Crop Eared Wolf was a small man. He’d been shot in the leg in 1865 when he was about 20 years old on a raid against the Cree, and it left him limping. The injury also meant he rode with long stirrups the way white settlers on the Plains did, the Northwest Mounted Police officers and ranchers who were taking over Indigenous land in what is now southern Alberta. No longer able to take part in raids, he became a horse trader and a wealthy man, eventually succeeding his father Red Crow as chief of the Blood nation.

When our friend Michael Finlay died after a random attack in Toronto, my husband and I started going down rabbit holes, jangled, following links online. Wanted for manslaughter in Michael’s death is Robert Robin Cropearedwolf, 43. I should emphasize that he’s wanted for the crime, and hasn’t been charged or convicted. But when police released his name, a series of online searches led us to the historic Crop Eared Wolf, Makoyi-Opistoki, who became chief of the Blood or Kanai Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy in 1900. 

I have no idea whether Cropearedwolf is a descendant of the chief, although the life led by the historic figure and the forces he battled have left me with a series of questions about multi-generational trauma. Trying to answer them, I stayed up far too late last night finishing The Banker and the Blackfoot: A Memoir of my Grandfather in Chinook Country, by J. Edward Chamberlin (Knopf.)

Chamberlin is a University Professor Emeritus of the University of Toronto who among other things was Senior Research Associate with the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples for 18 months starting in 1991. That’s a lot of capital letters, but the memoir isn’t an academic work. Instead, it’s a fond exploration of the 20 years that Chamberlin’s gregarious grandfather, Jack Cowdry, spent in and around Fort Macleod, south of Calgary, where he and his brother opened a private bank.

Jack arrived in Fort Macleod in 1885, when the town was just a few wooden shacks on a dirt street leading away from the Northwest Mounted Police post, all of it on historically Blackfoot land. According to Chamberlin, one of the first people his grandfather met was Crop Eared Wolf as they both rode into town.

“He noticed from a distance that the Indian rider sat his saddle at an unusual slant, so the shoulder of his coat blanket was what my grandfather first saw of him; but when they came closer he turned to greet my grandfather in a sign-language gesture of welcome, and they exchanged names…

“Crop Eared Wolf said he was sometimes called Many Horses—and that he did in fact have many horses—but he preferred the name Crop Eared Wolf because wolves had taught the Blackfoot how to hunt in packs, and how to work together. You can still see them in the night sky, he said. Makoyi-yohsokoyi was the Wolf Trail. The Milky Way…

“They talked for a long while, not always understanding each other but coming comfortably back to horses in a conversation that seemed to work just fine across the languages. Until Crop Eared Wolf asked my grandfather, in English phrasing that was fairly blunt, why he had come to Fort Macleod and Blackfoot territory.”

The answer Chamberlin eventually finds is that his grandfather was looking for himself, but also for friends. It’s unclear to me whether Jack Cowdry ever learned to speak more than a few phrases in the Blackfoot’s Algonquian language or whether Crop Eared Wolf became fluent in English. Despite this, Chamberlin feels they became friends, and it’s true Crop Eared Wolf gave his grandfather a significant present, a carved and painted quirt detailing his own story. 

He also saved Jack Cowdry’s life when the banker was out riding during one dangerous chinook, a warm wind that passed over the foothills unusually quickly. The snow on the ground thawed then quickly froze again as the temperature dropped, so the hills became sheets of ice. The glare left Cowdry snowblind, and he was forced to loosen the reins to give his horse his head. Fortunately the horse found its way to Crop Eared Wolf’s house, where the family nursed Cowdry through a fierce headache as his sight returned.

Of course, since Fort Macleod was tiny and the Blood reserve close by, they would also have run into each other frequently in town or outside it, possibly in the company of a local translator who spoke multiple languages. Several translators lived in the area, most of them the sons of Indigenous mothers and raffish white whiskey-trading fathers who were more or less reformed. (Usually less.)

Jack Cowdry sounds like a raconteur and a bit of a Zelig. In his telling, he crossed paths with many celebrated figures at crucial moments in history. Or did he? In his book Chamberlin explores the concept of stories, how they’re sometimes true and sometimes not, although the untrue ones can still be true in their own way. He’s speaking, of course, of literal and metaphorical truth, and maybe in this case his grandfather’s stories tended to weigh in on the metaphorical side of things.

Jack Cowdry’s family was originally from England but they’d settled in Ontario, where he attended Upper Canada College, at least for a couple of years. He told his daughter, Chamberlin’s mother, that the Cowdrys later became neighbours to a world-famous inventor, so Jack “had even listened, so he told my mother, to his family’s friend Alexander Graham Bell make the first telephone calls from his summer home in Brantford.” 

Cowdry and his brother, Ned, eventually lit out for the frontier town of Pile of Bones, later Regina, driving a Red River cart. Later on, Jack would attend the trial there of Métis leader Louis Riel, whose ambitions for an autonomous Western nation he supported, and whose hanging Chamberlin says his grandfather railed against all his life.

Later still, in Fort Macleod, Jack was friends with Everett (Ebbs) Johnson, the foreman of the legendary Bar U ranch who had inspired the Wild West novel, The Virginian. He also knew John Ware, a rancher and famous rodeo rider who was Black—Chamberlain notes that about a quarter of real-life cowboys were Black—and had a drink with one Harry Longabaugh in Kamoose Taylor’s hotel on the muddy main street of Fort Macleod.

Harry Longabaugh: the Sundance Kid. Longabaugh nicknamed himself after the Blackfoot’s Sundance, and spent a year working at the Bar U ranch under his friend Ebbs Johnson before heading back to the States to rob banks with Butch Cassidy. Together Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are said to have robbed more banks and trains in North America than anybody before or since. You know about the movie even if Jack Cowdrey didn’t, although he lived to be 90 and flew on a Trans-Canada Airlines DC-3 from Vancouver to Calgary a lifetime after having driven his Red River cart to Pile of Bones. 

So—literally as well as metaphorically—Chamberlin is writing about a society of colourful (if mostly white) chancers who washed up in southern Alberta in the late nineteenth century. About 2,000 of them, he estimates, compared to about 30,000 members of the Blackfoot Confederacy from the Blood, Peigan and Siksika nations. In his telling, his grandfather’s 20 years in Fort Macleod marked one of those rare golden times in history when people lived together peacefully. A fluid time; “a time when many in the foothills,” he writes, “awkwardly but ambitiously, looked for ways of getting along and getting on with things that mattered to them. Not everyone, of course, and not always; but enough that their story offers hope for all of us today.”

In reading this, I kept hearing echoes of that old Broadway song: “In short there’s simply not, a more congenial spot/For happy ever after than here in Camelot.” An ironic song. My jangled brain was declaring its cynicism, and I considered once again the question of story-telling, which among other things can involve imposing a coherent narrative on messy human society, so what’s untrue in a literal sense isn’t necessarily a metaphor. It might not be true at all.

Part One of Two.