Wither the White Man: Charles Mair's "Lament for the Bison"

                                 Where are the buffalo? Gone the way of the Indian.
                                                                        
                                    Where is the Indian? Gone the way of the buffalo.
                                                                               —Armand Garnet Ruffo

by Albert Braz

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Charles Mair's literary reputation has fluctuated dramatically over the years. Mair first achieved renown with the publication of his Dreamland and Other Poems in 1868, considered by many critics at the time "the first significant collection of the new Confederation era" (Shrive, Voice 20). His standing was further solidified in 1886 when he published his "masterpiece" Tecumseh, a five-act verse drama about the Shawnee leader who helped to ensure that Canada would remain a separate polity in North America (Johnson 117).¹ Combined with his controversial political activities in the newly-acquired North-West, Mair's writings earned him the title of the nation's "warrior bard" (Dooley and Shrive 31; Shrive, Voice 106).Yet by the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century the same individual who had once been hailed as English-speaking Canada's "first important political poet" had come to be perceived as one of its "dear bad poets," those early writers who are significant not for the quality of their work but merely for mapping out an imaginative landscape (Brown 15; Reaney 211). Even more damning, some scholars ceased to deem him a creative writer at all. As Malcolm Ross wrote in justifying the decision to exclude him from one of the most influential anthologies of early Canadian poetry, "Charles Mair, perhaps, is our Confederation poet in the obvious political sense—the trouble being that he simply was not a poet" (ix). The recent dismissal of Mair is problematic, though, for at least two reasons. To begin with, a different view of his literary abilities was held in the past, when Pauline Johnson proclaims that the author of the "magnificent" Tecumseh has probably "enriched Canadian Indian literature" more than any other writer (120) and Charles G.D. Roberts asserts that "Mair really is a poet" (qtd. in Whalen 71). More significantly, today's critics tend to ignore some of the more compelling aspects of Mair's work, notably his letters and prose about Western Canada and his writings on the bison. The latter, in particular, have surprisingly modern ecological overtones.

Without minimizing Mair's cultural chauvinism, I would like to argue that the inordinate focus on his Red River experience has produced a rather unbalanced view of him. First, however dramatic, the events of 1869-70 comprise a minute segment of what was a long and active life—Mair would not die until 1927, at the age of 88, ending a career not just as a poet and political activist but also as a newspaper correspondent, merchant, land speculator, and civil servant. Second, when contemporary poets and novelists examine his activities in the North-West they tend to do so indirectly, as an addendum to the Riel story, thus disregarding his political and psychological motivation. Most important, they usually fail to address Mair's own writings. This is particularly true of his passionate advocacy of the vanishing prairie bison, best exemplified in the 1888 poem "The Last Bison" and the 1890 essay "The American Bison."²

There is perhaps no fact in the natural history of America which brings such reproach on civilized man as the reckless and almost total destruction of the bison. Twenty years ago it abounded in many parts of the North-Western plains and prairies. . . . In the beginning of the nineteenth century it roamed the country from Texas and New Mexico northward, and from the Alleghanies [sic] westward into and beyond the Rocky Mountains and north-westward to the affluents of the Mackenzie. (277)

It may be true that Mair is an inveterate central Canadian bigot "dedicated to spreading ‘superior' Anglo-Saxon values" across the top half of North America (Siggins 85), yet he is broadminded enough to admit that he owes much of his knowledge of the bison to the First Nations. He begins his essay with a recapitulation of the literary and scientific representations of the animal, citing a variety of early writers and explorers from Richard Hakluyt to Samuel Purchas, Thomas Morton, Louis Hennepin, and Jacques Marquette (277-79). However, he avers that he derives his authority more from his "long residence in the North-West" and from information provided to him by local First Nations and Métis people than from the learned Europeans. As he writes, it is by "consulting many Indians and half-breeds of experience and of great repute in their day as plain hunters" that he has been able to pursue "inquiries into questions of interest, with regard to the bison on the safe ground of their daily contact with and intimate knowledge of its habits" (281). Indeed, it is because of his experience on the Prairies, including the knowledge he gleans from "noted half-breed leaders of the plain hunt in times past," that Mair learns about the fabled burdash, the hermaphroditic bison who yielded the immense and much prized glossy "beaver robe" (290).³

