Charles Alloway Tried to Hold Onto a Bison
Alloway tried to perpetuate and control the myth of how he ‘saved the buffalo’ until his dying day, a legacy his wife Maude took-up after he was gone.[1] The Alloways’ story centers the white hero, the repentant slaughterer, but their attempt to squeeze the tale into a white supremacist mold taints every anecdote. Every use of the word
James McKay, the Metis forefather of modern Winnipeg.
The Honourable James McKay, speaker of the first legislature; translator and negotiator for treaties One through Three and commissioner for Five and Six.[2]
James McKay, the stout trader and guide with the piercing grey eyes, who once carried Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudsons Bay Company, on his shoulders across muskeg swamps.[3]
Alloway tried to use his white body to obscure all 300 pounds of McKay’s Scottish/Cree body, but he won’t succeed in this telling as he has in so many others… But of course, Alloway’s words are the ones who survive in the colonial record.[4] So he will, in parts, be our narrator. When the telling is drawn from his words the font will appear likes this. Be on your guard, I have the distinct feeling he and his wife are not to be trusted. But then again, what do I know? Maybe I shouldn’t be trusted either, what do I know?
In early 1873 McKay and Alloway drove their oxcart down the deeply rutted mud streets out of Winnipeg to meet up with a convoy of eighty to a hundred Metis hunters on their way to the Battleford[5] area of Saskatchewan. Led by Pierre LaVeille, the hunters and their families were searching for Bison to slaughter for hides and pemmican. They found a herd on the Southwest bank of what is now the North Saskatchewan River.
As it was the tail end of winter the party undoubtedly pursued a matriarchal band of cows and under three-year-olds. The grandmothers, mothers, and aunties would have chosen this place because of its large meadows, rich with rough fescue, buffalo grass, and freshly greening sedges; so important when the other plant life was barely waking from winters grip.[6] Just emerging from the patchy remnants of snow, these grasses provided for the nutritional needs of the pregnant, while the wooded banks and small ravines that meandered off the river provided shelter.[7] I wonder if the hunters came upon the herd unaware; placidly grazing but always on alert, mothers with increasingly adventurous young calves often calling and awaiting the gentle, grunting response of “here I am”. Were McKay and Alloway so stealthy that they could approach them and hear their huffing breath and loud tearing of grass?
Or did the black tailed prairie dogs that make their homes beneath bison feet sense the approaching danger? Did their sentries, just able to stand and watch for coming threats over the grass shorn down by tearing bison teeth, spot them? Did the change in their chattering chirps alert the vigilant cows?
Regardless, they surely stampeded as the first round of bodies fell. Brown headed cowbirds took to the sky, their piercing liquid chirps and trills drowned out by hooves and bellows as they abandoned their posts on the bison’s backs. That first volley of gunfire was coordinated to optimize the number killed before the stampede began.[8] Dozens fell. Still, dozens more were on their feet when the men reloaded. The women and children encamped at a distance from the action heard what they couldn’t see, “a sound deep and moving like a train moving over a bridge…a continuous, deep steady roar that seems to reach the clouds.”[9] Up close to the carnage, McKay and Alloway would have felt the anguished guttural calls of mothers resonating in the cavities of their chests. The cows were the pray these hunters sought, their flesh was more palatable than the males, and their hides would have been at their most desirable state if they came upon them before the spring molt had begun. But this meant the next generation of bison were in their bellies, and their death meant there were so few to replace them. The few that had been born early that year would had blended even more completely with the red-brown soil now that it was soaked in their kin’s blood.
When the selected cows had been brought down and the remainder driven off, the women were brought in to butcher and process the bodies. The calves lingered near their fallen mothers, watching from a distance as the women did their work. Further rings of hungry creatures circled this scene; wolves, swift foxes and coyotes awaited their turn on land while vultures and hawks hovered overhead. Woodpeckers and other small birds lingered in nearby trees, ready to feast on the insects that will arrive to consume what remains.[10]
As the azure glare of day gave way to pink, magenta, then purple deepening into black, three remaining calves were driven from their mother’s bodies towards the hunter’s fires. When morning dawned these “pitiful” creatures were run down or lassoed at McKay and Alloway’s command. The partners recognized even then that the current rate of slaughter could not be maintained. Alloway had once bought 21,000 hides from a single brigade of hunters, only one of dozens operating around Winnipeg at the time. So, they sent Feladoux Ducharme to Prince Albert for a domestic cow. When he returned they succeeded in forcing an adoption of two bulls and a heifer, who thrived once they got accustomed to their new mother. It took them all summer to bring the orphans in from the western plains to James McKay’s estate, Deer Lodge, on the North West fringe of Winnipeg.
In April of the following year the pair struck West again with a similar convoy. It took them a month to find any bison. The metis hunters undoubtedly familiar with the general rhythms of bison movement found them “west of the Milk River[11], halfway between Regina and Moose Jaw and near the international border.”
