Treaty Pay 1879

from the Thunder Bay Sentinel, Thursday, July 31, 1879:

"Excursion from Cleveland.  On Monday evening last, the side wheel steamer "Flora" came into our Port.  Before reaching here, they stopped at Silver Islet and Nipigon where the Indian payment was going on.
( Note:  this vessel was on a charter holiday cruise with 108 passengers.)

Meeting of the Clans, Nipigon, 1931 continued

Nipigon, 1931, meeting of the clans, nmp1465
E.C. Everett photo

Meeting of the Clans, Nipigon, 1931

The meeting of the Klans (Clans), Nipigon, Ontario
Photo by E.C. Everett ECE 54-2

Men of the Birch-Bark Canoe - the Ojibway

THE VANISHING HUNTER-MEN – THE OJIBWAYS

Men of the Birch-Bark Canoes and the Outpost Camps of the Far-Lands

(written circa 1909 likely published in the Globe, Toronto; author unknown; photographer presumed to be C.W. Jeffreys. From the ephemera files of C.W. Jeffreys sent to the Nipigon Historical Museum.)

Any man who has never been North knows little or nothing about it.

There are the vanishing tribes – the Ojibway;  there are the men of Wabigoon and of Temagami;  the hunters and the traders and the trappers of old – they that once were underlings to the great Company – The Hudson’s Bay.

 Time was when these people were the lords of the North.

They were the makers of commerce.

Ships that came into Hudson’s Bay; York boats on the rivers; the long-oared rollicking boats with the chansons of the crews;  the fires by night and the silent dip-dip by day; the long portages – they the red-shirted ones, the half-breeds, boys of the fur brigade that came before the bushwhacker and the courier de bois with red sash and sheepacks;  and these also were second in time to the primeval hunter-man.

Those were the ancient trading days;  and it seems that now it’s just about over; for the furs this year were mighty scarce and the packs very small and the long canoes rode light on the rivers from post to post down from the Mettagami and Abittibi to Moose and York and Churchill. But the Indians, the Ojibways must be kept somehow;  the makers of language and of poetry, and the rugged background of our civilization which is still creeping up over the hunt-grounds. Five dollars a year for every man, woman and child; the white man pays it; the inspector of agencies and his clerk and his crew – holding court in the open air as they did this summer of 1909,  whence these many splendid pictures.  And did you ever behold more beautiful pictures of a vanishing people, taken by one who knows them well;  shambling and nomadic and colourful?

From Camp to Camp and from camps to outpost and from there by the rivers to the posts of fur where the gatherings of the tribes were held;  they fetched with them the strength and the smell of the back-places;  the camps and the canoes, the spruce and the skins; but they all wanted the white man’s “sooneahs” – which is the word for money on the rocks of North Ontario and on the prairies of Saskatchewan and Alberta and far up into the foot-hills.

Passing out of this pageant of the Ojibway; the Indian of Hiawatha.  He has seen the coming of the fur brigades – the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North – West Company who fought like wolves on his hunt-grounds.  He has seen the second era of commerce;  the great lumber companies that stripped off the whispering pines where the big moose ran.  The houses of the overlords, the factors, still stand by the rivers;  but the Factor is not so busy as once he was.

Hard-fisted old Scotchmen most of these factors;  knowing the Ojibways whom they govern like children; speaking their language.  Now the third act in the civilization drama is beginning to raise the curtain.  It is the railway.  Two railways are running through the Ojibway hunt-grounds.  The snort of the steam-shovel instead of the cough of the moose;  the thud of dynamite and the rumble of gravel trains.  The Ojibway is not in love with the fire-wagon.  He sits in his bark canoe and thinks it a strange thing.  Maybe he knows that this thing with the banner of black smoke is the last act in his play.  Railway and Ojibway – not meant to go together.

Canoe for him; the river and the moose-run.

For he has never ridden a horse, this Ojibway of the hinterland.  In all the camps of the moose-hunter – not a horse unless some half-civilized hunter has got hold of one for haulage work and for hire.

This makes the great difference between the bush Indian and the plains-man;  between the back-country moose-runner, and the Crees and the Blackfoots who hunted buffaloes horseback and on the prairies.  The Cree would be a dead mand without his pony.  The Ojibway would be useless without his canoe.  Each has made the way his own fashion;  each at the outpost doing his own work in the world of fur.  The man on the Saskatchewan never saw a birch-bark canoe – unless by some chance he drifted down the water highways of the far to York Factory and to Moose;  away from his inland river to the meeting- place of the birch-bark canoes that went down loaded to the brim with packs of fur and came up freighted with goods.

