Down to the Qu’Appelle

—Trevor Herriot

A half-mile from our cabin in the valley there is a large tributary coulee where I like to walk early in the day. The creek along the bottom is dry for most of the summer but its annual flood in April continues to renovate the floodplain. When I stand along the rim of this coulee at a certain spot I can see several miles upstream where hillsides woolly and green with poplar, ash, and saskatoon bushes overlap in an alternating pattern, one behind the other. It is a common enough form in the Qu’Appelle country, but wherever I see it I feel a longing to participate in the sculpture, to touch the land in its millennial changes.

The original Artist did it the right way, the only way, with time and glaciers. Take an old meltwater channel, much broader and deeper than the valley is today, and fill it with layers of gravel and sand. Position the front of a glacier just so, turn up the heat and watch the run-off do the work. That done, those of us with a desire to join in the making now have to get by with pencils and paper, brushes and canvas.

For much longer than we can tell, people have been responding to the Qu’Appelle Valley and its landforms by making things. The process of receiving this land and then making it new again in stories and art was first enacted here by the people who found their way alongside the buffalo that migrated through the valley. And the valley marked the things they made because it bisected their seasonal trails as they moved from camp to camp.

The Qu’Appelle arcs across a 260-mile stretch of the north-eastern arm of the North American Great Plains, its watershed draining the 20,000 square miles of prairie between the South Saskatchewan River watershed to the west and the Assiniboine River watershed to the east. The Qu’Appelle’s natural headwaters rest beneath the eastern arm of a vast reservoir created when the South Saskatchewan River was dammed in the 1960s in south-central Saskatchewan. Today, the Qu’Appelle River has its engineered origins just a little further east of the river bend that has always been known as the Elbow of the South Saskatchewan. From there it meanders eastward as a sleepy prairie river, widening here and there into long lakes that fill the grassland valley from wall to wall. Midway along its sweep through south-eastern Saskatchewan, Last Mountain Lake, the region’s largest natural body of water, comes slicing into the valley from the north, joining the Qu’Appelle near the town of Craven. The valley then continues east, becoming ever deeper and more heavily wooded until, just inside Manitoba, the river finally spills into the Assiniboine bound for the Forks at Winnipeg.

Travel far enough in any direction off the Trans-Canada highway in this region and you will encounter the Qu’Appelle’s sunken landscapes. Whether you move fast or slow across the flat uplands, every time you encounter a piece of the Qu’Appelle’s vast imprint upon the peneplain, the shift in the earth’s surface comes as a surprise. The world falls away at your feet, the geometry begins to curve, and vertical forms suddenly overlap the horizontal. You know, without even seeing it, that there is water down there.

Running water was and remains the Landscaper’s primary tool in this country. Its rise, run, and descent made this place. During the retreat of the Wisconsinan ice sheet, great floods of glacial meltwater cut down into the till and etched a deep, ragged trench. Since then, the snow-melt and annual run-off of 12,000 winters and summers have worked away at the contours, rounding off edges, backfilling the trenches, and slumping hillocks along faults and where springs flow underground. It is an antediluvian world here. The flood has just receded and the soils are young, their parentage traceable to Pleistocene events still fresh in the earth’s short-term memory.

The flood lives too within human memory. A Cree elder living at Piapot, the first Indian reserve as you travel downstream in the valley, told me that one of the stories handed down to her father was about a great river torrent that cut down through the plains, carving the Qu’Appelle long ago.

Now that the waterways have fallen to a trickle, with the occasional spring flood hearkening to the good old days of glacial meltwater, the land looks big and serene. Its soft forms—the undulating hillsides, the slumped terraces, the river’s oxbow curves, the recumbent walls of every tributary coulee—have taken on the sensuality of bodies in repose. Stand and look along the valley’s rim where there are few trees to confuse the eye and you will see voluptuous contours on a monumental scale. Here a spine, there a shoulder, a hip, a knee—forms of sunbathers on a beach receding into the distance. Nothing in the valley thrusts or bends abruptly; everything curves, yields, and rounds to the slow, implacable forces of gravity and water.

