Read an Excerpt
Blackfoot Redemption
A Blood Indian's Story of Murder, Confinement, and Imperfect Justice
By William E. Farr UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8780-8
CHAPTER 1
"The Napikwan Was Dead"
Spopee's tragic story, at least the origin of it, began in November of 1879 in northern Montana Territory, amid the hysteria associated with the Sioux defeat of Custer's Seventh Cavalry at the bloody Battle of the Little Big Horn three years earlier. Even closer in time and place to Montana's population centers near the continental divide and in the western valleys was what would be later would be termed "the last Indian war," between the Nez Perce and the U.S. Army. Bands of the Nez Perce, who had been the friends and most trustworthy allies of the Americans since the days of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, had in their desperation at promises not kept and multiple threats to confine them to a much reduced reservation, turned on the U.S. government in 1877. Lashing out, the Nez Perce had spilled civilian blood in Idaho and defeated U.S. Army troops under General Oliver O. Howard. About eight hundred Nez Perce had then fled in orderly fashion across the Bitterroot Mountains, into the settled Bitterroot Valley in Montana Territory. Peacefully, they slowly moved up the valley on their way to the Big Hole, a high, isolated valley surrounded by mountains. There, an array of pursuers, including U.S. Army troops led by Colonel John Gibbon and mounted volunteers from the town of Corvallis in the Bitterroot Valley, attacked the unsuspecting Nez Perce, who thought they had left General Howard far behind.
Although the Nez Perce defeated their pursuers at the battle of the Big Hole, it was a costly victory. Limping away, the Nez Perce then won skirmishes in recently created Yellowstone National Park, terrorized tourists, and threaded their way out of its northern geographical maze before heading further north across central Montana and the Missouri River. They hoped for sanctuary in Canada. They did not make it. Instead, surprised and surrounded, the fleeing Nez Perce, cold, weary, and harried, were again forced to battle a many-pronged superior military force that against all odds had caught up with them. On the afternoon of October 5, 1877, they surrendered to Colonel Nelson A. Miles at snowy Snake Creek, near the Bear's Paw Mountains, some forty miles short of the Canadian border.
For Americans in Idaho and Montana, whether government officials, townspeople, miners, cattlemen, or settlers, the Nez Perce rebellion was a threatening example of perfidy. Sioux hostility had been expected. But if the friendly Nez Perce could become disloyal and treacherous, all these years after Lewis and Clark, then there was little hope of redeeming any of the buffalo hunting Indians. It was in this charged atmosphere, when whites felt most vulnerable and hostile, that Spopee, or Turtle, a Blood Indian, unexpectedly became involved in the brutal murder of a white man along a stretch of what locally was called the Whoop-Up Trail.
This so-called road had been beaten into place over a short ten years. Caravans of versatile two-wheeled Métis carts, simple horse-drawn wagons, and heavily laden freight brigades had rolled their way into and out of the British possessions from Montana Territory south of the Canadian boundary, etching long lines of parallel ruts into the dense prairie sod. The freight wagons were pulled by teams of "bulls" (really oxen or cattle), and were spoken of as "bull trains" because spans of these animals, yoked in pairs, were hitched to three wagons "in train," which could be coupled together as were freight cars on a railroad track. Hauling as much as fifteen tons of freight between the three wagons, they lumbered along, making but twelve to fifteen miles in a long day's travel across the open, treeless, but periodically broken country. Moving in "their slow and regular way," from one water-crossing or spring to another, brigades of these broad-gauged wagons, each much larger than the "prairie schooners" of the Oregon Trail, were the most efficient freighters of the day. They carried goods and supplies out of Fort Benton, aptly named "Chicago of the Plains" because, like Chicago, it too had become a hub of trade and transshipment on the northern Plains. The spokes of this entrepôt ran in every direction, some to mining camps and settlements, but a number, especially to the north across the U.S. boundary, ended at colorfully named bison-robe–trading forts, established by Americans, whose principal stock in trade was whiskey.
In the early 1870s, the emerging trail passed through the immense Blackfeet Reservation and then across the international boundary, between Saint Mary Lake to the west and the Sweet Grass Hills to the east, into the rich buffalo-hunting grounds of the Kainai, or Bloods, Spopee's people, and the site of Fort Whoop-Up. This colorful settlement received its curious moniker when the traders, needing more whisky, sent a freighter, George Houk, back to Fort Benton. Asked how things were "up" there in the British possessions, Houk had responded "Oh, we're just whoopen-on-em-up." Deciding that this well-remembered phrase needed some explanation in 1913, the old freighter elaborated, saying that the expression meant that "they were whooping up the whiskey trade with the Indians and making good money at it."
