Chapter XXVIII: The Land to the South

Pembina seethed with indignation when the Periers’ story was told. The Swiss, who were all undergoing their share of suffering, sympathized warmly with their country folk. Though still prejudiced against the new colonists, the Scotch and Irish settlers had nothing but condemnation for the rascally half-breed Murray. Many of the _bois brulés_ of Pembina had bitterly opposed the Selkirk settlement, and some had joined with the Northwesters in driving out the colonists. Since the union of the two companies, however, most of the enmity had evaporated. Walter had received only the kindest treatment from the French mixed bloods. Now there was not one to defend Murray in his heartless desertion of helpless travelers. So strong was the feeling against the treacherous voyageur that if he had been in Pembina when the Periers arrived, he would scarcely have escaped with his life. Though he had been gone several hours, a party of armed men went out to search for him. Uncertain whether he had told the truth when he had said he was going up river, they scoured the country for miles to the east and west as well as to the south. They did not overtake him. He had too long a start.

Murray was not well known in Pembina. He had never lived there nor at St. Boniface. No one in either settlement knew much about him. The spring after the killing of Governor Semple, the tall voyageur had come down the Assiniboine from the west with a brigade transporting furs to York Factory, and had remained in Hudson Bay service. It was said at that time that he was the son of a free trader of mixed Scotch and Cree blood. The elder Murray had wandered far,—so it was said,—and had taken a wife from among the western Sioux. If this story was true, Murray could not be more than one quarter white and was at least half Sioux. The Indian blood in the Pembina half-breeds was chiefly Ojibwa and Cree. The Sioux were the traditional enemies of the Ojibwas and the Crees. To the people of Pembina Murray’s Sioux blood did not endear him. There was not a man to find excuse for behavior of which few full-blooded Sioux would have been guilty.

It was some time before the Perier family recovered from their terrible experience. The frost bites Elise and Max had suffered were so severe that the outer skin of their cheeks, noses, hands, and feet peeled off in patches, leaving sore, tender spots. Their father was in a far worse condition. His feet and ankles, his right hand and arm, were badly swollen and inflamed and very painful. It was weeks before he was able to walk or to use his right hand. Had the boys failed to give him prompt treatment when they first found him he would have frozen to death. Realizing what might have happened if they had camped on the prairie that night, instead of pushing on to the river, Walter felt that he and his companions had indeed been guided to the rescue.

The little settlement had passed through hard days while the three boys were in the hills. Food had been very scanty. The buffalo had been far away, and following them in the deep snow next to impossible. Other game had been exceedingly scarce. Even the nets set under the ice of the two rivers had yielded little. The _bois brulés_ and the older settlers had fared better than the Swiss. Though the rations had been slender, neither the Brabants nor the MacKays had been entirely without food. The Swiss had suffered severely. Johan Scheidecker told Walter that at one time his family had not had a morsel to eat for three days. At Fort Douglas conditions had been even worse than at Pembina. By February most of the settlers were on an allowance of a pint of wheat or barley a day, which they ground in hand mills or mortars. Soup made from the grain and an occasional fish were all they had for weeks at a time. Though their fare had been meager enough, the Periers, in Sergeant Kolbach’s care, had fared better than many of their country folk. They had never been quite without food.

With the coming of spring matters improved at Pembina. When the ice in the rivers began to break up, wild fowl arrived in great flocks. Almost every night they could be heard passing over. By day they alighted to feed along the rivers and in the marshes. Every man able to walk, every boy large enough to carry a gun, shoot an arrow, or set a snare, and many of the women and girls, hunted from daylight till dark for ducks, geese, swans, pelicans, cranes, pigeons, any and every bird, large or small, that could be eaten. The buffalo also were drawing nearer the settlement. Following the herds over the wet, sodden prairie was difficult, even on horseback, but a skilful hunter brought down a cow or calf now and then. The lucky men shared generously with their neighbors.

Louis and Walter had no time for long hunting trips. Both had obtained temporary employment at the Company post. Indian and half-breed hunters were bringing in the winter’s catch, and the two boys were engaged to help with the cleaning, sorting, and packing of the pelts.

