Maccloud falls, p.11
macCLOUD FALLS, page 11
1866
The colonies of island and mainland are united by an Act of Parliament. ‘New Westminster’ becomes the official capital of the united colony of British Columbia.
1867
‘The Dominion of Canada’ is established by ‘the British North America Act’. Under this Act, Canada asserts jurisdiction over ‘Indians and Indian lands’.
1871
British Columbia becomes part of the Dominion of Canada, and the Canadian government assumes jurisdiction over Indian affairs in the new province. It incorrectly assumes the 1763 Royal Proclamation to secure the surrender of Indigenous territories has been applied there, and the Terms of Union guarantee a reserve policy specified to be ‘as liberal as that hitherto pursued’ by British Columbia, so approving Trutch’s reduced 10 acre per family allotment without knowledge of Douglas’s earlier policy. The earlier colonial department is replaced by ‘The British Columbia Lands and Works Department’, but its task remains to survey, map and administer land. The position of ‘Commissioner’ in this new department is politically powerful, due to the opportunity to grant land as patronage. The Canadian government publishes ‘A Schedule of All Indian Reserves in the Province of British Columbia’ but a number of reserves are omitted.
1872
Israel Wood Powell is appointed ‘Indian Superintendent’ and attempts to allocate more land for reserves. The Canadian government supports his recommendations and requests that British Columbia should adopt an 80 acre policy. British Columbia agrees to a 20 acre standard but reneges on this agreement. Powell stops laying out reserves in protest.
1872
Thousands of Salish gather outside the ‘Land Registry’ office in New Westminster to demand recognition of their territorial rights. The Gitxsan close the Skeena River to colonists. The provincial government mounts a military campaign to reopen the river.
1873
The ‘Federal Department of the Interior’ is created. A ‘Board of Commissioners’ is set up to administer ‘Indian Affairs’. The Salish and Tsilhqot’in peoples deliver a petition demanding compensation for land taken by settlers. Fifty-six chiefs sign, asking for reserves containing 80 acres per family in accordance with the federal government’s recommendation, noting settler encroachment and previous poor treatment. They threaten to appeal to the Dominion for arbitration if the Province does not respond. It does not.
1874
The Salish organize a protest rally, drawing people to ‘New Westminster’ from communities along the ‘Fraser River’, the mainland coast and the interior. British Columbia passes a new ‘Land Act,’ so consolidating all previous land legislation, which authorizes the annexation of Indigenous territories and sets ‘Indian’ reserve allotment at 20 acres for every head of family regardless of family size. The Canadian government again requests that the province adopt an 80 acre standard. British Columbia refuses, so Canada disallows the ‘Land Act’.’
1875
The Dominion government passes an order in council recommending that the BC government allot 80 acres of land to every Indian family of five persons. BC refuses, asserting that not more than 20 acres of land are required for each Indian family. A revised BC Land Act is passed, setting the 20 acre Indian reserve formula while providing 160 acre land grants for individual settlers free of charge.
1876
The Indian Act consolidates all previous legislation regarding Indians and Indian lands in Canada. Over time, the Indian Act is amended to prohibit cultural practices and public assembly, to confine Indians to reserves, and to prevent the pursuit of land claims. While the Indian Act asserts Canadian jurisdiction over Indigenous peoples, creating “Indians” and “Indian reserves,” it signals some governmental recognition of Indian lands and of the distinct position of Indigenous people.
1879
The Nlaka’pamux assemble at Lytton to discuss their land rights. A new political structure, consisting of a head chief and 13 councilors is proposed to deal with the colonial governments and the Nlaka’pamux request that their system be recognized under the Indian Act.
1880
Construction of the BC portion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) begins, contributing to increased immigration.
1883
Railway lands in BC are transferred to Canada to help pay for railroad construction costs. The Railway Belt is a 20-mile strip of land on either side of the railway line totaling nearly eleven million acres. An additional 3.5 million acres, known as the “Peace River Block,” is transferred to replace land already taken up in the more populated sections of the province. The Railway Belt and Peace River Block, including all Indian reserves contained within these sections, remain under federal control until 1930.
1884
James Lyle arrives in Canada.
1885
Canada enacts a potlatch ban. Every Indian engaging in a potlatch or Tamanawas (spirit) activities is deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and is subject to imprisonment of up to six months in jail. Uslick, a Sto:lo man from Chilliwack, is the first person arrested under this law. Three Tsimshian chiefs travel to Ottawa to express their concerns about land rights. They are the first Indigenous delegation from BC to take their protests to Ottawa.
She scrolled forward. The list went on for another ten pages or so, entry after entry, hardly a year missing from the chronology. It was impressive research, but it was far too much to take in, there in the darkness of the canyon night, so she scanned the remainder looking for more mentions of Lyle.
1894
James Lyle meets the ethnographer Franz Boas.
1899
James Lyle’s wife dies.
1909
Secwepemc, Okanagan, Nlaka’pamux and St’at’imc leaders meet in Cloud Falls and form the Interior Tribes of British Columbia. James Lyle, a local ethnographer, is recruited to translate their concerns and demands to Canada and BC.
