The Saga of Kootenai Brown

To say that legendary John “Kootenai” Brown, arguably Western Canada’s most famous frontiersman, led an interesting life is akin to saying that the Titanic suffered a minor mishap. Among other occupations, he worked as a prospector, trapper, whiskey trader, buffalo hunter, peace officer, army scout, pony express rider, and park ranger. He survived an arrow in the back during a pitched battle with a Blackfoot hunting party, was captured and almost killed by Chief Sitting Bull, and nearly hanged for murder. But what he is perhaps best known for was being a major force behind the creation of Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada.

I’m not sure whether the man was a scoundrel or a visionary. Perhaps a little of both? Read on and decide for yourself.

Early Life

Brown was born in Ireland in 1839. At a young age, he lost both parents in the Great Hunger, i.e. the Irish potato famine, and was raised by his widowed grandmother. When he turned eighteen, he joined the British army and was soon deployed to India as a junior officer. It didn’t take long to discover that army life didn’t suit him, and as soon as his term expired he resigned his commission and returned to Ireland. Not long afterward, his grandmother died, and having no reason to remain, he set out to seek his fortune in the Americas.

He bought passage on a steamship bound for Panama, then took a train across the isthmus from Colon to Panama City. (His impression of Colon wasn’t much different than ours the times we sailed there - “I have travelled a good deal in my day but a more miserable [place] it has never been my misfortune to behold.” Our sentiments exactly.)

From Panama, Brown sailed to San Francisco, where he arrived almost broke. There, he worked as a teamster, saving enough money to get a little closer to the Canadian goldfields. From San Francisco, he sailed to Vancouver Island, where he logged trees to earn enough money to purchase the gear and provisions to make his way into the interior of British Columbia. Finally, in the spring of 1862, after a long and difficult overland trek he arrived at the Cariboo goldfields and Williams Creek.

Gold Fever

Like most gold prospectors, his efforts were mostly unsuccessful. He’d work the goldfields until he ran out of money, then try something else, like trapping, to raise enough money to grub-stake another attempt at finding gold. One of his gold claims actually proved profitable, which he then sold to buy a larger claim - only to lose it all when the newer claim turned out to be worthless. By 1864, he decided to give up his search for gold and try something new. In his words, “I had no money when I went into Cariboo and I had none when I came out in 1864, but I had a little fortune for a while in between. Like thousands of other miners I made and lost a fortune in two years. When I left Williams Creek I had fifty cents in my pocket; my clothes were in rags; I had no shirt and no socks, but I had a pair of good boots“.

Brown left the goldfields and worked for a few months as a laborer hauling cargo up the Fraser River. His crew used ropes to tow large, barge-like canoes upriver, with an occasional portage around unnavigable sections of the river. It was unpleasant, hard work, but he was paid $6 a day plus his meals, and he eventually saved enough to buy new clothes and make his way to the town of New Westminster, BC’s first capital.

Peace Officer

With all the new gold discoveries in BC, there was a need for peace officers to maintain some semblance of law and order in the many gold camps that popped up. Brown soon found a job as a constable, and was sent to a newly discovered goldfield at Wild Horse Creek, a fifteen day journey into the interior. He did his best to constrain the lawlessness of the camp, including the capture of three gold dust counterfeiters. Apparently, it was possible to make an amalgam of lead, copper and gold dust that would pass as pure gold. Gold dust was the currency of trade in the mining camps, and the counterfeiters used their amalgam to buy provisions and supplies. The fake gold dust was discovered before the three got too far away, and Brown tracked them down and arrested them at gun point.

The next year, however, he resigned his position, and along with four other men, staked a new gold claim, hoping, yet again to strike it rich… and once again found himself nearly broke when the claim proved to be unprofitable. They were able to sell the claim, and with the money, the five men set out to the newly discovered goldfields near Edmonton.

Attack by Blackfeet

The men weren’t sure where Edmonton or the new goldfields were, other than eastward, so they set out in that general direction. They did know, however, that they were crossing an area known to be the hunting grounds for the Blackfoot people, and were watching for them. Several days into the trip, they encountered their first herd of buffalo, which stretched as far as they could see, and shot one for the meat. A few days later, near what is now the town of Medicine Hat, they stopped to eat in the shade of a clump of aspens. Their meal was interrupted by a fusillade of arrows, and they immediately ran for cover in a clump of bushes and began firing back. A Blackfoot hunting party of 32 warriors had found them. The battle lasted about twenty minutes, during which two warriors were killed and Brown was hit in the back with arrow, narrowly missing his kidney. The Blackfeet left, but took most of the prospectors’ horses and supplies with them.

The entire arrowhead had penetrated deeply into Brown’s back, and was difficult to extract. According to Brown, “The jagged edges caught the flesh as I pulled it out and gave me great pain. I had a bottle of turpentine and, opening up the wound, one of my companions inserted the neck of the bottle and when I bent over, about half a pint ran into the opening made by the arrowhead. This was all the doctoring I ever got and in a few days I was well again.” Ouch!

The Pony Express and Sitting Bull

For a year or two after that, Brown traveled the area, never quite making it to the newest goldfield. He lived with the Métis people (more friendly than the Blackfeet) for a winter, then tried his hand at trapping, and worked for a time at a trading post. During this period, he became quite fluent in several of the indigenous languages, including the Sioux language. In 1867, he met a recruiter for the new Pony Express that was being established south of the border in the U.S., and Brown quickly signed up. He was given a route in what is now North Dakota.