The post was a busy and a merry place those spring days. The men worked rapidly and well, but found plenty of time for joking, laughing, singing, and challenging one another to feats of strength and agility. After the cold and hardships of the winter, the spring fur-packing was a season of jollity for the voyageurs. Walter and Louis enjoyed the bustle and merriment, while they worked with a will.

The skins were thoroughly shaken and beaten to free them from dust and dried mud. Then they were sorted, folded to convenient size, and pressed into packs by means of a wooden lever press that stood in the post courtyard. Each bundle,—about ninety pounds weight,—of assorted furs was wrapped in a strong hide. In every package was a slip of paper with a list of the contents. To the outside was attached a wooden stave, with the number and weight of the pack, and the name of the post. The numbers and lettering were burned into the wood. Because he wrote a good hand, Walter was able to help the overworked clerk with these invoices and labels. He did a share of the harder physical work as well.

The Swiss boy was heartily glad of employment. His wages, in Hudson Bay Company paper money, were exchanged for food and ammunition, and clothes for Elise, Max and himself. The Periers needed his help sorely. They had reached Pembina destitute. When they had left Switzerland, they had been well supplied with clothing. They had also brought with them the apothecary’s herbs and powders and such household goods as they were permitted to take aboard ship. In the crowded open boat in which they had come from Fort York, there had not been room for all their belongings, so some had been left behind. Nearly everything else had been lost in the wreck on Lake Winnipeg. The little that remained had been on the toboggan that Murray had run away with. Every cent of Mr. Perier’s money, as well as the Hudson Bay paper he had received for his work at the buffalo wool factory, had gone for food and other expenses during the winter. Even his silver watch and chain he had turned over to Murray. Father and children had nothing left but the worn clothes they were wearing, two blankets, and the few packets of medicinal plant seeds the apothecary carried in his pockets. He must begin all over again, and on credit at that.

Mrs. Brabant’s sympathy for the unfortunate family was genuine and warm. They crowded her house to overflowing, but she would not hear of their going elsewhere. Indeed there was no other place for them to go but Fort Daer, and the fort was too well filled for comfort. It was hardly worth while to attempt building a new cabin, if they were to return to the Selkirk settlement in a few weeks.

Were they going to return to the settlement? That was the question that troubled Mr. Perier and Walter. It led to many debates, as the two families sat around the fire after the evening meal. There was that hundred acres of land to be considered. A vast estate it seemed to the Swiss apothecary. The promise of that great tract of land had dazzled him when he first talked with Captain Mai in Geneva. Since his coming to the new country, however, the hundred acres of unbroken prairie had grown less alluring. He had learned that not one of the older colonists had been able to cultivate more than a few acres. He had no farming tools and he could obtain nothing but hoe and spade at the Colony store. There was not a plough to be bought for credit or cash. Breaking tough prairie sod with hoe and spade would be slow and painful toil for Walter and himself.

Because of the depredations of the locusts, seed grain was very scarce. The little Mr. Perier might buy would be high in price. From his first crop he would have to pay for seed as well as rent for the land. If he did not succeed in raising a crop, if the grasshoppers came again and destroyed it, he would be far in debt to the Colony, with no immediate hope of getting out. Already he had learned to his cost that prices were high at the Colony store, and that bills were sometimes rendered for things that had not been bought. In the end he might easily lose his land and have nothing to show for his labor. The prospect was not bright. Hopeful though he was by nature, he doubted his ability to make a success of farming under such discouraging conditions.

Walter was strongly against returning to Fort Douglas. It would be better to remain where they were, he argued, and trust to making a living, as the _bois brulés_ did, by hunting, fishing, and planting a small garden. Perhaps the Company would let Mr. Perier have his hundred acres in the neighborhood of Pembina. Both Louis and Jean Lajimonière,—who was consulted,—shook their heads at the latter suggestion. Pembina was included in Lord Selkirk’s grant, but the real Colony was established at and near Fort Douglas. It was there that the land was allotted. They thought it unlikely that Mr. Perier could obtain his anywhere else. In any case there would be the same difficulty about tools, seed, supplies, and rent. And so the argument went on.

In the meantime spring had come in earnest. The ice was gone from the rivers. Birds were nesting in the woods, in the marshes, and on the prairie, according to their habit. As the rivers subsided from flood stage, fishing was resumed and yielded good results. The snow had melted from the prairie, though it still lingered in shaded places in the woods and along the river banks. The burned stretches showed new green. The sun was drying up the excess of moisture that had turned the prairie into ponds and spongy expanses and had converted the rambling paths and cart tracks of Pembina into sticky mud.