Moreover, as one can sense from the essay's first paragraph, Mair is not content to trace the seemingly inexorable disappearance of the bison from North America; he assigns specific blame for what a more recent poet, Al Purdy, has termed a "kinda genocide or buffalocide" (16). "The American Bison" is, in fact, nothing less than an indictment of Euro-American cupidity, an unequivocal condemnation of "that great enemy of wild nature, the white man" (281).⁴ As Mair states, the First Nations "lived upon" the bison, "but, with savage conservatism, severely punish[ing] anyone who wantonly butchered them."⁵ The Métis are supposedly more thoughtless, slaughtering "Immense numbers" during their annual hunt (281, 291). But the great culprits in this ecological catastrophe are white people, who, at least since the advent of the railway, hunt indiscriminately. Mair is especially critical of "pot-and-hide hunters," groups of heavily armed men hired by "wealthy citizens" with a craving for bison "tongues and humps," and to whom he traces the genesis of "the work of extermination" (292). For the poet, white hunting practices are not just unecological but immoral. Consequently, he not only develops strategies for preserving the bison, notably through domestication and the creation of sanctuaries, but also underlines the ignominy of failing to do so. As Mair ends his essay, in what amounts to an act of atonement for both himself and his civilization, "[n]o reasonable effort should be spared to rescue an animal from destruction which has been of great service on our continent, which is intimately associated with its history, and whose extinction would be a disgrace to civilized man" (303).

Yet Sorrow, too, had here its kindred place,
As o'er my spirit swept the sense of change.
Here sympathy could sigh o'er man's decay;
For here, but yesterday, the warrior dwelt
Whose faded nation had for ages held,
In fealty to Nature, these domains.
Around me were the relics of his race—
The grassy circlets where his village stood,
Well-ruled by customs immemorial law.
                                                          (238)

                                        Now stood he there
And stared, with head uplifted, at the skies,
Slow-yielding to his deep and mortal wound.
He seemed to pour his mighty spirit out
As thus he gazed, till my own spirit burned,
And teeming fancy, charmed and overwrought

By all the wildering glamour of the scene,
Gave to that glorious attitude a voice,
And, rapt, endowed the noble beast with song.
                                                              (239)

Comprising nine Spenserian stanzas, "The Song"⁶ of the burdash is basically a history of the bison from its own perspective. The animal begins by addressing the "smokeless skies and [the] grass green earth" through which "fond Nature gave me birth, / And food and freedom—all she had to give." It particularly underscores the early times, "changeless and unchanged," when it and its kind were hunted only by "nations primitive," who depended on them and respected them. As the burdash remarks, echoing Mair's views in "The American Bison," the First Nations "loved us, and they wasted not. They slew, / With pious hand, but for their daily need; / Not wantonly" (240). But this ostensibly symbiotic relationship of "blameless strife" was altered radically when "the red man mixed his blood / With paler currents." The fruit of this biological and cultural interbreeding was a race of "reckless hunters of the plains—who vied / In wanton slaughter for the tongue and hide, /To satisfy vain ends and longings base."⁷ The Métis, as the motives ascribed to them indicate, are not portrayed as being nearly as ecologically-minded as the First Nations. Yet they are not utterly foolhardy, either. While they expand the hunt more than ever before, under their regime, the bison still "flourished, and our name / Prospered" (240).

I see our spoilers build their cities great
Upon our plains—I see their rich estate:
          The centuries in dim procession fly!
Long ages roll, and then at length is bared
The time when they who spared not are no longer spared.

