An Assineboine camp—The trader McDermott—The chief “Wolverine”—Fire-water and finesse—The Assineboine war-party—A chance of a Cree scalp—The trader hears a well-known name—A big bid for murder, two hundred skins!
The events that now began to unfold themselves in my life and in those of my companions, took shape and context only after long lapse of time had passed by.
It was frequently when months had vanished that I learned the various threads of action which had led to incidents of more or less importance to me. Hitherto I had been only a boy-actor in the drama of existence. I was now about to become a sharer in a larger sphere of action, and to participate in scenes of adventure the springs of which were involved in the lives and actions of other men. Writing now as I do from a standpoint of life which looks back across many years to those early adventures, I am able to set down the record with its various parts complete. I can see the lines of life upon which other men moved, and can trace the impulses upon which they acted—can fill in, as it were, the gaps between their action and mine own, and give to the story of my life at that period an insight into events which then lay veiled from me by distance. It will therefore be necessary, in order that my readers may comprehend clearly the thread of the events I am about to relate, that I should at times carry them away to scenes in which personally I was not an actor, and that they should occasionally o’erleap the boundaries of the moment to look upon a far wider theatre of events than I myself had at the time beheld.
We will therefore leave the scene at the camp-fire in the Wolverine hills, and travel in imagination a hundred miles to the south-west, where, on one of the sources of the Qu’appelle river, a large camp of Assineboines, or Stone Indians, is pitched.
The camp is a large one, for the buffalo have been numerous all the summer long on the prairies south of the Qu’appelle, and many scattered bands of the tribe have come together to hunt and feast upon the mighty herd. A brisk trade is being carried on too in skins and robes; for a rich trader has arrived in the camp, with goodly store of guns, blankets, trinkets, powder and ball, and beads; and chief and brave, and squaw and boy, are busy at the work of barter and exchange.
A brisk trade is being carried on.
On the evening we speak of, the chief of the Assineboines was seated smoking in his lodge, when the leather door was raised and the figure of a white man entered. It was[84] McDermott, the trader from the Red River.
The Wolverine extended his hand to the new comer, the trader shook it, seated himself on the opposite side of the small, clear wood fire that burned in the centre of the lodge, and began to smoke in silence. The Indian scarcely moved a muscle, but sat smoking too, his eyes fixed upon the flame. At last the trader broke silence. “Has any news come of the young men who are on the war-path?” he asked.
“No,” answered the Wolverine, “they will carry their own news; when they have something to tell and to show, then they will return.”
McDermott had his own reasons for asking; he wanted horses, and he knew that if the war-party was successful he would obtain them for a trifle. Horses lightly got upon the war-path, are lightly parted with by their captors. A trading gun and some ball and powder would purchase a good horse in the camp; ten guns’ value would not buy him in the English settlement on the Red river.
The Wolverine knew well that the trader did not ask these questions without good reason; and although he had that day received news of the war-party, both of their whereabouts and future movements, he was not going to give the smallest item of that news to his questioner without receiving some substantial return for it.
On his part McDermott was also aware that a messenger had come in during the day from the war-party, but of the purport of the news, or the movements of the party, he could not glean any tidings; but he had brought with him to the lodge of the Wolverine a potent key to unlock the secret store of that chief's mind, and as he now produced from his pocket a bottle of the strongest fire-water, there came a look into the impassive eye of the old Indian opposite that told the trader at once that the information he sought for would soon be his.
Taking a small tin vessel, he poured out into it some of the fiery poison, and handed the cup across the fire to the chief. As his hand passed over the flame he shook a few drops of the spirit on the fire; a bright blue flame shot quickly up, illuminating all the interior of the lodge and lighting up the dusky features of the Wolverine, whose arm was already outstretched to receive the drink he so deeply thirsted for.
“It is good fire-water,” he said as he saw the blaze, “so it will light up the heart of the red man as it does this red stick.”
