Chapter XXVIII: The Executions

A frail little mother with wistful eyes turned toward the West was counting the days until she should once more press to her loving heart a son given back to her from the very verge of the grave. I had not been East for some years. But I had known Big Bear’s band before the outbreak, had been with them all through it. Now, I decided, I would remain to see the curtain drop on the last scene in this grim, emotional drama. I could not, I felt, do otherwise.

The trials had taken place in late September and early October. In the ensuing weeks I made frequent trips to the guard-room at the barracks with tobacco for the Indian prisoners. Their prison until late October was a new stable, a large log building with heavy bars placed across one end before which the guard was posted.

One afternoon, with half a dozen large plugs of tobacco in my pocket, I went down to see the Indians. I had not spoken to Wandering Spirit since his imprisonment. He sat behind the bars bowed almost to the floor, his blanket wrapped about his shoulders and the back of his head. He had perhaps not altogether recovered from the effects of his wound. He seemed lost in thought, and the face with which he watched me toss pieces of the tobacco to various Indians of my acquaintance inside was the picture of dejection.

I had one piece left and asked the sergeant of the guard to toss it to Wandering Spirit. As it dropped on the floor beside him the war chief started and looked up uncertainly as if to ask if I had really meant it for him. I nodded. He took the tobacco slowly from the floor, crossed his arms upon his knees and buried his face in his blanket. Had a trifling kindness from me melted the man of blood?

Passing through the barrack square one day just before the date set for the executions I encountered Wandering Spirit. He was being marched about by the guard with others for exercise.

“_N’Chawamis_,” said he, laughing and pointing to a short red-haired policeman before him, “this little fox is always barking at my heels. Remind him that we will trouble him but three days more. It is not worth while to be disagreeable for so short a time.”

It was the afternoon of November 26th. The murderers had been removed to cells in the guard-room. Wandering Spirit had maintained a stoic silence regarding the massacre and the motives which prompted him to commence it—a silence unbroken even when, after pleading guilty, he had been given the opportunity to speak before sentence was pronounced.

My interest in the wild, impulsive man continued acute to the last. He appeared to have been won over by my slight friendly offices at least to tolerance of me. Could he be induced to talk, to unbosom himself to me, before the morrow stilled the beatings of his turbulent heart and sealed for ever in this world the thin, cruel lips? I could see.

I got from Major Crozier, commanding the mounted police at Battleford, an order authorizing me to visit and talk with the murderers. I was shown into the cell occupied by the war chief. He sat on the floor, a heavy ball chained to his ankle. He shook hands with me as I took a seat opposite him.

“Kahpaypamahchakwayo,” I said, “you have been shut up here for four months. You might at any time have made a statement about the massacre. You have not done so. Your followers all place the blame for what occurred on you. I do not believe you are quite so bad as they make you out; therefore I have come to see you. To-morrow will be too late. If you wish to speak, to say anything in your own defence, I shall be glad to take it down. It will be printed. Thus no more than a just share of blame will rest on your name after you are gone. Your family, perhaps, will be glad.”

He was silent for a long time.

“I am glad you came to see me,” he said at length. “You were through it all; I would rather speak to you than to anyone else. You could see the part that each took. You knew them all.

“Four years ago we were camped on the Missouri River in the Long Knives’ land. Big Bear was there, Imasees, Four-Sky Thunder and other chiefs of the band. Riel was there, trading whisky to the Indians. He gave us liquor and said he would make war on this country. He asked us to join him in wiping out all Canadians. The government had treated him badly. He would demand much money from them. If they did not give he would spill blood, plenty Canadian blood.

“Last fall Riel sent word to us that when the leaves came out the half-breeds would rise and kill all whites. The Long Knives (Americans) would come. They would buy the land, pay the Indians plenty money for it, and afterwards trade with them. All the tribes who wished to benefit must rise, too, and help to rid the country of Canadians.

“At the time of the massacre, Andre Nault, a half-breed, told me he had in his pocket a letter from his cousin Riel, telling him to stay with Big Bear’s band and he would be safe. We would never be tried for what we did. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘the Canadians can’t beat us.’

“Imasees told me at a dance one night before the outbreak that he depended on me to do this thing. I fought against it. I wished last winter to leave the band and go to Duck Lake. My relatives lived there. Imasees nor the others would let me go. Kapwatamut, the Indian agent, would give me no provisions. It seemed it was to be—I was singled out to do it.”

