HISTORIC TALE A WRENCHING ACCOUNT OF BETRAYAL, LOSS
Book carries tone of social history rather than biography, writes Robert J. Wiersema.
With his new book, Halfmoon Bay writer J. Edward Chamberlin turns his attention to a particular, and personal, story with significant stakes of its own.
Chamberlin, whose 2003 book If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground was shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize and the Pearson Writer’s Trust Award, penned The Banker and the Blackfoot.
It’s ostensibly an account of Chamberlin’s grandfather, (Sorreltop) Jack Cowdry, and his relationship with Crop Eared Wolf, a Kainai warrior and, later, head chief of the Bloods.
The two met on Cowdry’s arrival in the Alberta foothills in the 1880s, a young adventure seeker and farmer drawn to the region by the potential for cattle ranching, now that the North West Mounted Police had brought “a certain sort of orderliness to the western prairies.”
And, perhaps crucially, “in my grandfather’s mind, the reputation of the Blackfoot was a big draw ... the greatest horse culture and Indian nation of the northern plains ... turned from fearless warriors ... into stern peacemakers.”
The book details — if one can use that word — roughly two decades spanning the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Cowdry settles in ragtag Fort Macleod and becomes a significant part of the building of the west, opening a bank to serve the locals, especially the cattle ranchers, establishing, on little more than handshakes and promises, an economy that allowed the region to thrive.
Threaded through the story are larger-than-life figures familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of western Canadian history, including Francis Dickens, a.k.a. Dickens of the Mounted, the son of writer Charles Dickens who served in the North West Mounted Police.
In fact, the world and people around Cowdry and Crop Eared Wolf take centre stage relatively quickly, and The Banker and the Blackfoot takes on a tone of social history rather than biography.
This may be due to the nature of Cowdry’s story: handed down verbally, as family tales, and supported by outside records, Cowdry’s life is interesting (Chamberlin’s account of his publishing of the scandalous satirical newspaper The Outlaw is particularly amusing), but there’s not really enough there to sustain an entire book.
Similarly, the nature and depths of his relationship with Crop Eared Wolf doesn’t add a whole lot; the material simply isn’t there.
It becomes clear soon enough, however, that, in addition to honouring the story of his grandfather and his friend, Chamberlin is using that relationship as an entry point for a very different sort of book. Not just a biography, not just a social history, The Banker and the Blackfoot becomes a collection of Chamberlin’s long-held passions.
There are beautiful passages, for example, about the horses of the plains, hardly surprising for a writer whose Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations was a stunning and powerful account of equine importance, blending biology, history, sociology and the like.
Most significantly, though, the book allows Chamberlin, who has worked extensively on aboriginal land claims around the world, including as senior research associate with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, to look back at the roots of the modern relationship between the First Nations of the plains and the white settlers.
By examining not just the process by which treaties were negotiated and signed (Treaty Seven gets considerable attention), but also the nature of life in the region before and after the treaties, Chamberlin conveys both the ambitions of the treaty process and its failures.
It’s a wrenching account of betrayal and loss, and one which Chamberlin seems, to his credit, to take very personally. In its own way, The Banker and the Blackfoot serves as a capsule history, and a reminder of our common history.
There is, as Chamberlin would be the first to attest, power in such a story.