McDermott cautiously refrained for some moments from asking any more questions of the whereabouts of the war-party. A perfect adept in the ways of Indian trade, he knew the fire-water would soon do its work on the brain of the Wolverine.
The Indian drank, and returned the empty cup to his visitor.
“I wished to learn the movements of your young men,” said McDermott after a long pause, during which his sharp eye had noted the Indian’s face as he sat glowering over the fire, “because I am about to quit this camp, and I am afraid they may come upon my horses at night and mistake them for those of an enemy.”
“What direction do you travel?” asked the chief.
“Towards the settlement,” replied the trader. “My supplies are nearly exhausted, and it is time to return home.”
This was a lie. He had no intention whatever of leaving the plains, and the best portion of his goods he had kept concealed from the Assineboines in a cache on the Qu’appelle river. For the third time he filled the cup, and already the eye, glistening in the firelight like that of a serpent, told the effect the fiery liquor was having upon the Wolverine’s brain. “I want you,” went on the trader, “to send with me the Indian who came to-day from the war-party. He will protect my horses from being taken, in case I should fall in with your young men.”
“There will be no danger to your horses,” said the Indian. “My young men are far away from the trail that leads to the settlement; but you want to get the horses they have taken, not to protect your own. Well, give me the rest of that bottle, and you may take with you the young man who to-day has come from the party. He will lead you where[87] you will find them.”
The bargain was soon struck, and as the trader quitted the lodge the Wolverine was clutching in his bony fingers the fatal fire-water, which, more than war, hunger, or exposure, has destroyed the red man’s race over the wide continent of North America.
McDermott having obtained the chief’s consent to his taking the brave lately arrived from the war-party away with him, without which permission it would have been fatal to his future interests in trade to have moved him, lost no time in setting out on his road. He put together the greater portion of his goods, and leaving a half-breed servant to continue the exchange of those things that it was impossible for him to take away, he departed from the camp at midnight, and by daybreak was far away from the last trace of the Assineboines.
He had with him the Assineboine scout as guide, and two retainers, a French half-breed and a Salteaux Indian. The party rode rapidly; they had a large band of horses, and packs and saddles were frequently changed. By the evening of the first day they drew near the last mountain range of hills. The scout led the way. When night fell upon the plain they were on the edge of the hills; presently a small lake was reached. It was now dark, but the guide knew the track, and he pushed on into the hills.
A long ride further through rough and broken ground, on which they had carefully to pick their way, brought them suddenly face to face with a small fire burning in a glen between abrupt hills. Around the fire were seated several figures. It was the camp of the war-party. The braves sat late around their fires, but there was reason for their doing so. A scout had only lately returned with news of importance. The story he had to tell was to this effect. At sunset he had been looking from a hill over the prairie to the west; he had suddenly observed two horsemen riding from a point in the line of hills farther to the south, out into the plain. Judging from the lateness of the hour, that a camp must be in the neighbourhood of the place from whence those horsemen had gone, the scout had ridden cautiously forward towards that portion of the hills. He had soon discovered a fire, beside which a solitary white man sat. Concealing himself effectually from sight, he had watched and waited.
Soon there had come an Indian and another white man, bearing with them what seemed the dead body of another Indian. But this man was not dead; he shortly began to speak, to eat, to drink. He was a Cree, who told a story of having crawled a long way over the prairies from the south. The scout knew only a little of the Cree language, and he had been able only to follow roughly what the wounded man had said. As for the other men—the white men he had never seen before, but the red man was the Red Cloud,[89] the famous wandering Sioux.
Now the principal item of this story that had interest for the Assineboines, who sat eager listeners around the fire, was that which had reference to the wounded Cree Indian: the Crees were enemies; the war-party had as yet taken no Cree scalps. How could they return to their camp with no trophy to show? The women and children would laugh at them; the old men would say, “Ah! it was different in our time; we did not come in from the war-trail without horses or scalps.” Here then was a great chance of supplying this most pressing want.