He was craning forward. The quick, restless eyes burned into mine. I covertly watched the hand nervously clutching the chain riveted to the heavy iron ball beside him—I remembered he had said earlier in his imprisonment that he would kill yet another white man before he died.

“Why did you try to kill yourself last spring?” I asked, then. He tossed his head.

“I knew there was no hope for me. Perhaps, I thought, if I sacrificed myself the government would not be so hard on the rest.”

He was silent again; then went on: “Will you say good-bye for me to my family if you see them? Also to Missa Jim? Tell the Crees from me never to do again as they did this spring—never to do as I did. Tell my daughter I died in the white man’s religion; I want her and her cousins to have that religion, too. I am not thinking much about what is going to happen to-morrow. I am thinking about what the priest says to me.”

I had for long wished to ask a question of the war chief. I asked it now:

“Suppose I had been with the other whites at Frog Lake at the moment they were shot; what then, Kahpaypamahchakwayo?”

He considered before replying.

“We were singing,” he said at length.

This may seem a mystifying answer. But I understood its significance. He might as plainly have said: “We were on the warpath. We were not looking to save life.” Of course he had not intended that I should escape; that was evident at the time.

Miserable Man grinned at me and remarked: “To-morrow, my brother, I am going to see my father. That is good; it is long since I saw him.” He laughed and added more seriously: “I am not afraid yet. When I stand on the planks with the rope round my neck well—What time is it, that, to-morrow?” I told him. He turned to Wandering Spirit. “We’ll have breakfast before——” It was easy to discover the ruling passion in Miserable Man.

“Say to the soldier chief that Manito tells me he is not to hang me!” said Apischiskoos, defiant to the end. “I have killed nobody.”

I rose to go, holding out my hand to the war chief. He kept his grip of my hand.

“Wait,” he said quietly, rising. “I will speak to the police.”

I walked to the door of the cell and he followed. When I told them the war chief would make a speech the guard crowded to the centre of the room before him. He drew himself up with something of the old spirit; his confidences appeared to have lifted the burden of gloom that had oppressed him since his imprisonment.

“I wish to say good-bye to you all,” he began; “officers as well as men. You have been good to me; better than I deserved. What I have done that was bad. My punishment is no worse than I could expect. But let me tell you that I never thought to lift my hand against a white man. Years ago, when we lived on the plains and hunted the buffalo, I was a head warrior of the Crees in battle with the Blackfeet. I liked to fight. I took many scalps. But after you, the redcoats, came and the treaty was made with the white man, war was no more. I had never fought a white man. But lately we received bad advice. Of what good is it to speak of that now? I am sorry when it is too late. I only want to thank you, redcoats, and the sheriff for your kindness. I am not afraid to die.”

He paused for an instant:

“One thing only makes my heart beat with badness again!” Stepping back, he lifted the heavy ball from the floor and held it out at arm’s length before him: “To be buried with _that_ on my leg!”

The troubled look left his lean face when he was told that the shackles would be removed before the executions.

“Then I will die satisfied!” he exclaimed, dropping the weight. “I may not be able in the morning, so now I say again to you all—good-bye! _How! Aquisanee!_”

It was the war chief’s last speech.

I rose early. Eight o’clock was the hour set for the executions. Hodson, the little English cook, ex-prisoner with the McLeans, was executioner; P. G. Laurie, veteran publisher of the Saskatchewan Herald, the coroner. He named me on his jury.

At half-past seven I strolled down to the barracks. The scaffold stood in the barrack-square, the platform, twenty feet long by eight broad, ten feet above the ground, with a railing enclosing the trap in the centre, reached by a stair.

As I entered the square the death chant of the condemned red men, a weird, melancholy strain, came to me from the guard-room. A group of Cree and Assiniboine Indians sat with their backs against the blacksmith shop in the open space before the scaffold. The authorities, hoping it would have a salutary effect, had allowed a limited number in to view the executions. Small knots of civilians conversed in low tones inside the high stockade about the fort: everywhere was that sense of repression always freighting the atmosphere of tragedy. The curtain was about to rise on the final act in the shocking drama which opened eight months before at Frog Lake.

Suddenly the singing ceased and a hush fell upon the men gathered about the square. A squad of mounted police marched up, black military cloaks over their shoulders, their rifles at the support, and formed a cordon about the foot of the scaffold. Major Crozier, the commandant, paced restlessly up and down on the left, talking with Mr. McKay, of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who acted as interpreter.