He had only been riding the route for a few weeks when a war party of Sioux gave chase and captured him. The war party was led by the famous Sitting Bull himself, who ordered Brown to strip down entirely. When the warriors had divvied up his clothes, gun, horse and other possessions, he told Brown that they had realized that wherever the white men settled, the buffalo soon disappeared, and it was his intent to kill any white men who trespassed on their people’s territory. Some of the warriors wanted to kill him outright, but Sitting Bull was leaning towards taking their captive back to their camp and having some fun with him before he died. Brown, being fluent in their language, told the chief that he wasn’t a white man at all, but that his mother was a Santee Sioux and his father an Irishman. The chief had difficulty believing that this fair skinned, blue eyed man could be half Sioux, but Brown’s fluency in their language and his Irish gift of blarney finally convinced Sitting Bull to let him go. Naked and barefooted , it took him a day and a half to make it back to Fort Stevenson, sunburned, mosquito bitten, dehydrated and with bloody feet, but alive.

Over the next year, the Sioux killed several other riders and most of the station-keepers along the mail routes, and captured hundreds of horses, eventually causing the company to go bankrupt. Brown claimed, in his later years, that the company still owed him $400 in unpaid wages.

Wolfing

After his adventures with the Pony Express, Brown found some less exciting ways of making a living. He became storekeeper for awhile, then acted as a guide and scout for the army. In his travels, he met and fell in love with a beautiful French-Cree woman named Olivia, whom he married after a brief courtship. The two lived with the Métis people for a couple years, during which time they had two girls. As the buffalo began disappearing, however, life with the Métis got harder, and Brown took up a very lucrative occupation… wolfing.

With two friends, he would spend the winter killing wolves for their pelts. The men would shoot a buffalo and partially skin it. They’d remove the heart, liver and lungs, which they would chop up and mix with strychnine. The poisonous mixture would be rubbed into the buffalo carcass and left for the wolves. They would typically kill 20-25 wolves with one poisoned carcass.

Wolf pelts were worth about $2.50 in 1877, which is about $75 in today’s dollars. The three averaged about a thousand pelts over the winter, yielding roughly $25,000 which was a fortune back then when a tradesman earned less than $100 a month.

Murder Trial

In the spring of 1877, Brown, along with his family and other wolfers and trappers, headed for Fort Benton in Montana to sell their pelts. They stopped along the way at a Métis encampment, where he met another fur trader named Louis Ell. Ell insisted Brown owed him money from a long-standing debt, which Brown heatedly denied. The argument grew in intensity, until Brown pulled out his skinning knife and stabbed Ell in the abdomen. Ell, mortally wounded, stumbled his way toward a nearby Métis man who had witnessed the entire incident. When Brown approached Ell, probably to finish the job, the Métis man knocked him down disarmed him, whereupon Brown hopped on his horse and headed north towards the Canadian border.

Ell soon died, and the Métis man reported the killing to the sheriff, John Rowe. Sheriff Rowe gave pursuit and captured Brown about 60 miles north of Fort Benton, then brought him back and locked him up. Brown spent several months locked up before the circuit judge arrived and his trial could begin. In the meantime, not only was Sheriff Rowe replaced by another man, John Healy, but the Métis man who had witnessed the killing had moved on and couldn’t be located. At the trial, Brown claimed he had killed Ell in self-defense, and with no witness to contradict him, he was acquitted.

Kootenay Lakes

As soon as the trial was over, the Brown family packed up and headed back to Canada, never to return to the U.S. again. In his travels, he had visited the Kootenay Lakes area several times and always liked it, so they decided to settle there. He built a cabin and spent his days hunting and fishing, both for food and to trade for flour, sugar, coffee and other staples.

In late 1883, Olivia, with the help of a local midwife, gave birth to a son, Leo. It was a difficult labor from which she became ill and never recovered. Brown didn’t realize how ill she was and, out of necessity, continued his hunting and fishing trips while Olivia got continually worse. She died in early 1884 while Brown was away. On his return, heartbroken and full of self-reproach, he buried her on the western shore of Lower Kootenay Lake.

He was unable to care for his three children, but it’s not clear what happened to them. Supposedly, on the advice of a Catholic missionary, he sent his son to a missionary school in St. Albert, Alberta, but I can’t imagine that they’d accept an infant. In addition, I could find no mention at all of what happened to the daughters… were they sent to the missionary school? Adopted by local First Nation families? They apparently survived, however. In my internet searches, I did come across more than one person who, based on their  DNA, claim to be direct descendants of Brown.

Later Years

Brown continued to hunt and fish from his cabin in the  Kootenay Lakes area. A few years later, he married a Cree woman named Isabella (her Cree name was Chepaykwakasoon, or Blue Lightning Flash), with whom he lived out his years. According to Hammerson Peters in his excellent biography of Brown, “In later years, he was instrumental in turning the Kootenay Lakes area into the Kootenay Forest Reserve, in which he worked as a fishery officer. Later still, due largely to Brown’s efforts, the area was converted into the famous Waterton Lakes National Park, in which he worked as a park ranger for the rest of his days.” On July 18, 1916, Brown passed away in his sleep.

Denouement

So, was Kootenai Brown a scoundrel or a visionary? On the one hand, by today’s standards, he was most assuredly a dead-beat dad. I can maybe understand why he found others to care for his children when Olivia died, but why didn’t he get them back when he remarried? Perhaps that was not unusual in the late 1800s, any more than poisoning thousands of wolves for their pelts was thought to be cruel or inhumane, but there’s no escaping the fact that only by sheer luck did he escape the hangman’s noose for murdering Louis Ell.

On the other hand, he was certainly a legendary frontiersman with no end of exciting adventures to recount, and was known as an accomplished raconteur, who, in his later years delighted in telling tales of the old west to newcomers. I’m sure his adventures grew with the retelling. Without a doubt, however, his real legacy was his contribution towards the creation of the Waterton Lakes National Park.