It was true that the Red Cloud was well known over all the northern prairies. It would be no easy matter to carry off the Cree from his protection; nor would it be safe to molest the white men who were with him, for the noise of harm done to white men travelled sometimes far over the prairies, and reached even the ears of the Great Mother who dwelt beyond the big sea in the land where the sun rose.
These things considered made it wiser to attempt the capture of the Cree while both the Indian and his white friends were absent from their camp. If this could be effected, then indeed the party might return in triumph to their friends and justly receive the rewards of bravery.
It will be seen from the foregoing summary of the conversation which had been held over the fire by the Assineboines now grouped around it, that the bravery of the party individually or collectively was not of the highest order; but in truth the thing we call courage is much the same among red men as among white all the world over. Confined to no class or to no people, its examples will be found often mixed with strange evidences of cowardice; and side by side with the man who dares for the sake of daring, will be found the man in whose heart a bit of cheap courage is only less cherished than his life.
It was while thus the party of Assineboines debated their future action that the voice of the scout who had left them some days previously was heard saluting from the darkness. The new arrivals came forward into the circle of light. McDermott was an old acquaintance, and he and his Salteaux were soon seated around the fire. The presence of the trader did little to interrupt the flow of conversation between the Assineboines. Too much engrossed by the prospect of such an easy prey, they soon resumed the thread of their discussion, and after some questions asked and answered the new comer was left to smoke in silence.
But as the Assineboines debated their plans, and mention had been made once or twice of the two men in the other camp against whom the braves had no quarrel, there came into the trader’s face an expression of rapt attention, and he listened eagerly to every word that fell from his companions. He might well start at the utterance of one name—the name of the Red Cloud, the son of the man he had foully[91] betrayed to his doom.
Face to face he had never met the Sioux chief, but a vague undefined fear had oppressed him whenever his name had been mentioned. He well knew that the vengeance of the Sioux is deep and lasting; he knew too that if any act merited revenge it was the act which he had committed upon the father of this man with whom he had had no cause of quarrel, with whom he had been on terms of long and deep intimacy, in whose tent he had eaten in former times, when the Sioux had held their lands up to the shores of the Otter Tail and to the sources of the Mississippi.
Nine years had passed since that foul deed had been wrought. In the wild life of the prairies, and amid a society whose deeds of violence were of too frequent occurrence, the memory of any particular act of bloodshed is soon forgotten; but time had never blotted out the recollection of the treachery of the trader McDermott. There was not a Sioux on the most southern tributary stream of the great Missouri who had not heard of that dark night’s work, when, drugged at the feast to which he had gone in the confidence of old friendship, the chief Black Eagle was carried through the snow of the winter night and yielded a prisoner at the frontier post on the Red river.
Since that time the trader had grown rich. He had many successful ventures on the plains; for the quarrels of the[92] Sioux were not the quarrels of the Crees, the Assineboines, and the Blackfeet, the Sircies or the Salteaux; but through all these years he lived as it were in the shadow of his own crime, and he felt that while a Sioux was left to roam the prairie, the dead body of the man whose life he had sold was still unburied. Many a time when the shadows darkened upon the great landscape had he heard in his heart the mysterious voice of conscience, upbraiding him with the deed of blood; but more than all had he conceived, with the intuitive faculty of fear, a dread of the Red Cloud.
Whether there came tidings of a battle or a skirmish, fought between the remnants of the Sioux, the Mandans, the Minatarree, or the Ogahalla branches of that once mighty nation with the troops of the United States, McDermott longed to learn that this wandering chief, whose presence ever haunted his imagination, had at last met his end. But he ever seemed to bear a charmed life.
At one time he was heard of in a raid upon the American post on the great bend of the Missouri; again came tidings that he had led a small band of the Ogahalla against a detachment of soldiers in the fort hills of Montana, and that not one living soul had escaped to tell the fate of the American soldiers; and again there came news that a solitary Indian had been seen by the Touchwood hills, or in the broken ridges of the Mauvais Bois, and that this roving red man was the Red Cloud.