Sheriff Forget appeared, dressed in black and carrying in his hand the warrants of execution. A Roman Catholic priest and a clergyman of the Church of England followed. Next came the prisoners, eight in all, their hands bound behind their backs. They marched in single file, a policeman before, another following and one on either side each of the doomed men. They stepped almost jauntily, dressed in their new suits of brown duck. The weights had been removed from their ankles. Round their shaven scalps were the black caps ready to be drawn down over their faces. Immediately in front of them walked Hodson. Intense silence had fallen upon the square, the only sound the measured tramp of the sombre procession.

At the foot of the stair leading to the scaffold the police escort stepped aside and the sheriff, missionaries, interpreter and hangman ascended to the platform. Miserable Man, Manichoos, Walking the Sky followed in the order named. Wandering Spirit came next. He paused at the foot of the stair, gazing up at the structure of death looming dismally above him; then mounted after the others with a firm step. Napaise and Apischiskoos followed him. Bringing up the rear were two Assiniboine Indians, the murderers of James Payne and Bernard Fremont, settlers of Battleford.

The Indians passed through a gate in the little railing enclosing the trap and were lined up, facing outward, in the order in which they had ascended the stair. The gate was closed, and while Hodson went round behind them and strapped the ankles of each man together they were told they would be given ten minutes in which to speak, should they feel disposed. All, I think, except Wandering Spirit availed themselves of the privilege.

The elder of the Assiniboines—Payne’s murderer—spoke defiantly. So did Little Bear. He told the Indian onlookers to remember how the whites had treated him—to make no peace with them. The old Assiniboine turned and harangued his companions, urging them to show their contempt for the punishment the government was about to inflict on them. All but Wandering Spirit smiled, sang and shouted short sharp war-cries.

The eyes of the Indians looking on grew big; it was easy to see how the words and actions of the doomed men roused in them all the latent savagery bred through generations. But between them and their fellow-tribesmen stood that stiff cordon of funereal capes and bristling muskets; they neither stirred nor uttered a sound. I glanced over my shoulder from where I stood with notebook and pencil before the scaffold and saw all this.

The time was up. The strapping was completed; they were bound hand and foot. A deathly silence fell. Hodson stepped up to Miserable Man, drew the black cap over his face and adjusted the noose. He turned to Manichoos and repeated these final preparations. A moment later he was engaged with Walking the Sky, who stood next Wandering Spirit. The war chief turned his head and watched him with the detached air of one who has an idle but no personal concern in an interesting proceeding. Then the black cap dropped over the face of the war chief himself and the rope settled about his lean sinewy neck.

The missionaries had sent up their last petitions for the souls of nature’s savage and misguided children; a hush fell over all as Hodson stepped behind the still line of dark heads and stooped to draw the bolt. There was a sharp sound of grating iron, the trap dropped and eight bodies shot through it. A sickening click of dislocated necks, and they hung dangling and gyrating slowly at the ends of as many hempen lines. A few convulsive shudders and all was over.

I drew a long breath and stepped forward with the remainder of the jury to view the bodies. The tension was past. I had not felt it greatly during the preliminaries, but that awful pause just before the drop is something I am not likely ever to forget.

The bodies were dropped into rough wooden boxes and buried in a common grave on the hillside below the police barracks, overlooking the broad wild valley of the Saskatchewan. We certified to the death of the murderers in fulfilment of the sentences passed upon them, and thus closed the last tragic event in the occurrences of the year 1885.

The young Assiniboine before his execution asked that a pair of heavy top boots be given him for use on his long march to the Sand Hills. His sweetheart brought him some pretty new moccasins with thick soles, which he wore to the scaffold.

Wandering Spirit feared that the ball and chain of which he complained would impede his progress to the Indian Nirvana.

On a bright moonlit night soon after the executions I was twice shot at by an Assiniboine Indian as I came out of my house in Battleford. I expect he had observed me as one of the coroner’s jury. For some time rumours were prevalent that the Assiniboines threatened to attack Battleford in force in revenge for the hanging of their tribesmen. Nothing happened, however, and a day or two later I left the Saskatchewan for a time and travelled East to rejoice the heart of the little mother waiting with such tender solicitude for me and my own.