Once more my vision sweeps the prairies wide,
          But now no peopled cities greet the sight;
All perished, now, their pomp and pride:
          In solitude the wild wind takes delight.
Naught but the vacant wilderness is seen,
And grassy mounds, where cities once had been.
          The earth smile [sic] as of yore, the skies are bright,
Wild cattle graze and bellow on the plain,
And savage nations roam o'er native wilds again!
                                                                              (241)

Mair's "The Last Bison" is clearly an unusual poem, never more so than in its depiction of the burdash. Desmond Pacey, for example, dismisses the work as "inept and fantastic." Pacey seems disturbed by the fact that "Mair gushes about the oppressed Indians and the disappearing buffaloes," but he also accuses the poet of writing in a "language appropriate to an itinerant evangelist!" (39). Norman Shrive, the author of two books⁸ and several essays on Mair, is more temperate in his criticism. Yet even Shrive concedes that the poem is "the strangest expression . . . of the theme of the greedy white man" in Mair's work (Voice 112). One of the few laudatory voices in this chorus of disapproval is Fred Cogswell, who agrees that Mair can be sentimental. However, examining Mair's work historically, Cogswell does not see this trait as a flaw but rather as a result of the poet living in his time. The main charge against Mair, Cogswell maintains, is that he does not "write as critics of today, gifted with hindsight, would have him write." As Cogswell states, after noting that the initial reception of "The Last Bison" was quite positive, "[i]t is Mair's misfortune that the present age is in revolt against both the kind of feelings our ancestors displayed and any open, direct expression of feeling at all in matters not concerned directly with sex and violence" (133-34; Shrive, Charles Mair 203).

Mair, as stated earlier, is a more complex figure than his critics are willing to admit. It is true that he advocates an Ontario-centred Canadian nationalism⁹ in which the acquisition of the North-West becomes not just a logical but a natural development. It is also true that he harbours deep anxieties about the new waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Like many of his contemporaries, on both sides of the Canada-United States border, he fears that the continual arrival of "semi-barbarous hordes" (qtd. in Shrive, Charles Mair 132) will lead to what another well-known naturalist, Theodore Roosevelt, terms "race suicide" (qtd. in Kassanoff 69). As a New England minister warns during that period, if such trends in immigration continue in North America, the people of "old stock" who succeeded to "cross the seas" and "subdue the wilderness" are bound to suffer the same fate as "the American Indian and the bison" (Denison 17).¹⁰ Yet at the same time that Mair avidly promotes the settlement of the North-West by Euro-Canadians, particularly those of Anglo-Celtic ancestry, he calls into question the wisdom, and long-term success, of any such enterprise. Throughout his poetry and prose, he often shows white people as a malignant force incapable of entering a territory without defiling it. As he writes in the symbolically titled poem "Kanata," the European masses seek "shelter in the peaceful West" but, because of their insatiable thirst for material wealth, they are destined to "enact the tyrants part" (253). This is an argument that becomes even more explicit in "The Last Bison," where Mair proposes that the decimation of a species is a crime so ignominious that it demands, or ought to demand, the eventual disappearance of white people from the heart of North America (241).

Needless to say, there is a measure of histrionics in the curse against white people that Mair has the burdash utter in "The Last Bison." After all, in "The American Bison," which is essentially a prose version of the poem, there is little indication that the bison and the First Nations are fated to displace whites from the Prairies. The curse becomes even more problematic in light of Mair's 1875 essay "The New Canada." The poet ends that tract with a vision of the new Dominion soon being transformed into "the hope of the despairing of the world," something that is made possible because "[t]he haunt of the Indian, the bison, and the antelope, [is] waiting with majestic patience for the flocks and the fields, the schools, the churches, the Christian faith and love of the coming men" ("New Canada" 109). In other words, rather than being about to re-inherit the Prairies, the bison, like the First Nations, appear about to vanish. That being said, Mair's raising of the idea of retribution likely is not just a rhetorical exercise. He truly seems convinced that Euro-American civilization's ignoble treatment of the bison will have catastrophic ramifications for white people, unless they succeed in reversing the decline of the animal.¹¹ This is precisely what Mair advocates at the end of "The American Bison." He considers a series of ways in which the animal can be saved from "extinction," and concludes that the best way is to create a national sanctuary for it on the "foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains," a plea that is believed to have provoked "a renewed interest in the buffalo" and influenced the Canadian government's decision to create a reserve in Wainwright, Alberta (303; Shrive, Voice 115).

