neither of these, they too lapsed into the shocked silence and confused outrage that was gripping their entire country.
The United States of America, One Nation Under God, had received rebuke.
Custer was dead! As were 264 of his brothers in arms!
George Armstrong Custer, golden boy of the US Army, Civil War hero, the youngest major-general in American history, had fallen victim to national ambition, vanity and corruption.
On the afternoon of Sunday, June 25, eight days earlier, he had led elements of the famed Seventh Cavalry, numbering more than 200 men, to their deaths near the banks of the Greasy Grass River in Montana Territory, at what was to become known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Perhaps hoping for a spectacular victory that would restore his fortunes as the rising star of the US Army or establish a basis for entry into politics, he had fallen to a vastly superior force of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho.
The victors that day were a persecuted and cheated minority. That they should have vengeance on their tormentors had, they were assured, been ordained by the spirit world through a holy man, tribal and war chief that they knew as Tatanka Iyotake. He had just been acclaimed the supreme chief of all the assembled hunting tribes in the unceded territory--an unprecedented honour.2 That he fought that day himself has been conclusively proven and his name, Sitting Bull, would become synonymous with the worst defeat ever inflicted on the United States military in all of its Western Indian wars.
It also made him the most famous Indian of all time.
The policies pursued by the United States government had virtually guaranteed an endless succession of armed confrontations with its indigenous peoples as it had moved steadily West toward its "Manifest Destiny." Treaties had no sooner been negotiated and signed, when plans were being laid in the highest offices of the land to renege on them. Almost everyone, from the most prominent politicians in Washington D.C., to their emissaries in the military and commerce on the frontier, was engaged in a national disgrace of lies, deceptions and thievery.
Official amoralities like the slaughter of tens of millions of buffalo to force the acquiescence of the various tribes to the government's will and the hunting down of any remnants who would not or could not comply, hardened the resolve of the remaining Natives to resist.
By the late-1860s and early-1870s the conflict in the United States had finally reached as far into its northwest as the Canadian border with the Dakota and Montana territories. Civil War veterans and other land-hungry Americans were filling up the comparatively empty Prairies behind the rapidly emerging railroads, pushing ever westward to the Rocky Mountains and beyond.
The forwardmost elements of this expansion were inevitably the most lawless and included in their ranks whiskey traders, gun-runners, buffalo and wolf hunters and outlaws of every stripe. Murder, rape and plundering was often visited on whoever might have the misfortune of crossing paths with them, regardless of race.
This was the Wild West.
This boiling cauldron of humanity spilled over the still uncertain international boundary between the United States and Canada, threatening to consume the fledgling country's claim to the nearly uninhabited Great Plains between its newly established provinces of Manitoba and British Columbia. The border was an amorphous and illusory concept with Indians and outlaws, cowboys and cavalry, fur traders and missionaries and great herds of buffalo all crossing it at will.
Possession was nine-tenths of the law and the two countries had found themselves at loggerheads on this issue numerous times in the past hundred years. Though for the most part neither one wanted to fight a war over the division of the continent, the competition between the two brothers could at times be fierce, as evidenced by the American War of Independence and the War of 1812.
Canada was also in the process of discovering that its interests and those of the British Empire did not always coincide. The Imperial government, wearying of North American colonial entanglements and always more engaged by its European affairs, was not hesitant to trade away Canadian territory in order to appease American expansionists.
In 1844, James Knox Polk campaigned for the presidency of the United States on the issue of possession of the Oregon territory and was at the same time fomenting a similar dispute with Mexico. He demanded that Great Britain forfeit all her claims on the Pacific coast as far north as Russian territory at 54 degrees, 40 minutes. In effect, he was attempting to encircle British territorial interests and place the United States in the strategic position to swallow the entirety of the continent. This immediate objective was eventually abandoned in the aftermath of the Mexican war, but Polk's sabre rattling did gain for the US all of the continent up to the 49th parallel.
Though by this time there was little doubt who would win a war, in the short term at any rate, Polk's ambitions had been tempered by the unpopularity of his dispute with their southern neighbour and the enormous internal political difficulties attendant to the acquisition of so much new territory. These problems--the status of slavery in the new tract and repeated Southern attempts to expand it north into the Free States--would be the precursor to the American Civil War.
