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respected Big Bear because he was an even-tempered, thoughtful man who played with children and laughed at himself, who dreamed dreams and received visions, a person whom smallpox could not kill, but even more because his spirit helper was the Great Parent of Bear, who had given him a powerful bundle that protected him from every harm during years of defending his People. His honour stories had been sung at Thirst Dance ceremonies, from his greatest warrior deeds of dodging through enemy arrows or bullets to club a warrior and take his scalp, to facing an enemy with only a war club ora knife, or stealing into a Blackfoot camp and galloping away with the buffalo runner tied beside the lodge of a war chief. And how, when bloody violence between Cree and Blackfoot continued endlessly, one winter he had carried his band’s medicine pipe bundle through the snow to eight Plains Cree chiefs and persuaded them to pledge their peace on the pipe. Then in spring he rode to Blackfoot camps with the pipe and convinced them to come together to make peace with the Cree. Like the venerable Maskepetoon, he was a devastating warrior who also had the courage to stop killing.
    There was consensus: Big Bear should follow in his father’s footsteps. He was a mature family man, with a daughter old enough for marriage and two sons already riding with the Young Men to hunt or watch for enemies. And he accepted the band’s communal call to duty. He had no illusions of power; he knew he needed more guidance, so he allied himself with Sweetgrass, the elder statesman among the Plains Cree trading at Fort Pitt. But as they had all feared, the tribal wars over buffalo grew steadily worse.
    About the time that Big Bear was chosen chief, far away in the east the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences were beginning to shape the colonial provinces of BritishNorth America into the nation of Canada. Big Bear could not know that John A. Macdonald, one of the leaders of that Confederation movement, would soon become the most powerful person in deciding the destiny of all prairie People.
    The summer after Big Bear became a chief, the northern prairie tribes faced something more ominous than distant White politics or the wars and hunger and disease they continually struggled with. That summer they found that the Iron Stone was gone.
    Reverend Robert Rundle, who listed 592 Cree in his Baptism Book by the Christian names he gave them, left Edmonton in 1848, and a new Methodist missionary came from Upper Canada (Ontario) to build a log church on the North Saskatchewan River halfway between Fort Pitt and Edmonton. He called the place Victoria after the Great Mother he was always talking about. This George McDougall with his son John ripped up large plots of earth for potatoes—very good food, bigger and sweeter than wild turnips—and every spring they hunted buffalo on the prairie with Cree bands led by Chiefs Maskepetoon and Pakan. They were powerful God-men both in talking and acting; it was said they intended to build another church on the Bow River, where even the Company had never had atrading post for more than a year before the Blackfoot burned it down. In 1869, George McDougall wrote to his mission director in Toronto:
“August 23, Iron Creek: This beautiful stream derives its name from a strange formation said to be pure iron. The piece weighs 300 pounds.… Tradition says that it has lain out on the hill ever since the place was first visited by Na-ne-boo-sho after the flood had retired. For ages the tribes of the Blackfoot and Cree have gathered their clans to pay homage to this wonderful manitoo. Three years ago [1866] one of our people put the idol in his cart and brought it to [our settlement] Victoria.”
    In July 1874, he mentioned the stone again (apparently it had gained weight):
“I have sent on to Red River a meteoric stone weighing 400 pounds, the great memento of the plains, and requested Brother Young to forward it to your address. I intended