As the weather warmed and the rains fell the bison matriarchs had led their daughters and nieces southwest to the moist mixed prairie where the high protein grasses would tolerate their heavy grazing.[12] Here most of their calves would have been birthed and the new mothers would have broken-off for a few weeks into nursery bands.[13] The herd was weeks from making the move en mass to the south where the Blue gramma grass would draw them onto the dry mixed prairie and into closer contact with bachelor herds and bulls who would engaged them in the intricate dance of rutting, tending, and breeding.[14]
This band, however, wouldn’t make it to the breeding grounds that July. Like the previous year, McKay and Alloway were able to capture three orphaned calves; a bull and two heifers this time. Unlike the previous year, however, not all of the calves took to their forced adoption. The bull rejected, or was rejected by the domestic cow they had brought, grew sick and weak and died on the journey home. Alloway doesn’t describe the hobbling and binding that needed occur for these surrogates to take to one another but this violence is present, if unsaid, in his statement, “it is exceedingly difficult to make the calves take to a domestic cow.”
These five freeborn calves survived and reproduced, but their relationship to the land and the people they coevolved with died. They were kept at Deer Lodge in summer and wintered in Baie St. Paul parish along the Assiniboine River.
When the last of the Canadian plains bison were being slaughtered in 1878, Alloway sent out a hunter who brought him back the hides of thirty bison from just south of the of the Pembina Mountains. In February of the following year James McKay’s wife Margaret died. McKay followed her in December.
Alloway claimed that he made the “greatest mistake of his life” when he sold all his “tangilble assets”, including the now 13 bison, to go into banking with his brother. Lamenting, “we cannot see distant things from the all absorbing present sometimes.”
What a strange lie. Even from in front of my computer screen, a province and 95 years away, I can catch him in it.
With an electrified thrill, I find this advertisement from the front page of the Manitoba Free Press on 2 Jan 1880. Up for auction on Tuesday, January 20th, 1880 were numerous horses, other livestock, household furniture, sleighs and a “band of 13 splendid Buffaloes and other curiosities”. Alloway was not the owner, nor the seller of the bison. In fact, his only connection to the auction was as a buyer. A subsequent article from the Free Press on January 20th attests that C.V. Alloway purchased the 5 year-old Kentuky bred, chestnut thoroughbred stallion “Shekle” for fifteen hundred dollars.
In reflecting on the establishment of Buffalo National Park at Wainright, Alloway said, “the animals will increase under natural conditions of peace and contentment. Every one of them came from my original group of three heifers and two bulls.” Both of these statements are false. The first represents the failure of the settler mindset, for whom success was to control the bison as a resource in managed isolation. The second is the failure of a man to see how thin his hero disguise was, and how it could not hide his acts to portray all non-white actants as supporting cast[e].
[1] In a story dictated to S. Helena Macvicar, for inclusion in the records of the Manitoba Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba, Maude Alloway stated “It has been said that to Charlie Alloway should go the credit for the preservation on the buffalo in Manitoba for if it had not been for his foresight years ago, the American bison would be but a misty vision.”
[2] McKay aided Alexander Morrison in negotiating Treaty Six with the Cree Nation at Fort Carleton. There they used the nearing extinction of the bison as leverage to get leaders to agree to a cession of lands and withdrawal to reserves. Local leader and eventual great chief Pitikwahanapiwiyin (Poundmaker) responded “This is our land, it isn’t a piece of pemmican to be cut off and given in little pieces back to us. It is ours and we will take what we want.” Despite opposition from prominent leaders such as Pitikwahanapiwiyin and Mistahimaskwa (Big Bear), Treaty Six was eventually signed, in some cases years later, by nearly all of the Cree Nation in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Big Bear and Poundmaker would be imprisoned with these bison and their descendants at Stony Mountain Penitentiary in 1895. Interestingly, Battleford, the location of the first capture of bison was still sovereign territory in 1873. They signed onto through adhesion in 1878. Filice, 2017
[3] Stephen, 19
[4] “Alloway certainly lied, or conveniently mis-remembered his prominence in these events. I have found no mention of him in any of the early reports. I don't believe either Alloway was a 'big man about town' at that time, so I would certainly guess he went along as a paid helper, along with many others that just didn't happen to get rich later in life.” Private communications Dr. Randall Mooi, Curator of Zoology, Manitoba Museum
[5] Original Cree name of this area is “Sakicawasihk”. Private communications with Battlefords Agency Tribal Chiefs Community Organization
[6] Chapman 984
[7] Olson, 34
[8] Alloway’s characterization of this type of hunt is so strange “I have had my battles with the buffaloes also, I don’t mean on horseback, shooting them down on the run, as the wild-westerners were doing everyday. That was not adventure, that was murder of the defenseless [sic].” It seems the work of domestication, a sort of battle of wills, was the real battle for Alloway.
[9] Billy Dixon (1874) qtd in Flannery 319
[10] Olson, 8
[11] The Milk River meanders along the southern edge of Alberta and dips down into Montana just before Saskatchewan’s western border. This geographical description makes no sense at all, seeing as Regina and Moose Jaw are closer to the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border.
[12] Brower 21
[13] Olson 37
[14] Brower 21