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chief. There can only be more war.
    Simpson murmured, Perhaps war with the Whites too.
    Big Bear looked up. Why would we fight Whites?
    Red River, Simpson said. Just this spring Canada marched in a thousand soldiers and chased Louis Riel across the border into the States. Half those soldiers are still there.
    The Métis know what wars they want to fight. We are People.
    Haven’t you heard? The Métis made Riel chief of Red River because they heard the Hudson’s Bay Company had sold the land to Canada.
    Sold? What land?
    Simpson said, All the land, everything around Red River, and even here where you live.
    The Company has no land, just the spots where People once agreed they could build posts to trade with us.
    They say Canada bought the whole land from them, everything north of the border to the mountains.
    After a long pause of incomprehension, Big Bear asked, Did your father say that? That the Company
owns
our land?
    Simpson snorted. Huh! My father thought he owned everything he stepped on. He doesn’t matter, but Macdonald in Ottawa matters. He says he’s bought all the land.
    How can anyone “buy” or “own” land?
    The question Big Bear would ask many times in the coming years. And no one would give him any more comfort than James Simpson:
    I think maybe Whites can do more than we can dream of.
    The trader was surprised at how many horses Big Bear’s band bartered for despite its poverty. The chief did not tell him that they were planning war. Their Assiniboine allies had begun it by sending a tobacco message: The Blackfoot are ravaged by smallpox; come, now is the time to destroy them. We will avenge your peace chief Maskepetoon, and we will have the prairie and buffalo to ourselves.
    More than twenty Cree bands, including those of Big Bear and his close friend Little Pine, smoked the tobacco, and though Sweetgrass was too old for battle, most of his Young Men came as well. In early October 1870, the Cree met the Assiniboine in the Vermillion Hills and more than six hundred warriors rode west together, the largest force they had ever assembled.
    They finally reached the Little Bow River and sent out scouts. They readied their Bay muzzle-loaders and rifles, their bows and arrows, spears, war clubs, and knives, but one day in council, Assiniboine Chief Piapot told them he had dreamed a dream. He had seen a buffalo with iron horns charging through camp, goring, tossing warriors aside in bloody pieces; clearly, his guardian spirit was warning him not to commit war. But the other leaders did not agree: they were eight days into Blackfoot territory and still had not met one single enemy! Sonext day, while Piapot and some followers turned back, almost six hundred warriors continued south to the Oldman River, where the scouts had discovered a Blood camp within sight of the mountains. They attacked before dawn.
    But, unknown to them, several much larger bands of Peigan and Blood were camped nearby, and before the Cree and Assiniboine could completely destroy the smaller camp, they were in turn attacked. These Blackfoot were armed with the latest Winchester repeater rifles and Colt revolvers traded from the Americans, and they drove the invaders back over the open prairie and into the Oldman River coulees where a few years later Whites would dig the coal mines of Lethbridge. There, after four more hours of ferocious fighting, forty Blackfoot were killed and fifty wounded, while the Cree allies escaped total annihilation only by leaving three hundred of their dead on the cliffs and in the coulees and river valley when they retreated. They were so outgunned that Jerry Potts, a half-Blood warrior who later became a guide for the North West Mounted Police, said, “You could shut your eyes and still be sure to kill a Cree.” The Blackfoot named that place Assini-etomochi, Where They Slaughtered the Cree.

 
     
     
     

CHAPTER FOUR
Come, Talk to Us
     
     
    Chief’s Son’s Hand protected Big Bear in the disastrous