The Conclusion.

In concluding this narrative of my experiences among hostile Indians a few notes concerning the subsequent careers of those prominently connected with it, either as belligerents or as captives, will be of interest.

Louis Riel was hanged at Regina, in October, 1885. I saw him there, wearing a ball and chain, several times during the trials, after he had been condemned. He was of medium height, compactly built, with thick curling brown hair and beard, an unusually long, straight nose, small, cunning eyes, and hands like a woman's which he used with effect in graceful gestures when he spoke. His skin was fair for a half-breed and he possessed marked native ability, which his perverted ideas, cruel nature and overweening ambition prevented his employing to useful ends. His purpose in inciting rebellion among his own race and his kinsmen, the Indians, undoubtedly was to force the Canadian government into paying him a large sum to leave the country and return to the United States. In this he was defeated by the unexpected and rapid rise and spread of the revolt and the shedding of blood, and the scaffold was a fitting close to his inglorious career.

On my way East in December, 1885, I visited the Manitaba Penitentiary and through the kindness of the warden, Major Bedson, was permitted to interview Big Bear, Pound-maker and other Indian prisoners. They were pleased to see me. Poundmaker was a magnificent type of the American red man. Fully six and a half feet in height, he had a most intelligent face, large Roman nose, a deliberate and courtly air, and a slight stoop which gave a classic pose to his striking figure. His hair was his especial pride. It hung in two superb plaits almost to his knees. When sentenced at Regina for treason-felony to two years' imprisonment, he exclaimed: "I would rather be hanged!" It was the expected loss of his hair that moved him. His appearance and manner so impressed the prison authorities, however, that he was spared the humiliation of parting with his cherished locks.

Big Bear's chief concern was for the scattered remnant of his band and for his children. He told me then, and also a year later when I returned West, the truth about his connection with the outbreak, most of his story being embodied in the foregoing pages I had always a keen regard for the old chief and believed his word was to be relied upon. True, he was a savage, but in estimating his character allowance must be made for a condition for which he was in no wise responsible, being born to it. Big Bear had great natural gift, courage, a keen intellect, a fine sense of humor, quick perteption, splendid native powers of expression and great strength of purpose.

His voice reminded me always of his name. It was of amazing depth and volume and I have heard him say "No!" in tones which sounded like the roar of a lion. Yet his speech was capable of taking on a vastly different inflection, and the next instant I have heard it sink to a soft whisper, tender and musical as a child's. The old man came often to the Hudson's Bay Company's post at Frog Lake and had dinner with me and prior to the outbreak we had many times camped and travelled together. He was one of the most entertaining conversationalists I ever listened to and I never wearied of his tales and reminiscences. He could enchain an audience, white or red, whenever he opened his mouth; his gestures spoke almost as eloquently as his words. He was built more like a white man than an Indian, being short and heavy. When young he must have had tremendous powers of endurance.

I recall his once telling me of having been surrounded with three others of his tribe on the open plains by a large war party of Blackfeet. The Crees threw up earthworks with their knives and for three days lay in their pits, enduring all the pangs of hunger and thirst, and kept the enemy at bay. He became so accustomed to the sound of the Blackfoot bullets over his head, the old man said, and grew so drowsy that he frequently found himself dropping off to sleep as he lay with his rifle across a depression in the earthworks, watching in the darkness for the shadow of an approaching foe. On the third night Big Bear escaped through the Blackfoot lines, killing one of their pickets, and at daybreak returned with a party of his own tribe and drove the enemy off.

Had the old chief been a white man and educated, he would have made a great lawyer, or a great statesman. Poundmaker was perhaps a finer savage to look at, but Big Bear was far the greater man. Poundmaker was crafty and politic; Big Bear imperious, outspoken, fearless.

Big Bear was liberated at the end of two years. He returned to Battleford and died on Little Pine's reservation during the winter of 1887-88. Poundmaker had been released earlier; like Big Bear he did not long survive to appreciate the blessing of freedom. I have a photograph of Poundmaker taken just before his death through the bursting of a blood-vessel at Blackfoot Crossing, near Calgary, where he was visiting the Blackfoot chief, Crowfoot. I have also a photograph of Big Bear taken immediately after his surrender in 1885.

In the spring of 1888, I told one of Big Bear's men whom I met at Edmonton of his chief's death. He clapped his hand over his mouth - the Indian expression of surprise or incredulity.

"He always said he would never die until his teeth were worn even with his gums," was what he said then. An Indian is usually too polite to say that he does not believe you, but I quite understood that Wapistanis at that moment held my veracity in light esteem. His answer was significant as showing the estimation in which Big Bear's utterances were regarded by his band. As a matter of fact I immediately recalled that the old chief's teeth were worn short by mastication.