 Canada has never had a finer thing than the birch-bark canoe;  never any birch-bark canoe in the world finer than that of the Ojibways that scudded the rivers of the north land from Lake Superior to Hudson’s Bay.

These men of the birch-bark canoes understand that the modern white man’s canoe is a very fine thing and carries a large load;  but they know also that when a white man’s canoe strikes a rock in a rapid it is a hard matter to repair;  camp all night and half a day perhaps;  but when a bark canoe tore a hole with a load of fur, it was but a little job to haul her out and in twenty minutes with chunk of resin and the “wahtap,” the spruce root, a piece of bark and a bone needle, to make her as good a new again.

The Ojibways do not comprehend why the rivers are not now so full of the birch-bark canoes;  only that the furs are less and the trapping not so good, and that strange men come down the rivers who think more of the rocks than they do of the woods;  and some that think only of a place to build a railway – talking of wheat and ships in the north and all such things that in the days of the great Company were not known where the Ojibway was king.  One of these days we shall have become so commercialised by the railway as to forget the hunters and trappers and traders of the fur-post regime.

Then we shall build Museums.

 

( I’m sorry, I just couldn’t help myself from enlarging that thought! – B)

TREATY DAY WITH OJIBWAYS 1911, part 2

 

Paying Canada’s Rent

By James Henry Pedley

The Globe  Toronto    March 9, 1912  page 2, continued…

During the evening interest centres at the “store”.  Seated on packing box or hard-tack barrel, we talk. The hoarse jabber of the Ojibway speech mingles with the smoother accents of the English tongue as the story of the fire at porcupine is told again. Then the little church bell rings and we hear no longer the Indian voices for our Interpreter on the treaty party is the Anglican Bishop of the diocese, who is calling his flock together for service.  Only once in a long year does a missionary visit this Christian settlement;  it behooves him to use well the time at his disposal for pastoral work.  As we chat, we hear through the wide-open door the strains of “Sun of My Soul,” done into the Ojibway language;  and following at long intervals the deep-voiced “Amen” at the end of the prayers.  When the pipes are out we seek our tents and sleep.

 

The morrow’s sun dawns upon the long-expected pay-day;  an hour before the pay valise has been produced the open space fronting the store is dotted with the squatting figures of the old men and women of the tribe.  In the middle distance the young buck have gathered, amusing themselves with good-natured horseplay until they shall be called forward to receive the money due them.  The majority of the squaws, young and old alike, carry papooses, chubby infants and silent, who lie strapped into their many-hued “kinogins” and never cry.  There are youngsters aplenty, too, rolling in the dirt or playing noisily, getting in everyone’s way, and drawing down upon themselves anathemas from the old men.  Of these last, two are blind and infirm almost to the verge of total helplessness.  One of them has been paddled across by his squaw from his tent across the lake, a long journey for him now;  it is pathetic to see him grope for the hand of the other ancient, and to watch them chuckle as they exchange “ B’ jou’s” with gleaming, toothless gums. This accomplished, the visitor fumbles for his pipe – last solace of lonely old age – and, having lighted it dexterously with the first match, turns his useless eyes toward the table, now becomes the centre of interest.

For Mr. West – representing the Canadian people – has taken his seat, flanked on his left by his clerk, who jealously guards a package containing one hundred one-dollar bills, and on his right by his Interpreter, the Bishop, just come from holding an early morning baptismal service.  At the shoulder of the latter stands the Chief of the band,  a keen-looking young Indian, who will aid in clearing up tangles and settling disputes which may arise;  for the Indian is by nature uncommunicative, and especially so in his dealings with the white man.  The presence of his Chief is as a key to his gates of speech, which would otherwise remain unopened.