The Civil War would provide Canada with invaluable breathing space in which to lay the groundwork for its own Confederation in 1867 and devise a solution for its massive loss of immigrants to the United States, due to the settlement of all arable farmland.3
Invoking the providence of the Biblical God of the Israelites, the infant country drew upon the Old Testament and the eighth verse of King Solomon's 72d Psalm for its name: "And He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, And from the River unto the ends of the earth."
Thus both nations, the Dominion of Canada and the United States of America--newly born in the mid-1860s--turned their gaze West and dreamt of ascendancy from sea to shining sea.
Heedless of their neighbour's aspirations, the American Presidents Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant, their respective Secretaries of State William H. Seward and Hamilton Fish, as well as countless other politicians and newspaper editors, habitually called for the outright annexation of Canada and British North America.
On June 24, 1864, as the Civil War was drawing to its conclusion, the New York Herald editorialized that soon "� four hundred thousand thoroughly disciplined troops will ask no better occupation than to destroy the last vestiges of British rule on the American continent and annex Canada to the United States."
During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had paid little attention to expansionist elements like the Irish-American "Fenians" who, after he was assassinated and Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency, were freely allowed to launch guerrilla raids into Canada. Johnson was expressing his displeasure with Britain's wartime commerce with the secessionist states and lending a supporting arm to those who might formulate a policy of armed conflict, in the furtherance of Manifest Destiny. Professedly the Fenians only motivation was to hold captured Canadian territory until Britain abandoned its occupation of Ireland. But in the nation's highest circles it was rumoured that any territory gained from Canada, especially on the south bank of the St. Lawrence River, would be permanently attached to the rapidly expanding United States.4
This sympathy had found earlier expression in a military standoff between the two in 1860 over the ownership of San Juan, an island in the straits of Juan de Fuca along the Pacific coast boundary. Twelve years later, in 1872, after the arbitration of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and at the height of the Grant presidencies, the entire island chain was given to the Americans.
As a result of this and other disputes, both countries were heavily engaged in espionage against each other and had been for years.5
Canada was likewise having difficulties in dealing with the indigenous peoples of her Western frontier. For the most part, expansion had been achieved through the Hudson's Bay Company and its trading for furs with the various tribes throughout the forested north and mountain ranges of the far West.
But its Great Plains, almost a thousand miles from east to west, were not as rich in valuable furs and the Indians who lived there tended to be very fierce indeed. This was the home and hunting grounds of the nomadic and war-like Lakota, Dakota and Nakota Sioux, Plains Cree, Assiniboine, Plains Ojibway, Blackfoot, Blood, Peigan and Sarcee, among others. Many white explorers and adventurers who penetrated deeply into this vast region did not live to relate their experiences.
War had been an increasingly present fact of life amongst these Plains tribes for more than a century, and as the technology of white civilization came into their hands they used it against their hereditary enemies, pushing them violently aside and enlarging upon whatever territory they coveted.
Up until the mid-1850s this was the last large unexplored tract left in North America. Then, from 1857 to 1859, Captain John Palliser led a Royal Geographical Society expedition that mapped the region and its Western mountain passes, finally giving the British Empire somewhat more than the tenuous claims of its 1818 and 1846 boundary treaties with the United States.6
Nonetheless, American explorers and traders had also been trying to establish links with the Plains tribes north of the 49th parallel. Regarded with deep suspicion and greeted with a shoot-on-sight policy, they were bloodily repulsed by the Blackfoot, Blood, Peigan and Sarcee from the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition in the earliest 1800s. Deflected eastward but continuing to work out of Fort Union and other outposts on the upper Missouri, the American Fur Company began enticing delegations of Cree and Assiniboine from the Canadian Plains, east of the Cypress Hills, to Washington D.C. for displays of the United States' military power as early as 1831.7
In 1853 and 1854 Isaac I. Stevens, the incipient governor of Washington Territory, led a congressionally mandated exploration party which reported directly to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, (who was soon to be the first and only president of the Confederate States of America), mapping a route for the proposed Northern Pacific Railroad. For military and commercial purposes, the American government desired to build a railroad west across the Great Plains between the 49th and 47th parallels, adjacent to its border with British North America. Along the way, Stevens, an ardent expansionist and veteran of the Mexican War, dispatched delegations which deliberately crossed the international boundary at the Souris River, the Cypress Hills and the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, penetrating British territory deeply in search of the region's Plains Indians and Red River M�tis hunters.8 They successfully drew various chieftains to Fort Benton, (then still a part of the huge Nebraska Territory), for "counseling sessions with [representatives of] the Great White Father"--Governor Stevens' political mentor and close personal friend, President Franklin Pierce.9
Numerous other armed exploration, prospecting, trading and hunting expeditions swarmed over the border throughout the 1860s and early-1870s, introducing huge quantities of liquor and up to date weaponry to the region's tribes.10
However, the Northwestern Plains remained almost exclusively Indian territory and was far too distant from the effective frontier of Canada or the United States to fall under either's direct influence. It continued on as a tantalizing prize, very much desired by both.