This hard-hearted, misery-inducing, but lucrative business enterprise, often disguised as boisterous merrymaking, had disastrous and murderous consequences for the peoples of the Blackfoot Nation, the Niitzitapi, be they Blood, Piegan, or Blackfoot proper. The fruits of this trade, as Crowfoot, head chief of the Blackfoot tribe, painfully described them in 1874, were deplorable: "If left to ourselves," he explained to Methodist missionary John McDougall, "we are gone. The whiskey brought among us by the Traders is fast killing us all off and we are powerless before the evil. [We are] totally unable to resist the temptation to drink when brought into contact with the white man's water." Crowfoot concluded on an even more dismal note, explaining his people's inability to escape the source of their poverty, the object of their trade, and their addiction. "We are also unable to pitch anywhere that the Trader cannot follow us. Our horses, Buffalo robes, and other articles of trade go for whiskey, a large number of our people have killed one another and perished in various ways under the influence."
American traders John J. Healy and Alfred B. Hamilton, both of whom will figure prominently in the Spopee narrative, had initiated the whiskey trade in the British possessions when they built the infamous Fort Whoop-Up and cashed out fifty thousand dollars' worth of robes and pelts for a short six months of trading. Other American traders, wanting to profit from the same opportunities, quickly followed their example. Like mushrooms following a soft rain, the whiskey forts popped up, sporting names equally vivid and memorable as the first; there was Standoff, north of Fort Whoop-Up on the Belly River, Slide Out to the west, up the Saint Mary River, and the short-lived Robbers' Roost at the mouth of the Little Bow River.
Voluminously supplied via the improved steamboats of the Missouri, the traders of Fort Benton sent wagon train after wagon train carrying whiskey, Indian trade goods, and supplies north, and then those same wagons were turned around and lumbered back by the same route, this time carrying bison robes, south to Fort Benton. Back and forth, up and down, between Fort Benton and Fort Whoop-Up and the numerous other trading posts between the Saint Mary and the Oldman River, the 245-mile trail became known far and wide as the Whoop-Up Trail; and the territory, as Whoop-Up Country. Since the Hudson's Bay Company had transferred legal and political authority in the former Rupert's Land to the distant and absent Dominion of Canada, Whoop-Up Country also became a place beyond enforcement and essentially outside any law.
In this environment the whiskey trade, which centered on a beverage that was not really whiskey but an awful local concoction deceptively called "firewater," became particularly brazen and pernicious. In 1873, for example, in a senseless act of violence, Montana wolfers attacked a drunken and defenseless camp of Assiniboine north of the border in the low-lying Cypress Hills, south and east of the junction of the South Saskatchewan River with its parent. Known thereafter as the "Cypress Hills massacre," this international incident became a cause célèbre, exasperating relations between the United States and Canada.
Only in the aftermath of this tragedy did the Canadian government in Ottawa finally realize that it had to do something to effectively administer its western territory. In the spring of 1873, the Canadian Parliament addressed the pressing problem of the illegal U.S. whiskey trade by creating a mounted constabulary, the NWMP, with the purpose of bringing law and justice to the region. It was not, however, until October of 1874 that the NWMP arrived in the Northwest Territories of southern Alberta and the Cypress Hills, following an epic eight-hundred-mile journey across western Canada in what became known as the "Great March." Building a series of forts encompassing barracks, barns, stables, supply depots, and officers' quarters, the police force received a clutch of governmental powers designed to stabilize the deteriorating situation. There were multiple purposes to this activity, including, as one historian puts it, "pulling the West firmly into the nation's orbit."
One NWMP contingent, under Commissioner George A. French, zeroed in on Fort Whoop-Up, but finding no whiskey there, the men moved north about twenty-five miles. There, under Assistant Commissioner Colonel James F. Macleod, the police began to construct their first buildings on the Oldman River in October of 1874, just in time for winter. They named their creation Fort Macleod, after their leader. Its purpose was to suppress, if not eradicate, the lucrative whiskey trade out of Fort Benton on the Missouri. Ironically enough, in order to provision their large force of 150 men, Commissioner French had previously contacted one of the Fort Benton traders, the I. G. Baker & Company, to supply its need for clothing, hardware, and groceries, already amounting to forty thousand pounds of supplies.
The Blackfeet referred to the boundary between the United States and Canada (or Montana Territory and what would become Alberta) as the Medicine Line or the Iron Line for its magical, transformational, or even sacramental properties, including its ability to stop mounted, superior-armed American soldiers, as well as American legal authorities in the form of federal and territorial officials, dead in their tracks in the middle of nowhere and with no one in sight. This imaginary line exercised much less power over Indian people, especially the tribes of the Niitzitapi.
In 1870, Lt. Colonel Alfred Sully, superintendent of Indians for the Territory of Montana, described the Blackfoot collectively as "one of the largest nations of Indians at present in our country." He was quick to point out, however, that "they do not all properly belong to the United States," for they "claim in common a section of the country from the British line south some miles to the city of Helena, and north of the line to the Saskatchewan River." Sully also felt obliged to remind his superiors in Washington, D.C., that "[b]eing a wild, uncivilized set, they of course do not take into consideration any treaties we have with Great Britain in regard to our boundary line, but look upon the whole of the country both north and south of the line as theirs." Yet while the Indians hardly saw or paid much attention to the boundary line, they knew full well where it was, understood its significance among whites, and acknowledged that the Southern Piegan collected around their newly established agency on Badger Creek, a tributary of the Marias River.