Big Bear and Poundmaker were the two principal chiefs implicated in the uprising. Imasees, Little Poplar, King Bird, Lucky Man and others managed to avoid capture and escape across the boundary into Montana. They killed a man drifting down the South Saskatchewan River in a skiff and used his boat to cross the stream. Little Poplar was shot a year or so later by a half-breed named Ward with whom he quarrelled over some horses. They met on horseback on the prairie near Fort Bear, made a trip to Ottawa and eastern cities in paint and feathers, wearing all the airs of a great chief. He made speeches and Canadian officialdom listened deferentially and paid him due respect. Had he been captured after the rebellion he would doubtless have swung from the same scaffold as Wandering Spirit, for he was undoubtedly the real instigator of the Frog Lake massacre. From personal observation, I have shown that he was guilty of the basest treachery. But such are the vagaries of time: the accessories condemned and hanged by the government; the principal feted and publicly honored by the same government.

Imasees died many years later in his camp on the St. Mary's River in Montana.

The two murderers, Paskookwyoo and Maymaykwaysoo, also escaped justice. I believe they are now also dead.

Four-Sky Thunder was released in the summer of 1891. I had seen him at Stony Mountain Penitentiary, occupying a seat on the tailors' bench. I met Peter Hourie, the Indian Department interpreter at Regina, in the street one day.

"Did you see your old friend?" he asked. "Who was that?" "Kahneeokeesikopaniss.

He came to the office yesterday, on his way to Battleford. He said he was sorry to hear that the Musinageesees was dead. I asked him who he meant. 'Missa Jim Oskineku', he said. "He is not dead," I told him. 'If you stand on this corner he will pass within two smokes and you will see him."

This was early in the afternoon. I afterwards learned that my old chawam, Four-Sky Thunder, had stood in that spot until nearly train time, seven in the evening, watching for me. I was sorry that my business that afternoon had taken me in another direction and that he was obliged to leave without seeing me again. He is long since dead.

Lone Man put in an appearance at Edmonton a year after the rebellion. He was trying to sell horses, the white racer upon which he had ridden down Loasby at Pitt among them. It was an unfortunate indiscretion on the part of Lone Man, for an ex-member of Steele's Scouts who lived at Edmonton recognized the savage of the solitary name by the white horse. He had encountered him on the afternoon that Quinney, Dufresne and myself found the scouts at Frenchman's Butte and about a mile from that picturesque land-mark - which incidentally proves that Dufresne and I were right in believing there might be stray Indians about and that it would be the part of wisdom for the missionary to exercise caution.

Lone Man was shut up in the police guardroom at Edmonton to await trial for shooting at and wounding Loasby. One night he escaped. He was gone for two days. It was January, the thermometer far below zero. On the third morning a detachment of police overtook Lone' Man on the road.

He knew, of course, that several of his fellow-tribesmen had been hanged at Battleford and doubtless anticipated a like fate. He took off his white blanket and waved it in the wind, trying to stampede the police horses. They plunged and snorted but the attempt failed. Then Lone Man shouted defiance, telling the police they were dogs and calling on them to shoot and be eternally condemned. They arrested him instead. He got six years in Manitoba penitentiary. Lone Man is now dead.

About 1911, I one day received in the mail a letter post-marked Pincher Creek, Alberta, addressed in an unfamiliar hand. It was signed: "Your old friend, "SAM JOHNSON."

I had known Johnsons, of course - plenty of them - but I couldn't place Sam. But when I reached the postscript the riddle was explained. "I used to be called The Lone Man," it read, "but my right name is Sam Johnson. "Your old friend, "Sam Johnson."

Civilization does move, by heck!

Clarence Loasby was for years an official of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the Kootenays, British Columbia. He wore in a ring on his finger one of the two bullets received on that scouting trip at Pitt and for which he is indebted to The Lone Man. He died a few years ago.

My friend and protector, Louis Patenaude, lived until recently on the bank of the Saskatchewan near Fort Pitt, with his stepfather, old Mr. James K. Simpson. Both, I am sorry to say, are now dead. There were no better men anywhere.

Kahneepotaytayo lived until recently on the reservation at Onion Lake. Though I had not seen him since the rebellion, he recognized me at once when I drove out to his place in the fall of 1923. No one seeing him now would believe he could have been the handsome and active head dancer of Big Bear's band in 1885, the spearer of the White Dog's Head and next to Little Poplar (of whom he was a nephew) perhaps the greatest dandy in the camp. His first wife was a daughter of Wandering Spirit, his last a daughter of Apischiskoos, among the murderers hanged at Battleford.

