The Shagganappi

When “Fire-Flint” Larocque said good-bye to his parents, up in the Red River Valley, and started forth for his first term in an Eastern college, he knew that the next few years would be a fight to the very teeth.  If he could have called himself “Indian” or “White” he would have known where he stood in the great world of Eastern advancement, but he was neither one nor the other—­but here he was born to be a thing apart, with no nationality in all the world to claim as a blood heritage.  All his young life he had been accustomed to hear his parents and himself referred to as “half-breeds,” until one day, when the Governor-General of all Canada paid a visit to the Indian school, and the principal, with an air of pride, presented “Fire-Flint” to His Excellency, with “This is our head pupil, the most diligent boy in the school.  He is Trapper Larocque’s son.”

“Oh?  What tribe does he belong to?” asked the Governor, as he clasped the boy’s hand genially.

“Oh, Fire-Flint belongs to no tribe; he is a half-breed,” explained the principal.

“What an odd term!” said the Governor, with a perplexed wrinkle across his brows; then, “I imagine you mean a half-blood, not breed.”  His voice was chilly and his eyes a little cold as he looked rather haughtily at the principal.  “I do not like the word ‘breed’ applied to human beings.  It is a term for cattle and not men,” he continued.  Then, addressing “Fire-Flint,” he asked, “Who are your parents, my boy?”

“My father is half French and half Cree; my mother is about three-quarters Cree; her grandfather was French,” replied the boy, while his whole loyal young heart reached out towards this great man, who was lifting him out of the depths of obscurity.  Then His Excellency’s hands rested with a peculiar half fatherly, half brotherly touch on the shoulders of the slim lad before him.

“Then you have blood in your veins that the whole world might envy,” he said slowly.  “The blood of old France and the blood of a great aboriginal race that is the offshoot of no other race in the world.  The Indian blood is a thing of itself, unmixed for thousands of years, a blood that is distinct and exclusive.  Few white people can claim such a lineage.  Boy, try and remember that as you come of Red Indian blood, dashed with that of the first great soldiers, settlers and pioneers in this vast Dominion, that you have one of the proudest places and heritages in the world; you are a Canadian in the greatest sense of that great word.  When you go out into the world will you remember that, Fire-Flint?” His Excellency’s voice ceased, but his thin, pale, aristocratic fingers still rested on the boy’s shoulders, his eyes still shone with that peculiar brotherly light.

“I shall remember, sir,” replied Fire-Flint, while his homeless young heart was fast creating for itself the foothold amongst the great nations of the earth.  The principal of the school stood awkwardly, hoping that all this attention would not spoil his head pupil; but he never knew that boy in all the five years he had instructed him, as His Excellency, Lord Mortimer, knew him in that five minutes’ chat.