Bedson
The calf and her relatives had been sold when their original benefactor/abductor, the honourable James McKay, had died. It is a testament to how remarkable the sight of these bison were that in 1880 eight hundred people attended the auction that determined their fate. Remarkable, because the bison were once so plentiful here that at a distance they could have been mistaken for a brownish-black churning river surging across the plain. Auction day was a festive affair and attendees filled the estate and spilled out onto Portage Avenue. Some attendees sought to buy the bison for meat, others would have shipped them as far as Europe and into private zoos, many were just there for the spectacle of seeing the last of their kind. The winner of the auction was Samuel L Bedson the British born warden of Stony Mountain penitentiary, who borrowed the thousand dollars they cost from Sir Donald A. Smith, Lord Strathcona.[2]
And so, not long after the February sale, and only hours after that small calf’s birth the bison were herded the 58 kilometres north across hard open ground to Stony Mountain.
I realise that the name might form a misleading mental picture for those who have never seen the prison as it still stands, its front façade looking much as it did on that day almost a century and a half ago. Imagine a sea of flat uniform ground that the wind whips across on a painfully bright February day. On top of a sudden swell in the land sits a three story sandy brick building, dozens of elegant arched windows peering down upon you, the bars not discernable from a distance. It has since grown many transecting arms off the original building, and a domed cupola sprouted from its centre, but that first view you have of it when you drive down highway seven, that’s what those fourteen bison saw.
Our new-born’s mother may very well have been one of the free-born, drawn from her mother’s body near the banks of the North Saskatchewan River only five years before. In comparison with that first march, this leg of the forced migration is paltry. Most importantly, our rapidly maturing calf has something her mother did not, the insistent grunts of her matriarchal family all around her; a call and response of “here I am” that eases the stress of being herded.
It took 36 hours to reach Stony Mountain, which upon completing, the fourteen bison promptly escaped from and made a bee-line for Deer Lodge on the north-west edge of the city.[3] They didn’t stop until they got there and had only a few hours respite before their drivers caught up with them and drove them back to the penitentiary.
This small calf, born early into deep snows, was unharmed by the trek, even though “no domestic calf could do one-quarter of that at the same age”.[4]
The bison were often corralled in a stone pen near the farm on the prison grounds. This complex was nicknamed “the castle” and Bedson was its king. Unlike most of the other men involved in ‘saving’ the bison, Bedson was no great hunter. He was a collector. He was always trying to domesticate wild animals for the amusement of his family and neighbours. The farm at Stony Mountain continuously housed a collection of wolves, deer, bears and badgers, but Bedson’s moose where local favourites; a pair had been trained to pull a handsome sled in the winter.[5] Bedson’s daughter Menotah remembered when a similar trick was tried with a two-year-old bison bull. It was Christmas afternoon, and his shaggy brown body was hitched to a toboggan for the amusement of the warden’s guests. Eight merry-makers loaded on the sled while five or six of the incarcerated men held onto a rope tied around his neck. Imagine this ludicrous game of inter-species tug-of-war; the free laughing and playing while the trapped were scared for their lives. A tense calm lasted for about fifteen or twenty minutes until suddenly and without warning the bull leapt into the air, scattering prisoners and guests in the snow. There was no catching him now that he had gained his freedom. Months later Menotah’s father received a letter from North Dakota that a lone young bull had been found grazing with an old rope tied around his neck. Bedson sent a hired man across the border to bring his property back.[6]
Menotah doesn’t note the year of this escapade, but I can imagine it might have been December 1886 and one of the unnamed prisoners might have been Big Bear (Mistahimaskwa), the chief and political prisoner who had been sentenced to three years at Stony Mountain Penitentiary following the defeat of the Riel uprising in 1885. The aging headman was initially put to work in the carpentry shop, but was transferred after a few months to the barns, which he preferred. The loss of the bison, the starvation and disease that followed had led Big Bear to take on the colonial government, and now here he was a lonely broken man, feeding hay to what was left of the bison in the Canadian West. Most of his time in the stables was spent looking after the pigs, a dirty and demeaning job, but the assignment allowed him to “get chummy” with two bears; his namesake and captives just like him.[7] Big Bear’s health had already begun to decline, and by January 1887 he was bedridden. Two years after being condemned to a three-year sentence at Stony Mountain he was released so the government could be spared the embarrassment of having him die, as so many unnamed Cree, Salteaux, and Ojibwa had before him, in that hateful frigid place.
Big Bear was sent to his daughter Earth Woman at the Little Pine First Nation. There, she alone nursed him as most of his family had fled to Montana. He lingered for many months in a cabin just west of where the first of Bedon’s bison had been captured.
In December of 1987 remarkable news reached the fading Big Bear, four bison were sighted near lake Manitou. Big Bear’s son Imasees had once lamented, “there will be no buffalo in the other world, for they all have been killed and their bones scattered to the four corners of the land.”[8] Yet, these four remained free on the land and so Big Bear was able to pass away peacefully in his sleep on January 17th 1888, with faith in the Great Spirit and believing that there would be buffalo waiting for him in the green grass world on the other side.[9]