Whatever her father may have been, the daughter of Apischiskoos is a fine type of Indian woman, pleasant to look at, ready of speech, amiable, laughing and sincere. Everything about their camp on the Pipestone near Onion Lake was as spick and trim as could be when I visited them again in the fall of 1925. I made them some small presents of things most dear to the Indian heart - tea, tobacco, sweets. They were so kind, so frankly delighted over the visit that before leaving I wished to say something agreeable, something sympathetic, to mention some redeeming trait in her turbulent parent. I did. He had two daughters; neat attractive girls about sixteen years of age at the time of the massacre. They knew no English and we spoke in Cree.

"Your father was a good friend to me." A shadow crossed her cheerful face. She murmured something - probably to the effect that they should not have hanged him, though I could not catch it. "In the winter before the 'bad time' he came to me one day. 'My daughter is very sick,' he told me. 'She has a bad cold. I have no medicine - nothing to buy any.' I felt sorry. I said: 'I will give you some medicine. Also a little tea and sugar and biscuit for her. He came back in two weeks. "That was splendid medicine," he said. "My daughter is quite well again."

"He never forgot that. When others in the camp were against me, he threatened them, always ready to defend me." I paused a moment: "I don't know - perhaps it was for you he got the medicine?" Like a flash, memory flew back over the years. Her eyes lighted; she turned a beaming face to me: "Yes; I know!" she exclaimed. "It was yellow medicine, wasn't it?"

It was. What I had given Apischiskoos was a small bottle of honey - the only "medicine" I had that I thought might help a cold. Across that great span of forty years she had not forgotten my trifling act of kindness. She proved it convincingly.

When we were leaving she stood with Kahneepotaytayo alongside our car with its three white occupants. I waited. They wanted, I knew, to say something, to make a little speech to me at parting. At length Kahneepotaytayo spoke:

"We are very pleased that you have come to see us. We never thought to look at you again." He was silent for a second. "And perhaps, if Manitou thinks, we shall see you yet again sometime." And they call this man a pagan!

I have never anywhere met friends who were more unaffectedly glad to see me than these simple, kindly red folk of the Plains.

Francois Dufresne was for many years before his death, interpreter for the Indian Department at Onion Lake, where the agency is now located.

Poor Louis Goulet was for thirty years an inmate of the Home for Incurables at Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. I dropped in to see him when I passed that way. He liked to talk over the days, long gone, when he could enjoy the sunlight like other people. He was completely blind. He died in 1936.

Adolphus Nolin, vigorous and active still, lived until recently on a ranch near Onion Lake. I spent a night with him some time ago.

I saw John Pritchard at Battleford in the fall of 1925, a few days before his death at the age of 86. His only reward for guarding the white women in the Indian camp was the consciousness of a good act nobly performed. It is not to the credit of the Canadian government that his splendid service at that difficult time was never recognized. He might at least have been given a small pension, like the women whose lives he had saved.

Father Le Goff died only a few years ago at the Roman Catholic Mission of St. Albert. Despite his eighty-six years, his health, as he wrote me some time before, "was very good." The little French priest had a most eventful life. Prisoner of Big Bear's followers in 1885, he was again a prisoner thirty years later of the Germans. In June, 1914, he was in Liege, Belgium, arranging for the publication of a Chippewyan dictionary he had written, when the Great War broke. He was captured and shut up in a monastery, but escaped to Switzerland. He continued after his return to labor among the Chippewyans, with whom he must have spent nearly 50 years, until shortly before his death.

Mr. W. J. McLean died some time ago in Winnipeg.

On Poundmaker's reserve, in 1925, I looked up Horse Child, Big Bear's only surviving son. In build and many little mannerisms he reminded me strongly of his father. He was twelve at the time of the '85 troubles; he was then fifty-two. I saw him again in 1947, when he had reached the age of 74. He is a fine Indian. I met there also Sakama-taynew, Poundmaker's only son.

My dear old comrade, Frederick Stanley Simpson, met his death on October 1st, 1891, in the Nelson River, a tributary of Hudson Bay, in an heroic effort to save the life of his senior officer, Horace Belanger, chief factor in charge of the Hudson's Bay Company's district of Norway House. Horace Belanger was an immense man, helpless out of his depth. Their canoe capsized in a dangerous rapid and Simpson, a powerful swimmer, exhausted by his exertions to help his chief and paralysed by the icy water, sank to rise no more, Belanger also losing his life. The sacrifice was witnessed by an Indian, the third member of the party, who escaped.

Simpson had the nature of a true nobleman. He was my greatest friend.

Frog Lake is no longer deserted, but the centre of a beautiful and thriving white settlement. A railway under construction from Battleford to Edmonton north of the Saskatchewan will reach it ultimately, and its hills, which have echoed to the whoops of the red man, will give back only the peaceful whistle of the locomotive. Its isolation and wild loneliness are things of the past.