In today’s drawn and quartered landscape of quadrilinear fields, curves provide welcome relief. The face of the valley pleases us and so we have come to call it “The Beautiful Qu’Appelle” or “The Scenic Qu’Appelle” in the language of our tourist brochures, real estate agents, and golf course developers. Ecologists and geographers use different terms. They say the valley is a relict mixed-grass grassland in the west and an outlier of aspen parkland in the east. The grass is “mixed” because its assemblage of species lies somewhere between the tallgrass to the south and east and shortgrass to the south and west. Aspen parkland, nominally a savannah of fescue prairie and aspen poplar copses (we call them “bluffs”), is what this part of the continent produces when the fire-precipitation-evaporation regime favours tree growth. But these are ecological categories for what Creation provides and are but little borne out in a casual survey of today’s altered countryside. More accurate terms to describe the land surrounding the valley might be “livestock forage-land” or “cereal-canola-legume crop-land.” In the valley and its many tributaries, however, the ecological tags still apply because the hills are too steep and stony to be ploughed.

The Qu’Appelle and its contributing creeks, then, stand as a last bulwark of unploughed prairie and parkland on the north-eastern fringe of the Great Plains. The valley and its web of tributaries are not quite as diverse and yet a great deal more wooded than they were during the Holocene’s prairie heyday when the random visits of fire and buffalo maintained a full range of grass-dominant ecotones across the northern plains. Nevertheless, the spear grasses, wheat grasses, and bluestem hold the hillsides today in a livelihood that approximates that of the old prairie world. The story of how the valley became a leftover corridor of prairie and parkland engulfed in a sea of cultivated cropland is the story of colonized landscapes the world over: the indigenous and local subsumed by the colonial and global.

* * *

I think of the Qu’Appelle country as having passed through a succession of three cultural phases. As soon as the land was inhabitable after the retreat of the ice, there were people living here. For thousands of years, cultures came and went, rose and fell, hunting, traveling, and trading widely in small bands. The story of this first phase exists in the oral tradition of the Plains peoples, beyond the reach of archaeology and written record.

The second phase began slowly with the advent of the horse and gun in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The horse arrived first, traded north from tribes on the southern plains. Guns came soon after, issuing from the fur trade to the north and east. Indigenous patterns of trade, warfare, and migration began to change, and the changes accelerated as the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and its competitors arrived in the eastern reaches of the valley to gather pemmican for the fur brigades paddling the northern rivers. Groups of Cree and Saulteaux people began to move out of the woodlands and onto the Northern Great Plains, supplanting other nations and eventually dominating the Qu’Appelle region. With the pemmican forts (Fort St. John and Fort Esperance) in the lower Qu’Appelle Valley established in the 1780s, the first mixed-blood or, as we say today, Métis people, came to live in the area. These women and men of blended Indian and European (usually Orkney Scot or French) heritage at the time were called les Hivernant (“the winterers”) or Bois Brulé (“burnt wood”) people. They lived in or near the forts, hunting buffalo, making pemmican, and freighting cargo.

During this same period, diseases such as smallpox borne by Europeans began to kill off thousands of Plains Indian people. A first epidemic in the 1780s came north from the Missouri basin, extinguishing entire bands as it moved across the plains.¹ In the Qu’Appelle, the Assiniboine nation was hit hardest and by the 1830s had been reduced to a fraction of its former numbers. The bones and burial sites of disease victims littered the land, an important point to remember when we tell the stories behind place names that refer to bones. “Pile of Bones,” the English translation of a Cree name for the Regina plains and the creek that drains it, is today widely believed to be merely a reference to heaps of buffalo bones that greeted settlers in the area. If we were to admit that other bones mouldered in those piles we might be less inclined to lend the name so blithely to our tourism campaigns, urban parks, and summer fairs.