In May the old colonists and most of the new began to prepare for the return to Fort Douglas. Still Mr. Perier and Walter were undecided. At last they came to a decision suddenly and almost by accident. Through Lajimonière, Mr. Perier met a man named St. Antoine who had traveled more widely than most of the Pembina mixed bloods. Two years before, he had been far to the south and east with Laidlaw, the Colony superintendent of farming, when the latter had gone to Prairie du Chien on the Mississippi River for seed grain. St. Antoine had many tales to tell of the country along the Mississippi and the St. Peter rivers.

“That is a fine land,” he told Mr. Perier, “a land with hills and forests,—not flat and bare like this, though there is open country there too, good land for farming. At Prairie du Chien now, there the soil is rich and the crops grow well and ripen. It is not so cold as here. The spring comes earlier and the frost later.”

“Are there grasshoppers there?” Mr. Perier inquired.

“The kind that eat up everything? No, no. Those grasshoppers have never been seen in that country, the people say. And where the two rivers come together, where the Americans are building a fort, it is beautiful there, with high hills and bluffs like mountains, and woods and waterfalls.”

Mr. Perier’s brown eyes were wistful. St. Antoine’s description sounded good to a Swiss homesick for his mountains. “How does one go to that country?” he asked. “Can land be bought or rented?”

“Oh,” replied St. Antoine confidently, “you do not have to buy or rent it, that land. There is no Hudson Bay Company to say where you shall live and where you shall not, and to charge you so many bushels of wheat a year. You find a place that you like and you build a house and plant your crops and it is yours. That is the way folk do on the east side of the Rivière Mississippi. On the west side the American government does not want people to settle. That is Indian country. You may live there if you are a trader. But there is plenty of land on the east side, fine land too. Some time I am going back there to stay,—when I get old and want to settle down.”

St. Antoine’s tales took hold of Mr. Perier’s imagination. The more he thought of that country to the south and east, the more he wanted to go there, and the less he wanted to return to Fort Douglas. He told Walter and Louis, and they too talked to St. Antoine, who fired their imaginations as he had fired the older man’s. It did not take Walter long to decide what he wanted to do. The question was how were they to get to the Mississippi. It would be a long journey, hundreds of miles, by cart and horseback through the country of the Sioux. But it could be done of course. It had been done a number of times. The previous summer’s threats of trouble with the Sioux had come to nothing. Yet the trip might be a dangerous one for a small party. At this point Louis had a suggestion to offer.

“The summer buffalo hunt will start in June,” he said. “It will go far to the south, perhaps near to the Lake Traverse. We can travel with the hunters at first. When we are near Lake Traverse,—or if the hunters go too far to the west,—we can leave them and make haste to the lake. There is a trading post there, so St. Antoine says, and another at the Lake Big Stone. Traders go back and forth along the Rivière St. Pierre to the Mississippi. There will surely be some party we can travel with.”

“You will go too, Louis?” Walter asked eagerly.

“But _certainment_. Do you think I would let you and M’sieu Perier and Ma’amselle Elise and the little Max go alone? No, no, I want to see that country too. And I think Neil MacKay will go also.”

“His people would never let him.”

“I am not so sure of that. M’sieu MacKay is not well pleased with the Selkirk Colony. He says if the grasshoppers come again, he will go somewhere else. I think he would not object to Neil’s going to see that country to the south.”

So, gradually, the plan took shape. It was Mrs. Brabant who made the strongest objections at first. But when Mr. Perier and Walter finally decided to go, and Louis insisted on going with them, she suddenly made up her mind, much to Raoul’s delight, that she and the children would go along. “And if we like that country, Louis,” she said, “we will stay. It may be there will be a better chance for you there. If we do not like it, we can come back when some party comes this way.”

Neil proved eager to go. After some argument, he got his father’s consent, with the provision that he was to return to the Red River colony at the first opportunity, before winter if possible. He must learn all he could about that Mississippi country, his father said. If the crops should fail again, it might be that the MacKay family would have to leave the Red River for good. The Northwesters could not drive the stubborn Scot to give up his land, but against the locusts he could not contend forever.