Fort Macleod banker John Cowdry was nicknamed Sorreltop Jack for the reddish-brown colour of both his hair and his horse. He got the nickname from his friend, Crop Eared Wolf, Makoyi-Opistoki, who in 1900 would become chief of the Blood nation of the Blackfoot confederacy.

I wrote last time about J. Edward Chamberlin’s memoir, The Banker and the Blackfoot, which tells the story of both Crop Eared Wolf and Sorreltop Jack, who was Chamberlin’s grandfather. I read the book following the loss of a good friend, former CBC journalist Michael Finlay, whodied after a random street assault in east-end Toronto a couple of blocks from where we live. Wanted for manslaughter is Robert Robin Cropearedwolf, 43. Learning his name sent me online, and eventually brought me to Chamberlin’s book. 

Subtitled A Memoir of my Grandfather in Chinook Country, the book centres on 20 years in the history of Fort Macleod. It starts in 1885 when Jack Cowdry rode into town at the same time as Crop Eared Wolf, and they became friends. Cowdry would go on to find other friends among the settlers, and discovered that many of them were in transition—from whiskey trader to rancher, or former slave to landowner. In Chamberlin’s telling, this left Fort Macleod far less hidebound than the urbanized east of Canada, and for a while it was a good place for everybody to live.

As he writes, Crop Eared Wolf’s people were facing a greater transition than any footloose settler. Members of the Blackfoot Confederacy had for millennia depended on hunting buffalo, using the meat for food and the tanned hides for clothing and shelter. But things had started changing about 150 years before Crop Eared Wolf’s time. That’s when the people of the Plains began to ride horses, which allowed greater mobility and deadliness in the hunt. Life changed more radically when plagues of European diseases wiped out up to half the Indigenous people in the region. Changed again when rifles were introduced in the 1860s, allowing even deadlier buffalo kills, many of them by white settlers brought to the American west by the growing chain of railroads, not to mention overtly racist U.S. settlement policies.

By 1885, when Jack Cowdry arrived in Fort Macleod, the millions-strong herds of buffalo were gone, and so was the Plains way of life. Chamberlin hopefully calls it a period of transition because the great Blood Chief Red Crow, and later his son Crop Eared Wolf, seemed to have been grimly focused on moving forward as best they could. 

Red Crow was among the signatories in 1877 of Treaty Seven with the new Dominion of Canada, which among other clauses (most never honoured) deeded the Blood people the largest reserve in Canada. From great hunters and riders—and the Bloods were considered the greatest riders of the Plains—they became dealers in horses, and soon enough ranchers with large herds of cattle, with Crop Eared Wolf one of the richest among them. Eventually some became farmers as they planted their land with potatoes and hay. The Indigenous people taught settlers about the Plains, its weather and soil, while settlers taught them about cattle and agriculture. 

In Chamberlin’s telling, this period of exchange led to equality and respect, if only briefly.

Yet while he goes into great and valuable detail about treaty negotiations between Indigenous nations and the newly-founded Dominion of Canada, and quotes many wise speeches made by notable chiefs, I miss the type of stories Chamberlin heard from his grandfather and retells throughout the book. Jack Cowdry was a genial raconteur, and what’s missing from the stories of Indigenous life is the in-house details that a Blackfoot kid would get from his own beloved grandfather. It’s not surprising that an Indigenous person wouldn’t want to share these stories with a settler, even one as sympathetic as Chamberlin, but it leaves me wondering whether Blackfoot people found life in late 19^th century Chinook country particularly golden during the 20 years that Jack Cowdry spent here.

I also miss the voices of women. This is a very male book, and I have an idea that women weren’t having such a rocking great time during those 20 years. Chamberlin mentions briefly that the Blackfoot woman Revenge Taylor and another unnamed Indigenous woman left their white settler husbands to return to their reserve, although he doesn’t say why. The men went on to marry white women, but they seem to have kept charge of their half-Blackfoot sons, since both of the boys went to Trinity College in Port Hope, Ontario. Quite a change, and I can’t help wondering how much trauma is tied up in that pair of sentences. 

More personally, I’ve heard family stories of early white settlement in Alberta of the type Chamberlin was told by his grandfather, but in my case from women. My father’s family was Swedish and my grandmother, Ida Steen, and her brother, Johan, arrived Canada in 1912, heading for the town of Trochu about 280 kilometers north of Fort Macleod. The young Swedes were joining their aunt, who had immigrated to the U.S. around 1890, part of a great wave of migration from impoverished southern Sweden that saw seven per cent of the population cross the Atlantic before the First World War. Their aunt and her husband later moved to Alberta when land was opened to settlers there. Yes, Indigenous land. 

I wrote about what happened to my grandmother in a memoir of my own called Foreign Correspondences: A Traveler’s Tales. It’s an exploration of the idea of home and expatriation told through my own travels and the lives of my immigrant grandmothers. The blunt fact is that my Swedish grandmother was raped not long after she arrived in Alberta. I knew from my teenage years that my oldest uncle was not my father’s full brother, but only learned the full story of what had happened as I wrote the book. My grandmother’s rape took place when she worked as a chambermaid in a hotel. It happened six or seven years after Chamberlin’s golden period, but I would take a guess that women were raped in Fort Macleod during that time by the type of chancers and vagabonds he portrays. Because women always are.

Is any period truly golden? Maybe our youth as we look back on it. Jack Cowdrey was young when he arrived in Fort Macleod, and even though he suffered tragedy there, losing children and two wives in childbirth, he seems to have been a resilient and optimistic man. Likeable, decent, deeply sympathetic—like Chamberlin’s book. 

The memoir very well-written, thoughtful, amusing and heartfelt, scholarly in its reach and eclectic in its reach. Chamberlin mentions the sort of detail that I like. That the cowboy word lariat comes from the South American term la riata; that the Viennese call a house sitter a Hausbesorger, a house worrier; that KhoiKhoi story-tellers from the Kalahari desert begin by saying “|garube,” which means “the happening that is not happening.”

He also ends with the definitive finish to any golden area in Chinook country, when so-called Indian agents moved in and treated Blackfoot people with extraordinary cruelty. They cut off rations promised in Treaty Seven when people were starving; required them to produce permits to leave their reserves, then denied them permits; connived to persuade people to sell reserve land to incoming settlers—Crop Eared Wolf was extraordinarily successful in preventing this—and worst of all, supported the creation of residential schools, a plague that caused social and family breakdown that’s still reverberating down through the generations.

This is where I came in, wondering about Robert Robin Cropearedwolf, who is wanted for manslaughter the death of our friend Michael. I want to emphasize again that he’s only a suspect, neither charged nor convicted. Also to acknowledge the obvious fact that despite the horrors Chamberlin mentions, despite the residential schools, despite racism and other ongoing traumas, the vast majority of Indigenous people are–like most people everywhere–kind and good. Very few individuals of any background would randomly push over a man in his seventies, a frail cancer survivor, and cause his death. The fact an Indigenous person is being sought says nothing about anyone else.

But like Chamberlin and his grandfather, Sorreltop Jack, I’m a story-teller, and telling stories involves asking yourself that old question: What If? What if promises made in Treaty Seven to the Blackfoot people had been kept and honoured by Canada? What if there had been no starvation, no Indian agents? What if there had never been any such thing as residential schools? 

Then maybe times would really be golden and maybe our friend would be alive. 

Isn’t it pretty to think so?

The photo shows Mountain Wolf in the saddle and Crop Eared Wolf in front. Jump to my earlier post about The Banker and the Blackfoot here.