She scanned forward again. The list of names and treaties, of tribes and protests, went on and on, right through the First World War years, an astounding catalogue of history she knew little about. Her Scottish friend had certainly done his research. But it was too much to take in piecemeal. An overwhelming sense of injustice towards First Nations people came over her at that moment, and it was tinged by a kind of settler guilt. Although her family had nothing to do with those actions, had been in no way involved in the British colonization, her very presence here in the province seemed to implicate her, as she flash-read incident after incident in the Indian Rights movement’s history. The last page came into view.
1921
Indian Agent and Justice of the Peace William Halliday orchestrates a major RCMP raid on a Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch at Mamlillikulla (Village Island). They arrest 49 people and confiscate all sacred regalia, masks and other items. Twenty-six people are imprisoned and all artefacts are sold off to public and private collectors. The Kwakwaka’wakw join the Allied Tribes.
1922
James Lyle dies in Merritt.
She closed the file. In the light from the laptop, she looked at the sleeping Scotsman, lying wrapped in a white sheet, an echo of the shroud she’d saved him from. Where had he come from, bursting into her life like this, waking her from the stupor that had hung over her life since the surgery and the radiotherapy, that dreadful listlessness she had endured till her trip to Calgary? Suddenly she was elsewhere, in a world she did not know. Except of course she did. She was not the same person she had been. Except of course she was.
She clicked on the icon entitled ‘MacLeod Falls Journal’.
* * *
Second Dance
‘The Walking Scotchman’
(Slow Waltz)
* * *
The pioneers in this movement will conquer the territory not with arms in their hands, but with the gold-rocker, the plough, the loom, and the anvil, the steam-boat, the railway, and the telegraph. Commerce and agriculture, disenthralled by the influences of free institutions, will cause the new empire to spring into life, full armed, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter. Its Pacific ports will be thronged with ships of all nations, its rich valleys will blossom with nature’s choicest products, while its grand rivers will bear to the sea the fruits of free and honest labour.
R M Ballantyne, Handbook to the Goldfields
HE WATCHED AS the coach wound its way ever further into the interior, and into an ever steeper gorge surrounded by mountainous slopes and wild forest. Familiar though it seemed from the Highlands of home, the Scotsman was amazed by the scale of it all, despite the fact that he knew where he was going, had read and prepared, had studied maps and guides. He knew that for centuries this territory had been the place of the N’laka’pamux, who moved through the canyon and the valleys surrounding according to season, prey and natural crop, until finally they found themselves fenced in by the land grants given to the invader by the invader’s government. The N’laka’pamux knew where the gold they brought to trade at the white man’s fort could be found on the bars and spits of the canyon shores. The company traders learned from them, prospectors followed in huge swarms.
In the 1860s, the ‘Couteau Indians’ resisted. When miners raped two of their women, they found the culprits, cut their heads off, floated them downstream to the miners’ camp. Then, it was the wild frontier. Now, in the summer of 2011, the Scotsman stepped off a Greyhound bus from Vancouver, into the baking heat of noonday at a settlement they now called Cloud Falls – though he knew it had once been MacLeod’s Falls. He knew a lot about it. He’d mapped it from a distance of 5,000 miles as well as any one might scope it at that range. He’d google-walked the highway and the main street, but the backstreets and the hidden places were unknown. He knew the story of the old bridge he must cross to get to the inn. He’d made its history familiar, important, but now all that seemed strange because today the settlement he saw was stripped of story, and all appeared a tiny temporary structure among vast mountains, encamped alongside a great urgent river that could sweep it away in an instant, mere human scratchings in the wild.
He could see the inn where he was to stay on the far bank. It was supposedly the oldest in continuous use in the province, first opened as a glorified cabin, a roadhouse where travellers could wait till it was safe to cross the river on the great winched basket established by a man called Sigurd – which gave it its first name, Sigurd’s Crossing. It had slowly evolved to its heyday as stagecoach stop before that trade was put an end to by the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway. After the first bridge was built, the later town grew on the near bank, where there was a little land that could be farmed with proper irrigation and diligent care. It was there that Jimmy Lyle’s uncle John Macleod had created his fiefdom, once known as MacLeodville.
He passed between a few houses, set back from the road, but his eyes were on the bridge. From a distance, the old structure reminded him of the Forth Railway Bridge, a fellow Victorian wrought iron creation, though the span and the scale was very different. The bridge was sturdy, a belt and braces design made to resist annual floods. The sensation, that great notion he’d had in Scotland during those weeks of cancer treatment, that peculiar vertiginous urge to jump swept over him.
He stepped onto the great wooden planks – the rail was high but not a deterrent, and the river was moving rapidly, still carrying melt-water from the high mountains. The flow wasn’t smooth – rapid wave crests caused by hidden rocks appeared to want to flow upstream, but were constantly frustrated by the current. He leant over the barrier and watched this turmoil churning below, a vast silvery grey soup of silt. He knew that while the river was narrow up here in the gorge, it had a seasonal urgency sufficient to carry away any engineer’s designs, that it had done so once, before this structure was erected. The current would sweep all debris downstream, as it had the headless miners back in the day.