Somewhere amid the bones of the dead the original names for the Qu’Appelle Valley rest in a peace that our searching can never violate. A landform as dramatic and dominant as the Qu’Appelle would certainly have had as many names as there were cultures that passed over its hills and streams in the past 12,000 years. The historic record of indigenous names for the valley begins with the first trader to write about his travels upstream in the Qu’Appelle, a young North West Company man named Daniel Williams Harmon. In the late winter of 1804, Harmon’s Plains Cree hosts spoke to him about voices in the valley:

March 11, Sunday. Ca-ta-buy-se-ps or the River that Calls, so named by the Natives, who imagine a Spirit is constantly going up and down the River, and its voice they say they often hear, but it resembles the cry of a human being.²

Despite Harmon’s clumsy notation for the Cree words and his European disdain for the myth-world of aboriginal hunter-gatherers, we gain a sense here of how the valley’s first dwellers communicated with their landscapes, as they did with the whole of Creation. They knew all of nature to be sentient, and so they spoke and listened to the creatures, the grasses, the stones, the rivers, and the hills. What they were telling young Daniel was that the river and its valley called, spoke to them. Later explorers were told the same thing—this is the valley of the river that calls, or this is the What is Calling River, kâ-têpwêwi-sîpiy in Cree.

By the time Métis communities began forming in the valley during the 1800s, kâ-têpwêwi- sîpiy had acquired a new name shaped by the French tongue of les Hivernants. They began calling the river and the valley “the Qu’Appelle,” a fair translation of the Cree name. This was the golden age of the Métis culture. The buffalo were still plentiful, relations with the Cree and the HBC were good, and the colonial government with its police, railroads, and settlers was still somewhere far to the east of the Qu’Appelle. By the summer of 1816, new songs of nationhood were being sung and a new flag raised in the Lower Qu’Appelle valley. It was the height of the Pemmican Wars and the first defence of Métis rights. A Scot Métis named Cuthbert Grant led a band of buffalo hunters from the Lower Qu’Appelle to ride east toward Brandon House and the Selkirk Colony on the Red River. They ruffled the feathers of Peter Fidler at the Brandon HBC post, raising their new flag above the ramparts, and then headed toward the Red River to escort a pemmican shipment past the colony of British settlers, who had declared it illegal to run buffalo or trade pemmican anywhere in their land grant. A skirmish of uncertain cause erupted and, before retreating back to the Qu’Appelle, Grant’s men had killed twenty-one of the colonists, including their leader Robert Semple.

This first conflict between Métis ways and settler ways, now referred to as the Battle of Seven Oaks, may have bolstered the hopes of the plainsmen for a while, but two generations and two “rebellions” (at Red River and Batoche) later the buffalo were all but gone, the Plains Cree, Saulteaux, and Assiniboine had been placed on reserves, and the Qu’Appelle country had been handed over to land-hungry immigrants from Europe, America, and Eastern Canada.

The plan to colonize the North-West got its start in the 1850s, when two separate expeditions from the east arrived in the Qu’Appelle to ascertain whether it and other watersheds on the northern plains might be worth settling. Captain John Palliser, commissioned by a British Parliamentary committee, came first, blasting buffalo, wolves, and grizzlies as he rode west. He advised against settling the drier reaches of the region, an area referred to now as “Palliser’s Triangle,” but recommended that a “fertile belt” to the north and east of this be considered for farm settlement.

A year later, Henry Youle Hind, a geologist from the University of Toronto, was dispatched to conduct a more detailed survey of the area. Hind and his men covered the length and breadth of the valley, taking measurements and visiting posts and Indian bands up and down the river. Afterwards he wrote reports on everything from hydrological data to the experience of watching the Plains Cree impounding buffalo in the Upper Qu’Appelle. In these documents, Hind told his government sponsors that the Indians must be evangelized as soon as possible and induced “to relinquish their wandering habits of life and settle down.”³ To his credit, Hind recognized that indigenous peoples’ contact with European culture had been corrupted by commerce, disease, and alcohol. Unfortunately, however, the solution he proposed—to make every Indian into a Christian farmer—still came from the same paternalist soul of the colonizer. When the buffalo disappeared twenty years later, Hind’s recommendations were put into practice. Band by band, the Qu’Appelle Valley peoples took treaty and moved onto reserves, where missionaries and Indian agents could teach them to hoe potatoes and sing hymns.

