Illustration by Courtney Wotherspoon
Brisebois Drive curves through a dull and bucolic section of Calgary. The dwellings on either side maintain a ’60s bungalow squat, and the trees, while shady and pleasant, demarcate nothing but more houses surrounded by aprons of grass, as characterless as any lazy suburban byway. Without historical resonance, the street appears to be named whimsically, or after someone of no importance.
The booming and busting city of Calgary, magnet for newcomers and buffalo hunters (migrants who move to the city determined to make as much money as possible before decamping to more civilized places), has no time for historical markers. The pace of change in this town is too swift, the turnover too high. If buildings are subject to razing and revision, the same is true of historical characters. And so Brisebois is just a name, a short street connecting one boulevard with another trail (trails are freeways in Calgary), and beyond that of no relevance.
So who was Éphrem Brisebois? His given name is spelled variously, Éphrem or Éphraim; even historians cannot agree, although the Dictionary of Canadian Biography portentously and correctly spells it Éphrem-A. As a personage he is peripheral: the first French-Canadian officer in the North West Mounted Police. So what if he made the trek west? So what if he was the Mountie in charge when a rudimentary fort was established at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers, a site that would become this gleaming, postmodern Calgary? He didn’t start a war or finish an execution. He was a competent civil servant, although there was considerable dissatisfaction with his leadership, and the men under his command, F Troop, almost mutinied. He was replaced after a year, returned east and ultimately became a relatively invisible administrator, a registrar of land titles in Manitoba.
But that summary tells us nothing, nothing at all.
Embedded in Brisebois’s story is the temptation to use history — fragments of reality complete with documentation, lies, disputes, rumour — to resuscitate our failing relationship to a moribund aesthetic. We plunder it for examples of what we now do wrong or right. We would prefer the past to reassure us, and so enter into a false exchange with its fragments. Hardest of all for us to imagine is history as a dynamic space that hindsight cannot stop shape-shifting. So we read backwards, hunting for those turning points that impinge on who we have become. Here in twenty-first-century Calgary, a place much of Canada dismisses as raw and bare knuckled, I lazily exhume Brisebois, desultory in my interest but always encouraged by his absence.
The winter of 1875–76 was brutal, the cold unrelenting as only cold on the prairie can be. Ice crackled in the frost-coated fescue and even the swift-flowing Bow froze solid. The fifty men who comprised F Troop worked long and dogged days during the building of Fort Calgary, and as the winter advanced, it settled in their bones and their dispositions, making tempers as raw as the air. While the fort was under construction, they huddled in trenches, and once it was completed in December, spruce and pine logs upright in the ground, pole roof covered with earth, logs chinked with clay, floors hard-pounded earth, its rudimentary comforts proved comfortless.
The early tradition of the Mounties was that commanding officers worked as hard as their men, but Inspector Éphrem Brisebois seems to have thought of himself as above such democratic patterns. First of all, the men did not have enough buffalo robes to keep themselves warm, and because they had not been paid they were not able to purchase more from the Metis traders camped nearby. Brisebois, however, had a few good robes, and appropriated a few extra from his shivering men. Although fireplaces had been constructed in the crude quarters, they were drafty and provided less heat than smoke. Only one iron stove was available to heat the rooms, and Brisebois commandeered it for his individual use. Last, but possibly most galling, he had also managed to persuade a comely Metis woman to share the buffalo robes and the heat of the stove in his private quarters.
Éphrem Brisebois had it all: the stove, the buffalo robes, and a woman. These three essentials — heat, warmth, and intimacy — conjoin the most crucial of all historical tensions, those moments that pivot not just survival but a version of legacy. But Brisebois had pushed his luck too far.
In the heart of this bitter winter, isolated and nervous, far from home and without any of the pleasures they had imagined serving as mounted police would bring — no skirmishes with Indians, and not even much illicit American liquor — the men of F Troop were enraged to the point of mutiny. They compiled a long list of grievances, which they sent down to headquarters at Fort Macleod. To underscore their dissatisfaction, they refused to work — the first labour unrest in Calgary, which was not yet even Calgary, since Brisebois had seen fit to christen the fort Brisebois, after himself.