A hush, then at a word from the Bishop, a young man detaches himself from one of the groups and saunters forward, tugging at his knot in a bandana handkerchief he carries.  This, opened and unwound, he hands to Mr. West a small blue ticket, which will be found to bear the printed words “The James Bay Treaty,” and in manuscript the number which is his on the official books, and his name, John Wolf.  The books show that last year he was paid twenty dollars, his offspring numbering three.  To find what changes, if any, have taken place during the last twelve months is the task of the Interpreter.  A short colloquy in Ojibway,  then the Bishop turns to announce that although one of the children died – tuberculosis – in the spring, the family still shelters five members, and points in explanation to a papoose which its mother is rocking to sleep nearby.  The birth and death duly recorded, the clerk with ostentation counts out twenty dollars into the father’s hand and sees them folded up along with the blue ticket in the big red handkerchief.  The full-bred Indian, whether from trustful courtesy or ignorance, or both, seldom counts the money we pay him.  Honest himself (and no one is more so than he), he has perhaps not learned, though he has had many an opportunity, that all men are not as conscientious as he is.  Another summons, and another paterfamilias lounges forward, his halting feet and impassive countenance giving one the impression of extreme boredness, but that is the way of his race and must be so interpreted.  The former process is repeated, except that this time it is an elderly man who stands before us and his family has grown up. One of his daughters, moreover, has found a husband since last pay-day with whom she will henceforth be paid.  This worth advances next to receive a ticket (heretofore he has been paid under his father’s name) and to have himself set down as the head of a family.  Pride – the one emotion which the redskin does not blush to reveal –shines from his countenance, and it is with great show of dignity that he takes his eight dollars and bears the sum off to his “woman.”

 

After the family men have all been paid come the widows and the orphans and the lone old men of the tribe.  Here is a woman who last year received twenty-four dollars. But in early fall, as the family journeyed toward the hunting grounds, her eldest son, the provider, was drowned. None of the others was as yet old enough to hunt successfully.   The tubercule germ breeds fast in a stuffy wigwam, and it delights to prey on ill-nourished bodies.  With spring the mother returned from the bush – alone; her hand shook as she took four dollars given her, and hobbled back to sit silent among the jabboring squaws.  Many are the bashful youngsters dragged forward by stern guardians, and made to deliver up the tickets which they hold crushed in tight-clenched hands.  The bush is a cruel dwelling –place, even to the men whom it has reared, and many a father meets his death before his children have learned to know him.

 

Thus passes the afternoon.  There is no hurry, no crowding, no standing in line.  Sunset finds the gathering still intact;  apparently no one has anything else to do, and the day’s warmth is still to be felt.

The clerk calls for another package of bills – the fifth – and is supplied.  A few disputes have arisen from time to time, for no one must be paid twice, and illegitimate children ( of whom there is no dearth ) must not be paid at all.  But there is little or no attempt at deceit, so great is the respect for truth which obtains among these “uncivilized” peoples of the north.  Finally when all have been paid, the Factor, who has watched the proceedings from the doorway of his store, presents the tickets of such absentees as have left them in his hands, and receives the money called for.  Payment for 1911 is complete.  Any who have failed to appear will receive double amounts next summer.

+++

This story of the 1911 treaty-pay came to us from the ephemera collection of C.W. Jeffreys.

TREATY DAY WITH OJIBWAYS 1911

 

Paying Canada’s Rent

By James Henry Pedley

The Globe  Toronto    March 9, 1912  page 2

You have heard of Canada’s duty to herself – and of Canada’s duty to the Empire.

You have gloated over her natural resources, you have debated hotly the question of reciprocity and its probable bearing upon the future welfare of the country.

But was it ever brought home to you, prosperous Canadian, that this Canada of yours is not yours after all;  that it is a leasehold property, leased by the many from the few, and that you pay every year a portion of the rent?

We are but tenants in the land which we so proudly call our own.  Not so many miles to the Northward,  living a simple life in tents and lowly shacks, dwell our landlords.  They are not harsh and overbearing, those owners of our soil;  nay, rather are they humble and submissive in spirit, thankfully accepting from their tenants a paltry handful of crumbs, let fall from the heaped-up table of the land’s fruitage, the fullness of which they were incapable of reaping for themselves.

Among the Cabinet Ministers of the Dominion of Canada is numbered the Minister of the Interior.  From his office at Ottawa he directs those administrative departments which come under his control.  The Department of Indian Affairs is one of these.  It is presided over by a Deputy Minister and carries on its work through the medium of Indian agents distributed throughout Canada, and one of the most important duties of each agent consists in “paying off” the Indians in his district, according to the treaties made at different times in the past between the redmen and the whites.

Not all the Indians in Canada receive “treaty- money” – some tribes, perhaps more sagacious than the others (  although this is open to question ), demanded citizenship and voting rights in return for the sacrifice of their ancestral haunts;  but in the majority of cases the forefathers of the present day Indians gave way before the onward march of a force which they were powerless to withstand and sank their national freedom on a state of dependency.  Exempt from all public burdens, such as taxation, they have given up their individuality and have become mere wards of the Canadian people, virtually supported out of the State Treasury.