By the late 1860s the newly confederated Canadian government was growing increasingly afraid that America’s Manifest Destiny might spill over the 49th parallel. To get title to the North-West and begin filling it with people, the powers in Ottawa believed they had three tasks to accomplish: 1. Secure title from the HBC; 2. Survey the land to prepare for settlement; and 3. Build a railway to transport goods and settlers. In 1869 the HBC cashed in its North-West land holdings, known then as “Rupert’s Land,” selling hundreds of thousands of square miles for a token 300,000 pounds sterling. That same year, before the deal was signed, the Dominion Land Survey began carving up the countryside into quarter-section (160-acre) parcels ready for the plough. Working its way west, the survey eventually staked out more than 178 million acres for settlement and farming.

When they heard that the Hudson’s Bay Company had sold Rupert’s Land from underneath their feet, the Qu’Appelle Indian bands found themselves in the strange position of having to re-assert land rights that they had never relinquished in the first place. They had seen the government-survey crews taking measurements and they knew that settlement would follow quickly. In the early 1870s, the Cree sent word to the Canadian government calling for treaty discussions. Receiving no response, Qu’Appelle bands began blocking the work of survey crews, eventually forcing Ottawa to the treaty table.⁴ To the colonial government, the treaty that covers the Qu’Appelle country, Treaty Four, extinguished Indian title once and for all in a purely legal document agreed to by both parties (the Crown and the First Nations), transferring title to the Crown. To the first peoples of the Qu’Appelle, however, Treaty Four was and remains today a sacred agreement made before the Creator and sanctioned by the solemnity of the pipe. By signing it they agreed to share the fruits of the land with the British Crown in exchange for gifts, annual provisions, and other benefits and privileges set out in the terms of the treaty. The thirteen Cree and Saulteaux nations that came to Fort Qu’Appelle in September of 1874 to negotiate a treaty say that the reciprocity and provisions offered by the Crown were clear and beyond dispute. The issue of the exact rights the First Nations granted the Crown is less clear. The Treaty Four nations maintain that those rights are merely “usufruct” and therefore do not grant ownership.

Questions of ownership notwithstanding, the story of the first century on the Qu’Appelle-country Indian reserves is a saga of deprivation, abuse, betrayal, and oppression.⁵ In the early years of the reserve system, the Canadian government couldn’t decide which was more of a problem: the surprising success of some Indian farmers, which was causing white farmers to complain that Indian growers had unfair advantages in the local market, or their own utter failure to convince reserve people to abandon their cultural and religious traditions. Ottawa’s solution was to draw up the most repressive legislation in Canadian history. Laws restricting off-reserve movement, prohibiting religious ceremonies, and establishing the residential school system were swiftly passed under a new Indian Act. The Qu’Appelle First Nations, like indigenous peoples from coast to coast, were sentenced to one hundred years of hard time.

The Métis and non-status Indian people of the region have fared no better. They too could see by the late 1870s that the colonial plans for settlement would dispossess them in the land of their ancestors. When Louis Riel’s provisional government along the Red River collapsed, those among the Métis more inclined to live by the hunt and away from white settlement fled west to live along the Qu’Appelle and South Saskatchewan Rivers. Supported by some white settlers as well as their Plains Cree allies, the Métis of the Saskatchewan Territory began to send petitions to Ottawa, asking for recognition of their rights to land and self-government. At the request of the Métis, Riel returned from Montana, lifting hopes and leading the campaign to get a better deal for the Métis and Indian people of the North-West. After a series of disappointments and setbacks, Riel declared a provisional government in the late winter of 1885. Then, just before Easter, tensions in the region climaxed in a tragedy at Frog Lake, when several unarmed white men were killed by Cree warriors from the band led by the legendary Big Bear. The colonial government, fearing an all-out rebellion, dispatched three columns of the army, including one that would stop off at Fort Qu’Appelle to enlist settlers and drill for several days before the long march north to unseat Riel at Batoche.

As for the Métis in the Qu’Appelle, two men were arrested for allegedly sending supplies to Batoche. In the weeks and months leading up to the events at Batoche, white settlers in the Fort Qu’Appelle area had become extremely nervous, fearing an outbreak from their Métis neighbours. When General Middleton arrived with his troops to set up headquarters in the fort, the white citizenry breathed a sigh of relief. Their fears were unfounded, however, for the Qu’Appelle Métis at the time had had some success gaining the ear of government and believed—naively, it turns out—that they would receive title to their land, as well as compensation for lands relinquished.