Further east, the arrival of new settlers from Ontario at the Selkirk Colony and nearby Fort Garry, close to the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, throughout the early and middle decades of the century had caused a tremendous amount of friction between them and the mixed race M�tis and Half-breed peoples. The M�tis were the offspring of French fur traders and Indian women, while the Half-breeds held a British patrimonial lineage. Both groups were longtime residents of the frontier. At bitter issue were their hereditary and cultural pursuits, the apportioning of farmland and long-established trade patterns.
Ideas that had been formulated in the East, without regard for the desires of the people of the West, led to armed conflict time and time again.
Farmland next to precious water was resurveyed and expropriated by Ottawa. Free trade with neighbouring American settlements was imperiously and self-servingly curtailed by the Hudson's Bay Company. Also officially hampered were the traditional M�tis buffalo hunts, while the wishes of the local Indian tribes were almost completely ignored.
Understandably, neither the mixed-race nor Indian peoples of the West were anxious to be absorbed by a government so indifferent to their desires. Ultimately, not even the whites were being consulted by Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald in Ottawa who planned to render the entire Great Plains a mere "colony" of central Canada by "swamping" it with new settlers--thereby silencing their complaints.11
When a coalition of M�tis, Half-breeds and whites formed a transitional government in 1869-70 and started to enforce its own laws under the leadership of a former divinity student named Louis Riel, (following the Hudson's Bay Company's sale of its territorial rights to Canada), Ottawa sent an army of 1,200 to smash them.
When approached for the use of American rail transport, President Ulysses S. Grant refused Canada's request. Still smarting over the rejection of the United States' $10 million bid for the British Northwest, Grant had in November 1869 revealed his secret plans for the annexation of Canada to the members of his cabinet. The region north of the Great Lakes was amongst the most miserable in the world for the mass movement of troops or the construction of a railroad. Canada, Grant believed, was cut off from its West. With the purchase of Alaska from Russia only two years previously in 1867, the staunch resistance of most Nova Scotians and not a few New Brunswickers to union with Canada, and the recent arrival of a petition from British Columbian colonists urging a speedy American annexation, the continental goals of the United States became obvious and seemed assured.12
On March 5, 1870, Washington D.C.'s National Republican (the capital's primary organ of the Republican party) threatened that "[should] any attempt � be made to bring the North-West colony into subjection by a resort to arms there can be but one opinion throughout the American Union, as to the duty of the United States Government in the matter, and that is to adopt the most decisive method to prevent an Indian war of extermination and protect the colony in the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine and under the claims of our common humanity against the oppression of a foreign power."13
Indeed, a single bold military thrust into this region from Minnesota, (under governors Alexander Ramsey, Henry H. Sibley and William R. Marshall, the epicentre of annexationist passion), would have gained them the entire western portion of the continent. Towards this end the American consular delegation to the disputed British Northwest at Winnipeg was a den of secret agents and spies. Headed up by General Oscar Malmros and later James W. Taylor, they were in constant contact with the provisional government, offering it advice and support and at the same time urging Washington to provide Riel with financial aid. The consulate's ultimate objective remained unwaveringly the political absorption of the Northwest.
Yet with the attainment of his goals so close at hand, President Ulysses S. Grant (plagued by the unruly Irish-American Fenians who had launched yet another of their invasions into Canada) had met his match with Prime Minister Macdonald in the Machiavellian world of cloak-and-dagger, and geopolitical skulduggery.