It has not been the main objective of this essay to prove that Mair is a great poet, or even a great nature poet. Robertson Davies once opined that the Ontario writer J.R. Ramsay "suffered the disability of many poets—he had to choose between rhyme and reason, and he chose rhyme" (376). Mair, at least in the first part of "The Last Bison," does not even have the excuse that he is hampered by the need to ensure that his lines end in similar sounds. Still, there is no question that his poetry is often undermined by the quaintness of its language. Whatever else they may accomplish, lines like "the fulgent light / Of snowy cloud-land and cerulean skies" and "the suns fierce beams / Reverberate in wreathed ethereal flame" (237) fail to convey the reality of the landscape they describe. The inadequacy of Mair's poetic language becomes particularly glaring when one contrasts his poetry to his prose, notably his letters, such as when he informs his brother that the future of the North-West "is as inevitable as to-morrows sunrise. The climate is delightful. . . . In deep winter, there are short spells of severe weather, but they are short; so they all tell me, and certainly my experience so far justifies the assertion. I never felt such fine weather in November in Canada as we have just now: and there is an exhilaration in it quite new to me" (Letter 398). Indeed, as one reads his Red River correspondence, one cannot help but wish that, in his poetry, Mair had heeded the advice of his Canada First confederate Robert Haliburton and realized that "[y]ou're living in a new world and you must write the language of the living to [the] living" (qtd. in Shrive, Voice 26).¹²

Nonetheless, despite Mair's propensity for archaisms, there is power in his poetry. This is a vitality that probably derives from the poet's contradictions, his profound ambivalence not only about the First Nations but also about whites. Mair is widely viewed as an apostle of Canadian nationalism, an avid promoter of a transcontinental nation inhabited mainly by people of northern European stock. Yet this "expansionist hothead" (Leonard xxi) entertains considerable doubts about the group destined to acquire the new Canada, envisaging Euro-Canadians basically as a virus that cannot but despoil the Promised Land as they enter it. A similar tension exists in the poet's characterization of the First Nations. Mair, who styles himself as one of the elect "few" with the capacity to apprehend "the character of the true, aboriginal Indian, before he became abased and corrupted by the White Man" (qtd. in Wright 139), has a schizophrenic view of the First Nations. On one hand, as the previous quote intimates, he sees them as "corrupted" by whites, a "faded nation" (238). But on the other hand, he claims that they are an unalienated people, a people whose relationship to the land ought to be emulated. As he writes of northern Alberta in Through the Mackenzie Basin, it is "a real Utopia, such as Sir Thomas More dreamt not of, [I] being actually here, with no trace of abortive politics or irritating ordinance. Here was contentment in the savage wilderness—communion with Nature in all her unstained purity and beauty" (448). For Mair, whatever their future, the First Nations are clearly the first inhabitants of the land. Particularly in Through the Mackenzie Basin, he seems at pains to document their presence on it, usually citing the aboriginal names of rivers and villages he approaches. For example, he describes "Sturgeon River—the Namáo Sepe of the Crees—"; "Lilly Lake— Ascútamo Sakaigon—"; and "Vermilion River—the Wyamun of the Crees" (330-31). His ethnocultural chauvinism notwithstanding, he definitely would not appear to subscribe to the notion that the word Canada derives from the Portuguese phrase "Cá nada," an interpretation which signifies that the country was devoid of life prior to the arrival of the Europeans and which continues to have surprising currency even in our supposedly more enlightened times.¹³

In conclusion, Mair's significance as a writer is not formal or stylistic but cultural, the fact that he succeeds in "touching recurring concerns in English-Canadian culture" (Monkman 52). In terms of his work on the bison, what is most striking about it is the poet's passionate advocacy on behalf of the animal. His optimism about the bison's ability to rebound from what appears to be certain extinction is especially noteworthy since he lived at a time when people like George Armstrong Custer and his supporters ostensibly were determined to ensure that the only home that "both the buffalo and the Indian" would have would be "on the American nickel" (Ruffo, "Creating" 34). To quote Margaret Atwood, a writer for whom even a captive bison can elicit "anxious" fears ("Buffalo" 70), "The Last Bison" is "startlingly proleptic: the sentiments, if not the form, could have come straight from the ecology movement of the 1970s and 1980s" ("Introduction" xxxii). In fact, Mair's work on the bison constitutes less a lament for a vanishing species than a clarion call for its preservation.

