A Geography of Blood by Candace Savage

Author:Candace Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS006000
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2012-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

{eight} Fort Walsh

“Le plus terrible dans ce monde, c’est que chacun à ses raisons.”

“The most terrible thing about this world is that everyone has his reasons.”

JEAN RENOIR, La Règle du jeu, 1939

Imagine that we’re sitting together on the hillside above Fort Walsh. With every breath, we draw in the winy scent of wild roses, the smoky sweetness of sage, the sheen and shimmer of a perfect summer day. Down below, tourists in shorts and suntops are legging it along the road from the visitors’ center to the fort’s main gate or climbing aboard the bright yellow bus in front of the stockade. Since the site is only open from the May long weekend until early fall, these days it’s always summer at Fort Walsh. If ever there was a place to offer healing and distract us from troubling thoughts, here it is spread out in front of us. In the foreground, a soft screen of wolf willows; in the distance, a rollicking sweep of hills; and in between, on the flats below, a historic site managed exclusively for our edification and pleasure.

It’s been years now since Keith and I made our first tour of the fort, and I’m surprised by how much of that visit I can still recall. But then, who could forget the portly gent in full North-West Mounted Police regalia who greets us at the entrance with his knee-high boots polished to a fine luster, his scarlet coat buttoned to the chin, and a white pith helmet affixed to the top of his cranium? The original intention of this uniform had been to mark the mounted police as British, in contrast to the blue-coated Americans, and, in the years when that distinction truly mattered, it had served its purpose well. In deference to this historical significance, our guide bears his domed, beknobbled headgear with all the dignity he can muster.

Despite his cheerfully ridiculous accoutrements, our man knows his stuff, and he quickly fills us in on the basics about Fort Walsh. Although the present-day buildings date from the 1940s, he explains that the original construction was undertaken in 1875 by the thirty-man squad of “B” Division of the North-West Mounted Police, assisted by a crew of Métis sawyers. The commander of the operation was a flamboyant, hot-tempered officer named Inspector (or as he preferred to have it, “Major”) James M. Walsh, the man who lent his name to the outpost and whose picture—perhaps we’d noticed?—is featured on the cover of the fort’s brochure. Walsh was known to some of his Aboriginal clients as White Forehead Chief, so he must sometimes have worn his pith helmet in the course of his official duties. For this portrait, however, he has replaced his regulation issue with a slouch-brimmed Western hat, which he’s garlanded with a scarf and set on his head at a rakish tilt. Done up in fringes and buckskin, with a sword dangling from his belt, Major Walsh exudes a kind of steamy swashbuckling charisma.

It has sometimes

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