In many ways the lot of the Indians is by no means a hard one.  In addition to the four dollars “treaty money” due annually to every member of every band ( I refer now especially to those bands included in the provisions of the James Bay  Treaty ), of whatever age or sex, each Indian receives an elementary education at an Indian school, is supplied with ordinary medicines free of charge, and is given opportunity of consulting a skilled white doctor at least once a year.  He has a reserve to dwell upon in the summer and a hunting ground set apart for his use in winter, and if furs are scarcer now than in the old days they bring a better price, so that the dark-skinned hunter has lost nothing by reason of the changed conditions.  More, he is allowed to shoot almost any animal or bird for food at any time of the year, and should he, despite these privileges, become destitute, it is his right to demand aid from the Government. The prosperity of the individual seems assured, but for the race there is only one outlook, and that is – death.

Under the present system ambition is killed and self-respect is lost, so that the name “Indian,” once calculated to ispire awe or fear, with also a touch of admiration, now incites only feelings of pity or, as often, contempt in the breast of the whiteman who has succeeded him.

“Lo, the poor Indian,” wrote the poet – it was well written.

At Flying Post, a station of the Hudson’s Bay Company, fifty miles north of Biscotasing, on the Canadian Pacific Railway, resides a band of Ojibway Indians, about one hundred and thirty in all. At Fort Metagami, fifty miles to the southeast, there is another band, and every summer Mr. H. A. West, the Indian agent in that district, who lives in Chapleau, draws a thousand dollars from the bank there and makes the trip by canoe to Flying Post and Fort Metagami, paying Canada’s rent in bright new one- dollar bills. With him are a doctor, a clerk, an Interpreter and a cook, as well as four Indians to do the heavy work.  On the fifth or sixth day out the party draws nigh the first post to be visited.

On the last portage a spruce pole is cut, which is set up in the bow of one of the canoes, and to this improvised flagstaff is fastened a weather-beaten Union Jack, a symbol of British might and good-will.  We are approaching a community far off from human intercourse, a place where our visit is a thing long looked forward to and long remembered, so that it behooves us to make some show of ceremony. Our guns ready loaded, we are prepared to make a triumphal entry.  The “flagship” bearing the precious pay-valise, takes a slight lead;  and with long shoulder strokes we drive the two canoes around the last bend and into full view of the post – a cluster of log buildings, flanked by the tents and bark wigwams of the Indians, and far back on the hill a little church.  The wooden buildings in the foreground are the property of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and in a moment, in answer to our first rifle-shot, the Canadian Ensign, its lower corner embellished with the Company’s device, is run up on the flagstaff.  Simultaneously the report of a shotgun reaches our ears, followed by another and another, until it seems as if every gun in camp is pouring forth his quota of noise to swell the tumult.  A moment’s lull to permit the reloading, and now is heard the baying of hounds mingled with the shrill barking of mongrel curs.  The shore is alive with these animals each striving to be the loudest to raise the note of welcome ( or is it the opposite?); wherefore Fred, our French-Canadian cook, is moved to murmur in his quaint near-English, “Ho, de dogs he make saluting too, him,” Again and again as we draw near, and the sound of firing rolls over the water, and our rifle makes answer. And the higher ground is dotted with expectant figures long before we reach the landing.  This is the big event of the year for the dwellers at this post, and our welcome by the portly Hudson’s Bay Factor is both hearty and sincere.  Five minutes later finds us the centre of a dark-skinned group shaking hands promiscuously, and answering the guttural “ B’ jou’s” of the men and women of the band.  All familiarities over, we take ourselves off to our projected campground to superintend the preparation of a camp.

To be continued.

This is  a long article, quite detailed and using “non-politically correct language” of the year 1911.

97,033 PAGEVIEWS AUGUST 12, 2016

In just the last thirty days this Blog has jumped 5,888 PAGEVIEWS... that's a record.  I would like to thank all the readers who added to this total from the top ten countries: Russia, Canada, United States of America, Germany, Mauritius, Latvia, France, Ukraine, Serbia and India.
To be sure there are lots more countries below those top ten.
Today Blog visitors are from: Canada, United States, Spain, China, France, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, Norway, Philippines and Serbia.
Most popular Posts: The Law of the Land 1925, The Beardmore Relics and Delarondes.