Forced afoot, the Canadian troops were compelled to make their arduous journey through the rugged Shield country, north of the Great Lakes. In the interim, Macdonald (a longtime spymaster against both the Americans and Fenians) was learning quickly from his mistakes and hastening to exploit the weaknesses he had uncovered. Sensing that his American opponent was desirous of appearing to the outside world as honest and aboveboard, Macdonald entered into an unwritten agreement with Riel's provisional government that would give the M�tis leader almost every concession he had demanded. Then, after Riel had rejected American aid, Macdonald pounced on his M�tis rivals with the Canadian Army. Ostensibly arriving to protect the settlers from marauding Sioux Indians, they instead toppled Riel's provisional government, scattering the M�tis in particular further west and sowing the seeds for future conflict.
When the Fenians immediately offered to step into the breach, the bewildered Riel turned them down as well, and was at length driven by Macdonald into a prolonged American exile.14
Incredibly, at this very time the Imperial government in London had decided that Canada, if push came to shove, was expendable! Faced with the possibility of a European war in the fallout of the 1870 Franco-Prussian conflict, the British, unhappy at the prospect of tangling with the Americans as well, withdrew all of their troops from North America.
Canada--with a population of less than four million--would either gain and hold the majority of the North American continent through its own devices and fortitude, or succumb as a nation to the continental aspirations of the immensely more powerful United States of America.
In his final analysis of this first Western fiasco, Macdonald concluded that the new Dominion of Canada would have to build that "impossible" transcontinental railroad in order to retain its paid for, but as yet unoccupied, Great Plains.
In order to prevent this, staggeringly wealthy Republican party financier and Grant confidant Jay Cooke of the Northern Pacific Railroad, (as well as its other directors--state governors among them), stepped up their efforts to hasten its completion and moved behind the scenes to gain secret control of their rival, the upstart Canadian Pacific Railway.15 Cooke deduced that could he restrict access to the northern Great Plains solely to his Northern Pacific Railroad, the entire region would shortly fall into the American orbit. He had also, to no avail, tried to entice Riel's provisional government into union with the United States in 1870, and was known to associate with the Fenians. Using expatriate Canadians and the perfidious Montrealer Sir Hugh Allan, Cooke now attempted to purchase leverage over the Conservative government of Sir John A. Macdonald through clandestine campaign financing and thereby ensnare the Canadian Pacific's directorship.
Thus while a joint American-Canadian surveying expedition was establishing the exact location of the international boundary across the Great Plains, (under the terms of 1871's Treaty of Washington and the protection of Major Marcus Reno's two companies of US Seventh Cavalry, in addition to a single company of Twentieth Infantry), the most potent American power brokers were labouring surreptitiously to erase it!
After their intrigue was revealed by a disgruntled underling in 1873, Macdonald's government, seriously implicated, collapsed. The surrounding scandal forced a contraction of the London money markets, which, combined with other factors, led directly to the bankruptcy of the Northern Pacific conspirators. It also installed Alexander Mackenzie and his Liberals in office--ardently opposed to the Canadian Pacific's construction timetable, but equally as practised in the art of corruption. And for good measure, it plunged North America into the worst economic depression in its history.
Work on Canada's Canadian Pacific and the United States' Northern Pacific railroads, the vanguards of their respective country's craving for the northern Great Plains, ground to an almost complete stop. In fact, the Canadian Pacific existed in name only. Not a single mile of track had been laid! The Northern Pacific, on the other hand, was poised for its final assault on the northern Plains Indians, having stretched forth to the east bank of the Missouri River at Bismarck, in the Dakota Territory. That very winter, in March 1873, brevet Major-General George Armstrong Custer and almost the entirety of his elite Seventh Cavalry were transferred to nearby Fort Abraham Lincoln.
British Columbia, meanwhile, isolated on the west coast and lured into Confederation by the promise of a speedily completed transcontinental railroad, protested Canada's delays bitterly and was soon threatening to secede.
The United States, having been stymied on the industrial-economic front, turned its attention once again to intrigue and covert political action. Sometime in 1874 the exiled M�tis member of Parliament from Manitoba, Louis Riel--now a revolutionary--was ushered into his first known secret meeting with President Ulysses S. Grant.
