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Updated: April 30, 2025
The trappers explained to my father who he was, the Great Teacher, the heart's Medicine Man, the "Blackcoat" we had heard of, who brought peace where there was war, and the magic of whose black book brought greater things than all the Happy Hunting Grounds of our ancestors.
Being known as the son of the Blackcoat for in this way was the missionary designated by the tribe I was always welcomed in the wigwams, and was given a seat in the circle around the fire. In one wigwam the following characteristic incident occurred which made a deep impression on my mind.
I like not His two new places for me when I am dead. Take the child, Blackcoat, and save her from hell." The first grief of my life was when we reached the mission. They took my buckskin dress off, saying I was now a little Christian girl and must dress like all the white people at the mission. Oh, how I hated that stiff new calico dress and those leather shoes.
She will grow to be a noble woman, and return perhaps to bring her people to the Christ." My mother's eyes snapped. "No," she said. It was the first word she ever spoke to the "Blackcoat." My father sat and smoked. At the end of a half-hour he said: "I am an old man, Blackcoat. I shall not leave the God of my fathers. I like not your strange God's ways all of them.
"I wrote to him some time back, but his reply was not encouraging. I thought his spirit was perhaps broken." "You know that he is here?" "I concluded so, but we have not seen him; though to be sure, we have seen so many, and done so much since our arrival yesterday, it is not wonderful. By the bye, who is this blackcoat you have here, this St Lys?
It is for the man who found it first. No hell for Indians, just Happy Hunting Grounds. Blackcoat can't scare me." And then, after weeks had passed, one day as he stood at the tepee door he laid his white, old hand on my head and said to my father: "Give me this little girl, chief. Let me take her to the mission school; let me keep her, and teach her of the great God and His eternal heaven.
He told us many things that day, for he could speak the Cree tongue, and my father listened, and listened, and when at last they left us, my father said for him to come and sit within the tepee again. He came, all the time he came, and my father welcomed him, but my mother always sat in silence at work with the quills; my mother never liked the Great "Blackcoat." His stories fascinated me.
I used to listen intently to the tale of the strange new place he called "heaven," of the gold crown, of the white dress, of the great music; and then he would tell of that other strange place hell. My father and I hated it; we feared it, we dreamt of it, we trembled at it. Oh, if the "Blackcoat" would only cease to talk of it!
I never understood it, I cannot understand it now, why the use of my dear Cree tongue could be a matter for correction or an action deserving punishment. She was strict, the matron of the school, but only justly so, for she had a heart and a face like her brother's, the "Blackcoat." I had long since ceased to call him that. The trappers at the post called him "St.
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