After the Métis at Batoche were defeated, the mixed-blood people, who had, only a decade before, been the emerging culture of the Northern Great Plains, became landless wanderers, exiled in their own land and cheated of their birthright. In the Qu’Appelle they gathered at Lebret, Katepwa, St. Marthe de Rocanville, St. Joseph’s, and St. Lazarre. They are the families not mentioned in the Jubilee Year history books, those dark-skinned people who lived on the road allowance or by the river, hunted grouse and deer year round, sold cordwood, fence pickets, and half-wild ponies, and sent their children to school with gopher-meat sandwiches in their lunch-pails.

Left out of treaty-making and out of our local history books, it is the Métis people, however, that we turn to for our legends. The remnant of original meaning in the valley’s name survived because people with a mix of indigenous and European in their blood adapted the name and spun new stories to suit. In the middle of the Qu’Appelle Valley’s 260-mile length is a chain of four lakes, sometimes known as the “Calling Lakes”—yet another reference to the original Cree nomenclature. Our modern folk tale of the valley’s call is set in these lakes and forms a bridge from oral tradition to literature, appropriately enough, in the person of a mixed-blood poet of the early twentieth century, Pauline Johnson.

There is no denying that Johnson’s beloved “Legend of the Qu’Appelle” (see frontispiece) is a sentimental Victorian ode that takes a legitimate remnant of the oral tradition and reframes it to suit modern listeners who prefer their Indians noble, tragic, and, if at all possible, in canoes. Johnson’s legend has become the one we repeat for tourists, reinforcing the standard Indian clichés and burying the valley’s original stories of listening to the river. Still, if we are honest we have to admit that the legend appeals as well to our deepest wishes for a landscape that keeps its narratives. No matter what we may think of Johnson’s poem, we are grateful that this one piece of lore—however compromised it may be by our colonial appropriations—has survived the onslaught of modernity.

And that, finally, is what the Qu’Appelle has come to represent for the people who find themselves in this corner of the Northern Great Plains early in the third millennium: a landscape where original people, original ecologies, and original stories survive; a topography of relief for the eye and spirit imprinted upon a plain scraped bare first by glaciers and second by settlement and commerce.

Like everyone else, I go down to the Qu’Appelle because it feels good to be there, puts me in touch with something I long for. Exile makes it so. Nostalgic for a time when we spoke and listened to valleys and rivers, we go to places like the Qu’Appelle to make contact with people who once drew shelter and sustenance from its hills and ravines. We pause by tipi rings pondering the lives of first dwellers camped along the valley rim; we sense the presence of the second-comers, the Métis, at cellar depressions and mud-chinked cabins in a coulee; and we listen for ghosts at abandoned farm houses, the sun-bleached ruins of a brief embrace that brought together the valley and the settler people, third to know its hospitality.

Estranged from these former lifeways, we, the descendants of the three successive prairie cultures, live on reserves, acreages, and farms, in towns and cities where gas heat, indoor plumbing, and supermarket food have all but broken our physical bond to the valley. For most of us, if we go down to the Qu’Appelle to take a deer or a walleye, pick berries or dig breadroot now and then, it is more an act of remembering than survival. This beach, Grandma’s cabin, this creek, a skate into town, this coulee, a first grouse. Our favourite places, our past, and our stories tumble together now. Old ways and old ones come to mind: a valley met on its own terms and a people who listened to a river’s call.

Notes

1. John W.R. McIntyre and C. Stuart Houston, “Smallpox and its Control in Canada,” Canadian Medical Association Journal (December 1999), 1543–1547.
2. Daniel Williams Harmon, Sixteen Years in Indian Country (Toronto: MacMillan, 1957), 76.
3. Henry Youle Hind, Narrative of the Canadian Red River Exploring Expedition of 1857 and of the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition of 1858 (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1971), 2:198.
4. Rob Innes, unpublished paper, Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, 1999.
5. This important story is best found in books such as John S. Milloy’s A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879–1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999).