Despite its grandiose schemes, it was still all the United States could do to keep its hold on the Dakota, Wyoming and Montana territories in the face of ceaseless harassment from such feared Indian leaders as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Rain-in-the-Face, Four Horns, Black Moon and Gall. The Sioux were the mightiest of all the Plains Indians, numbering thirty thousand among their many tribes in both Canada and the United States. Of these, the Tetons or Lakota, with their seven separate bands and allied Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho, amounting to twenty thousand on both reservations and unceded territory, were providing the main opposition to the US Army.
The powerful Blackfoot Confederacy had already been almost entirely routed from their huge reservation in northwestern Montana Territory. For resisting American intrusions of their treaty lands they were bloodily terrorized across the border and into Canada by the US Army in January 1870.
The Lakota's other perpetual enemies, the Plains Ojibway, Plains Cree and Assiniboine, (who had separated from the Yanktonais Sioux two and one half centuries earlier), were also spread out across their northern flank and now beginning to experience the negative aspects of the rapidly encroaching white civilization.
Interspersed amongst these latter tribes were the M�tis, angry with their treatment at the hands of the Canadian government and who, in previous decades, had formed treaties with the Sioux.
Such were the circumstances that the North-West Mounted Police trekked into during the drought-stricken summer of 1874, and so began one of history's greatest epics.
Formed as a paramilitary force in order not to excite American annexationist passions, but cavalry in reality, their assignment was to conclusively establish Canadian sovereignty north of the 49th parallel and negotiate the peaceful settlement of Canada's Western tribes on reservations. As these 275 men rode into the West from Fort Dufferin, Manitoba, newspapers across the continent predicted their lives would be violently cut short by the rampaging Indian tribes or outlaw desperadoes, gun-runners and whiskey traders who vastly outnumbered them and had already decimated hundreds upon hundreds of US cavalrymen, soldiers and settlers. Many deserted.
The "Mounties," as they came to be called, built a number of forts at strategic sites throughout the North-West Territories and began their task by driving out and arresting the large criminal elements emanating from the United States.
Not all of the Indians welcomed them with open arms, however. Many wanted no white men of any sort trespassing on their territory or arranging a life for them on reservations, and dangerous confrontations occurred on not a few occasions. Theirs remained a shaky hold at best. Only the Mounties' Herculean efforts at even-handed and fair dispensation of justice, and the ancient inter-tribal animosities, worked to their advantage.
War was not uncommon between the Blackfoot Confederacy and Cree-Assiniboine Alliance. At one battle on the banks of the Belly River in 1870, only a few miles from where the NWMP would build Fort Macleod four years later, over 300 warriors were slain! The Blackfoot were victorious that day, due mainly to the repeating rifles they had obtained from American gun-runners.
But at another battle between these two groups near the northeastern slopes of the Cypress Hills, a mere four years earlier in 1866, the Cree annihilated more than 600 Blackfoot!16
These Plains tribes were formidable indeed, and the Mounted Police existed exclusively at their pleasure. Few settlers displayed the daring to make their way West.
South of the border, justice had long since ceased to operate. There was no adequate equivalent to a federal police force at work, applying equal justice to whites and Indians. There was only an alliance of the Northern Pacific Railroad, Black Hills gold mining interests and the United States government itself--all determined to force the Indians onto mostly miserable reservations, take possession of their coveted lands and push the tracks through to the Pacific coast.
Time and again the two would clash as the freedom loving and ferocious Indians of the northern Great Plains found themselves forced into an ill-defined and ever shrinking enclave of foothills, badlands and prairies, 500 miles wide and 600 miles deep, with their backs to the Rocky Mountains on both sides of the Canada-US border.
Unrecognized as they have been, these were the factors that culminated in the deaths of George Armstrong Custer and 264 members of his Seventh United States Cavalry.
And while this is by far the most written of episode in the history of the North American West--and probably North American history as a whole--there remains a much deeper level of secrecy and intrigue to this epic story that has never been correlated or deduced.
Until now.
As to those who question our credibility, you may take us or leave us. These Histories were written and assembled as a labor-of-love. Take them or leave them, period.
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