True Life Story: Rising Wolf the White Blackfoot. James Willard Schultz
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Mustaches! They are unclean! I shall keep my face smooth," I told her, and I have done so to this day.
When the time came for my going my father gave me a brace of silver-mounted pistols in holsters for the belt, and plenty of balls and extra flints for them. My grandfather gave me twenty pounds, and a sun-glass. "There are times when flint and steel are useless, but as long as the sun shines you can always make fire with this," he told me. Little did we think what an important part it was to play in my first adventure upon the plains.
At last the day for my departure came. We had breakfast by candlelight and then my grandfather took us and my kit down to the wharf in his carriage. I went into the office and signed articles of apprenticeship to the Hudson's Bay Company for five years, at twenty pounds per year, and found, my father and mother signing as witnesses. Whereupon the chief clerk gave me a letter to the factor to whom I was to report without undue delay, Factor James Hardesty, at Mountain Fort, Saskatchewan River, foot of the Rocky Mountains, the company's new fort built for the purpose of trade with the little-known tribes of the Blackfeet, said to be a very numerous people, and possessors of a vast hunting-ground teeming with beaver and other fur animals.
My mother almost fainted when she learned how very far away was my destination. She wept over me, kissed me many times, and made me promise again and again that I would return to her at the end of the five years. And so we went from the office to the end of the wharf, where were the five big keel boats of the company, all loaded, and manned by the sturdy French and English voyageurs, and I got into one of them with my kit, smoothbore in hand and pistols at my belt, and the men cast off and bent to their oars. As far as I could see them, my father and mother and grandfather kept waving their handkerchiefs to me, and I waved mine to them. I never saw them after that day! It was May 3, 1814, about two months short of my sixteenth birthday.
As I have said, there were five boats in the flotilla, and each one was loaded with four or five tons of goods for the Indian trade, everything being done up in waterproof packages of about one hundred pounds weight. The heavy goods were mostly guns, powder and ball and flints, tobacco, beads, beaver traps, and brass and copper wire for making bracelets, and ear and finger rings, and axes, and copper and brass kettles of various size, and small hand mirrors. The lighter goods comprised blankets, red, blue, and yellow woolen cloth, needles, awls, thread, and the many other articles and trinkets sure to take the Red Man's fancy. Not a very valuable cargo, you may say, nor was it there in Montreal. But at Mountain Fort, foot of the Rocky Mountains, it would be of enormous value. There a gun was worth sixty beaver pelts—sixty pounds' worth of fur—and all the other articles sold in the same proportion. Why, a yard of tobacco—it was in long twists like rope—sold there for two beaver skins!
I shall say little of our long journey to Mountain Fort. It was interesting, but as nothing compared to what I saw and experienced after arriving at my destination. We turned into the Ottawa River from the St. Lawrence. How strange it seemed to me, a boy, to sit in the prow as strong men drove us fast and faster toward that unknown land.
We ascended the Ottawa as far as it was navigable, and then portaged our boats and cargoes from lake to lake across a divide, and finally, early in September, arrived at York Factory, on the Saskatchewan River, and close to where the stream empties into Hudson Bay. There we wintered, and set forth again as soon as the ice went out in the spring. En route I saw, for the first time, buffaloes, elk, and one or two grizzly bears, monstrously big bears they appeared to be, even at a distance. I also saw some camps of Cree Indians, enemies of the Blackfeet, but friendly to the whites, and was told that they feared to visit the fort to trade when the Blackfeet were there.
At last, after many weary days of rowing and cordelling up the swift Saskatchewan, we arrived at Mountain Fort. It was the 10th day of July, 1815. I had been a year and a couple of months on my way to it from Montreal!
The fort, built of logs, the buildings roofed with poles and earth, was in a heavily timbered bottom above the high-water mark of the river. It was enclosed with a high, log stockade, and had a bastion at one corner, in which were two small cannon. It was later to be known as Bow Fort, as the stream it was upon, which was a main tributary of the Saskatchewan, was called by the Blackfeet Bow River.
The fort bottom came suddenly into view as our boats rounded a sharp bend of the river, and my eyes and mouth opened wide, I guess, when I saw that its shore was crowded with Indians, actually thousands of them. They had seen few white men, and few boats other than the round "bull boats" which they hastily constructed when they wanted to cross a river, and our arrival was of intense interest to them.
I noted at once that they were far different from all other Indians that I had seen on my long trip across the country. They were much taller, lighter of skin, and slenderly and gracefully built. I marveled at the length of hair of some of the men; in some instances the heavy braids touched the ground; five feet and more of hair! A very few of them wore blankets; the rest were dressed in well-tanned leather—call it buckskin if you will—garments, sewed with sinew thread. But these were well made, and very picturesque, ornamented, as many of them were, with vivid embroidery of porcupine quills, dyed all the colors of the rainbow. Men, women, and children, they all, excepting the few possessors of our company blankets, wore wraps, or togas, of buffalo cow leather, those of some of the men covered with bright-painted pictographs of their adventures, and strange animals of their dreams. I noticed that few of the men had guns; the most of them carried bows and arrows in fur or leather cases and quivers at their backs.
As we swept past the great crowd of people toward the landing, my heart went out to every one of them. I wanted to know them, these people of the plains, as yet unaffected and unspoiled by intercourse with the whites. Little did I think how very soon I was to know them, and know them intimately!
At the landing the factor, Hardesty, and some of his employees, backed by a half-circle of chiefs, awaited our coming. Little attention was paid to me, just a boy. The factor greeted the head voyageur of our flotilla, then the men, and then seemed suddenly to discover me: "And you—" he stopped and stared at me, and said impatiently to one whom I afterward learned was his clerk: "I asked for men, and they send me a boy!"
Then he turned again to me and asked: "Well, young man, what brings you here to this wild land?"
"I came to work, sir!" I answered, and handed him the letter which the company clerk had given me in Montreal. He read it and his manner toward me instantly changed.
"Ah, ha! So you are Hugh Monroe, Junior!" he exclaimed. "And you have come out to grow up with the company! I know your father well, young sir. And your Grandfather de la Roche as well. Fine gentlemen they are. Well! Well! We shall find some use for you, I am sure." And he shook hands with me, and then, after a time, told me to accompany him to his quarters.
We went up the broad beaten path in the timber to the fort, and the big, hewn timber gate swung open for us, and its keeper bowed low as he let us in. "We keep a guard here night and day, and two men up there with the cannon. We have many Indians hereabout, and as yet do not know them well," the factor told me.
We went into his quarters, a big room with an enormous fireplace at one end. It had windows of thin, oiled rawhide, which let in a yellowish light. Its furniture was home-made and comprised a desk, several chairs, a bunk, piled high with buffalo robes and blankets, and an elkhorn rack supporting several guns. I was told to put my gun and pistols on the rack, that another bunk should be put up, and that this was to be my home for the present.
We soon went out, for a long line of employees was bringing in the cargoes from the boats, and the factor had to inspect them. I made my way to the upper floor of the bastion and entered into conversation with the two men on guard there with the cannon, and looked down now and then at the great crowd of Indians out in front of the stockade. Many of them had bundles of beaver and other fur which they were waiting to trade for the newly arrived goods. The watch told me that they had been encamped at the fort for two months awaiting the coming of the boats, and that they had more fur than the cargoes of the five boats could buy, unless the factor more than doubled the price of the goods. That didn't seem possible to me.
"Why, how many Indians do you think are here?" asked one of the watch.
"Three