The breeze blowing down the canyon was warm yet still refreshing on his back after the stale air of the coach. He felt a little flashback to Vancouver in the early morning, before she dropped him off at Pacific Central, him telling her about John Buchan and his last Canadian book, as they’d waited in the lines of traffic. This would indeed be a good river for the drowning of a sick heart, unlike the shallow Almond at home he had left behind almost dry, its submerged rocks revealed. That was a lowland river with too gentle a name for tragic drowning. Here at Cloud Falls in New Caledonia, there would be a poetry about it. But he resisted, carefully walked the line between the lanes to the far bank where the inn stood, safe above the floodplain.
From there he could see properly the mountainous crag above the town which John MacLeod had dubbed ‘Arthur’s Seat’, because it reminded him of Edinburgh’s volcanic heart. It was in some way similar, but steeper and more forbidding by far.
A giant railway track ran alongside the highway as he walked, lugging his bags, and a train of trucks announced the Canadian Pacific he knew from the old song, their livery and logos giving a micro chain geography of Canada, with place names decorated here and there by graffiti.
The inn came into view, reminding him of one old photograph he’d got from the BC archives that had shown the inn in its prime, in the halcyon days of the stagecoach. It was only a thumbnail that pixelated when zoomed, but the hotel looked so freshly constructed the viewer could almost smell new-cut timber. Upstairs windows were raised, but the blinds drawn. Next to the stagecoach, a man in white shirt sleeves stood arms aloft, as if ready to give the signal to depart. Another held the bridles of the first of two pairs of horses. On the coach, three ladies in long dresses pulled headscarves tight around their chins, as if afraid their bonnets would fly off once the coach got under way. Two old long-beards sat by the opened inn door, watching the show, while another bearded figure stood closer, slightly off-balance as if in mid-step, staring right down the camera lens. It was a picture of pioneers establishing timetables, routes, routines, of a desire for connection, for swiftness.
The key was waiting for the Scotsman on the reception desk as he’d been told it would, with a note from Vince the proprietor to say he’d be back at 5pm. It was tagged ‘Room 14’. He made his way upstairs, lugging baggage, thinking of the list he’d made before he left Scotland in his notebook – a kind of guide, but one that took no account of how the journey felt, of the dead weight of things, of who was met or missed and how that diverted. Still he’d got there, and the room was clean, a tiny sanctuary from the road. The windows looked out across the river to the town on the far bank.
Once inside, he unpacked his gear and fixed tripod to camcorder, and plugged in the laptop so that he could lie on the bed and watch the image while he controlled the remote. The village across the river was too far off for clear images, present only in a rough blur. Still he could see wooden settler houses well spread out, but not much seemed to be happening. Further to the right was the bridge he’d crossed, the mad rush of water only a grey glistening without definition. Panning left, the land on the floodplain below came into focus, and his zoom lens found a nest on a platform atop a great wooden pole, where the electricity line crossed the river. He sat up so he could see the image more clearly, adjusted focus. There were two large birds flapping around among a pile of sticks and branches. One seemed to be pestering the other by flying up a short distance, then dropping down on to the back of that sitting, hopping around as if to tell it that it must move – go fishing!
It was a nest, and yes, he saw they were indeed ospreys – another strange coincidence to his mind as it sought for meaning, a little bit of home that had nested here. For forty years, ospreys had avoided Scotland where they had been persecuted to extinction. The last recorded chick preceded the First World War, so when in 1951, a pair nested in the Highlands – not reintroduced, but naturally – it was a big story. He knew it well. The countryside and the way of life had changed so during the intervening years, but here was something of the old world that chose to return – the Fish Hawk. After the long years of war, it was a hopeful tale, somehow, and a pilgrimage for those who had the means. It was a trip his mother and father first made together sometime in the later 1950s, north from Edinburgh on the old A9 to Boat of Garten in their Vauxhall Vesta. He wasn’t with them, was still a toddler so he’d stayed with the next door neighbours, but he remembered their monochrome photos, so when he zoomed in on this Canadian pair among twigs at the top of their tall pole above the river, strung round with heavy wires, he zoomed into his own past.
The sight triggered memories of where he’d come from and suddenly he found himself back in the old country, glad that he’d had those months with the old girl before she died. Though it was the cancer that drove him back to live with her, it was fortunate because it turned out to be her last months, and she needed him – perhaps they had needed each other? And as his mother began to unravel, he began to heed her words in a manner he hadn’t done in many years, because among the nonsense and the senile rambling she would sometimes say something that made his ears alert. It was as if she’d taken some kind of truth serum, and the silences she’d previously imposed on her early life melted into a formless lucidity over which she had no control. When she spoke during these times, it was not as if to him, but to some unspecified other she felt was listening, or perhaps judging, some presence to whom she felt the need to justify her deeds. Her speech in those moments – the two of them in the little kitchen of the cottage she’d made her final home, the old stove lit and her chair at its side, him at the table – was the voice of her childhood on the estate where her father was once gamekeeper, and her mother a maid at the castle. Braid Scots.