Notes

1. The response to Tecumseh by today's scholars is rather disparate. For instance, while Alan Filewod dismisses Mair's drama as "a pageant of rhetorical sentiments" that has been rightly consigned to "the dustbin of literary failures" (74), Glenn Willmott judges it "the most significant play of the Canadian nineteenth century" (135). [back]
2. Unless otherwise specified, all references to Mair's works are to the 1926 edition organized by John Garvin (Tecumseh . . .), and appear parenthetically in the text. [back]
3. In a note to "The Last Bison," Mair states: "A huge animal called by the half-breed plain hunters the burdash (the hermaphrodite) was occasionally found in a large bison herd. It was called by the Indians ayaquauy, namely of either sex" (270). In "The American Bison" he writes that the term burdash is "probably Norman French, for it is not Indian. If I am not mistaken the word Bredache is the patois of the French Canadian designates an animal of both genders. Its Cree name was Aya-quayu, meaning of ‘neither sex'" (290). [back]
4. In a striking contrast to Mair, Archibald Lampman attributes such ecological abominations as the destruction of the bison, not specifically to white people, but to humanity in general: "The awful destructiveness of the human race is exemplified in small things as well as great. Not only are the magnificent pine forests disappearing, not only is the buffalo practically extinct and the wild pigeon rapidly becoming so, but wherever any wild thing of interest or beauty occurs in rare haunts it is instantly set upon and destroyed" (339). [back]
5. Mair's image of the First Nations as natural ecologists is not universally held, either today or in the past. Upon witnessing the activities at a buffalo pound in the Edmonton area in 1840s, Paul Kane writes that "The Indians in this manner destroy innumerable buffaloes, apparently for the mere pleasure of the thing" (81). In his recent environmental history of the bison, Andrew Isenberg contends that the bison was decimated in the mid-nineteenth century by a "combination of Indian predation and environmental change" (3). [back]
6. "The Song," which constitutes about half of Mair's poem, is the only part of "The Last Bison" reproduced in most recent anthologies of Canadian poetry that include the nineteenth century. See, for example, Atwood, New Oxford 15-17, and Gerson and Davies 123-25. [back]
7. Mair's views on the Métis and interbreeding in general may reflect his fear of miscegenation, something he tends to associate with degeneration. For instance, in the first stanza of "The Last Bison," he describes "the Indians horse" as "Degenerate now, but from the ‘Centaurs drawn—'" in contrast to the poet's runner, which is of "pure Indian blood" (237). This focus on the purity and Indianness of the runner is curious since, as is well known, the horse was introduced by "Europeans . . . to the New World" (Isenberg 1). [back]
8. Shrives second book on Mair (Voice) is really a revised, and abridged, version of his first one (Charles Mair). As he suggests in the preface to the later work, the first book remains the "authoritative" study of Mair (Voice xi). [back]
9. Mair's Ontarianism, the claim that he was a central "force in the Upper Canadianization of the west" (Duffy 65), is perhaps overstressed. As the historian David Leonard notes, Mair spent most of his adult life in Western Canada and came "to stake his own identity on the West" (xxiv). [back]
10. For an incisive overview of the fear of "race suicide" in the United States at the end of the nineteenth-century, see Kassanoff. [back]
11. In Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen writes that "White America has been punished by lung cancer for having destroyed the Red Man and stolen his pleasures" (94). [back]
12. Mair, of course, did attempt to modernize or "Canadianize" his language but with not very successful results (Shrive, Voice 133). [back]
13. The idea that Canada derives its name from "Cá nada," as opposed to the Wendat word kanata, has been promulgated by such prominent literary figures as Northrop Frye, Eli Mandel, and Réjean Ducharme. One of the more recent ones is David Staines (7). [back]

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. "Buffalo in Compound: Alberta." Procedures for Underground. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1970. 70-71.