Under U.S. Blackfeet Agent John Young (1876–1884), the first agency at Badger Creek, the so-called Running Crane agency, had been moved a dozen miles downstream to where, it was argued by some, there was better arable and grazing land. It was at this agency, still looking remarkably like a military fort with its wooden palisades, large gate, and commanding watch tower, that Spopee's perplexing story begins to take shape.
On November 18, 1879, Agent Young reported to Montana Territorial Governor Benjamin F. Potts that ten days earlier an Indian woman, while gathering firewood alone beneath the now leafless cottonwood and aspen trees along Cut Bank Creek, had discovered the body of a white man, a napikwan. The location was near the crossing of the Whoop-Up Trail with one of the other trails associated with it, west of the Whoop-Up and twenty miles north of the agency. The day of the body's discovery was bright, but cold and windy. The acrid smell of moldering leaves hung in the crisp air. The dead man's head was bashed in and covered in blood, and the blood, the woman could tell by the color, was fresh. She was frightened, Young wrote, and "did not touch the body and moved Camp at once."
The following Sunday, Young sent the agency physician and chief of its newly established Indian Police, Dr. Arthur C. Hill, as well as the agency blacksmith and some Blackfeet policemen, north to investigate the grisly death, to gather all possible information, and to "bring the remains on return." Following clear directions provided by the woman who discovered the corpse, the group had no trouble finding it. Wolves had destroyed a large portion of the man's body; nonetheless, it was intact enough to determine that the unknown white man was "not much over thirty years, about six feet in height, high forehead, light complexion and light hair, cut short and very roughly." The agent's report, relying on the information gathered on the spot by Dr. Hill, went on to say that the death was the result of a gunshot wound to the body and that the head "was beaten in and the skull broken by a blunt instrument." Nothing of value was found on the body. The victim was dressed for the coming season, wearing three shirts, "one a red flannel, next to the skin, over that a checked shirt, an outside one of blanket." In addition, the body had on it "two pair of overalls, one blue and the other brown, and a pair of coarse, heavy No. 9 boots."
Curiously, the report, so specific and so detailed with respect to the deceased, contained no description of the exact location along Cut Bank Creek or of the larger scene. Nor was there any speculation as to why the body was so easily discovered, which contrasted dramatically with the efforts that had been made to hide the wagon the murdered man evidently had been driving. Seeing wagon tracks near the body, the agency employees had followed the tracks about two miles upstream, zigzagging back and forth across the leaf-strewn gravel streambed until they discovered "an old horse lynch-pin wagon, painted lead color." The wagon, they noted, "had been taken apart and sunk in the creek, excepting the bed and one wheel, which were hidden in the brush." The investigating team also found a double set of English-made harness that had been wadded up in a makeshift bundle. Given its provenance, they speculated that it probably belonged to the NWMP stationed at Fort Macleod, across the boundary, on Oldman River near the terminus of the Whoop-Up Trail. The remains of a bison skin lodge or tepee were also found nearby.
Agent Young, relying on these investigations by Dr. Hill, concluded his report with the comment that all "the circumstances point to a murder committed by some white man, or men, traveling this way from the North." Upon receipt of the news of the white man's murder in late November and knowing the effect the news would have among his already nervous constituents, Montana Governor Potts decided, as was his right according to the laws of the territory, to offer a thousand-dollar reward for the apprehension and conviction of the guilty party or parties. This was not that unusual. Governor Potts offered another territorial reward of one thousand dollars the following year for a murder in Lewis and Clark County. However, the reason behind the territorial governor's offer of a reward for a murder on an Indian reservation that was under direct federal jurisdiction and not territorial authority went unexplained. Many years later Potts's decision in this instance was challenged as inappropriate.
Agent Young, carefully following protocol, was not content to limit the recipients of his communications to Governor Potts. On the same day, he sent his report to other law enforcement officials, including the notorious whiskey trader and founder of Fort Whoop-Up, John J. Healy, who had become the sheriff in Fort Benton, Montana. Although Healy had remained involved in trading at Fort Whoop-Up after the NWMP arrived in 1874, by 1876 he had decided to sell out. The bloom was off the apple. Out of the trading business, Healy moved to Fort Benton in 1877. He became a partner, business manager, and reporter for the Fort Benton newspaper, the Benton Record, and published a remarkable number of firsthand accounts and personal reminiscences under the title "Frontier Sketches." At the same time, Healy purchased an interest in the Overland Hotel and ran for and was appointed sheriff of Chouteau County in 1877 by the local Democrats. He won election as sheriff in 1878 and secured re-election in 1880.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blackfoot Redemption by William E. Farr. Copyright © 2012 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