That curious instinct which danger frequently gives to the mind long before any actual symptom of its approach is visible, had warned the trader McDermott that while the Sioux lived he had reason to dread at his hands a fate as cruel as the one to which he had consigned the old chief.
Now all at once, sitting here at this camp fire, he heard the dreaded name of his enemy, and gathering from the conversation that only a few miles away from where he sat lay camped the man he feared more than anything on earth, it is little wonder that his heart beat loudly within his breast, and his face showed unmistakable traces of the conflict of passion that raged within him. For with the news of this proximity of his hated enemy there was also a chance not to be lightly lost. Here was the Sioux in company with a wounded Cree, close to a war-party of Assineboines hungry for trophies and for plunder. His course was plain. Could he succeed in inducing the Assineboines to attack the Sioux camp, and end for ever his hated enemy? It would go hard with him if he could not.
Listening to the conversation of the braves, and at the same time endeavouring to frame his plans for the destruction of the Sioux, he sat silent for some time. The presence of white men in the camp of the Sioux alone disquieted him; it prevented his openly proposing to the Indians who were with him to attack the camp, and joining[94] them himself in doing so.
The death on the prairies of two Indians would have mattered little, but the murder of two white men was an event that might give rise to unpleasant questions being asked in the Red River; and when next he visited his home there, it might be to find himself charged with complicity or actual share in the crime.
He pretended therefore not to have heard much of what the Assineboines had been speaking among themselves, but to approach his object from an outside point altogether.
Watching an opportunity, and addressing himself to the leader of the band, he began.
Watching an opportunity, the trader addressed the leader of the band.
“I see no trace of war,” he said, “and I hear of no horses having been captured. Are the Crees too strong, that your braves have feared to encounter them? or do they watch their horses so closely that you cannot get near them?”
The taunt struck the mark it had been aimed at. “We have not taken scalps,” replied the leader, “because the Crees keep together and shun our presence. The horses of the Crees are fleet to run away; but it may not be long,” he added, “before we have horses, and scalps too.”
“I want some good horses,” went on the trader, “and I will give a large price for them; but they must be of the right kind—not small, starved ponies, but mustangs of size and power, fit for a chief to ride.”
He well knew the horses which the Red Cloud usually rode and used, and in mentioning the style of horse he now required he painted exactly those of his enemy.
“And what would you give for such a horse?” asked the Assineboine leader.
The trader thought for a moment. Here was his opportunity. Now or never he would name a price dazzling to the Indian—cheap to him, since it might for ever rid him of the man he feared and hated.
“I would give for such a horse,” he slowly replied, “two hundred skins.”
Two hundred skins! Never had horse fetched such a price since the mustang breed had reached these northern prairies from the great plateau of New Mexico and the Spanish frontier, two hundred years ago. The Indian was dumb with astonishment—for three such horses he and his band would get 750 skins. Why they would be rich for evermore. They would be the envy of every young Assineboine in the tribe. The fairest squaws would be their wives, for they could lay such a pile of presents at the lodge doors of the parents that it would be impossible to deny their suit. What guns, too, they could buy, and fancy rifles, and store of beads and gaudy dress, with porcupine quills, and blankets of brightest hue!
All these things flashed through the minds of the war-party as they listened to the trader’s offer. The bid was too high; the last doubt about attempting to kill the Cree and carry off the horses of the Sioux vanished, and already they began to speculate upon their future disposal of so much wealth and so much finery. So far as they were concerned the doom of the Cree, and for that matter of the Sioux, and his associates if resistance was offered, was settled.
The trader saw with suppressed joy this realization of his fondest hopes. He well knew the Sioux would fight to the bitter end sooner than lose friend or horse. He had only one fear, and that was that the murder of the Cree and the capture of the horses might be effected while the Sioux was absent from his camp, and that thus the life of his enemy might be saved.
As he wrapt himself in his robe a little later on in the night, and lay down to sleep by the still smouldering embers of the camp fire, he felt at last that his long fear was wearing to an end, and that the fate of his enemy was sealed.