The Buffalo Head

By R. M. Patterson

The wildest, loveliest and least-travelled region of Alberta was R.M. Patterson’s home territory in the 1930s and ’40s. The Buffalo Head ranch was located in the foothills of the majestic Canadian Rockies. With the mountains as a backdrop, this dude ranch hosted visitors from around the world. Patterson bought it from its founder, a wild Italian named George Pocaterra, and explored the steep valleys and high mountain passes. Patterson’s tales of the ranch in The Buffalo Head culminate with a fantastic story of meeting a growling grizzly while crossing the Continental Divide in an October snowstorm.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Touchwood Editions
• Release date: Feb 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781926971353

R. M. Patterson

R.M. Patterson (1898-1984) moved to Canada when he realized that working in a London bank would never bring him happiness. He spent the remaining years of his life pursuing adventure in the Canadian West and was a delightfully evocative writer and an intrepid explorer. Authoring a total of five books about his excursions into the Canadian wilderness and his life on a southern Alberta ranch, Raymond Murray Patterson earned himself legions of fans and made Canada's wilderness famous. TouchWood Editions is proud to be keeping his works in print.

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The Buffalo Head

R. M. PATTERSON

Touchwood Logo

To my friend

George W. Pocaterra

who taught me how to throw

the diamond hitch

~

How strange and wild a heart-stirring was inspired by that vision of far-off peaks, how much of beauty and adventure was borne to me on the blue wings of distance.

The Spirit of the Hill by F. S. Smythe, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1935

Contents

Foreword by Janet Blanchet

Introduction

Part One: Destination Unknown

Chapter 1: Growing Pains

The Upland Road

The Higher Education

Inside, Looking Out

Schweidnitz

Chapter 2: Outward Bound

Anzeindaz

Desert of Stone

Peace River

Loup Garou

Venture to the North

Part Two: The Rocky Mountains

Chapter 3: The Old Days

To the Heart of the Mountains

Nyahé-ya-’nibi

Goat in the Sky

The Pass in the Clouds (1)

Tale of a Game Warden

Chapter 4 Bright Morning

Construction Period

Driving Cattle

The Valley of the South Fork

Bull Creek

Chapter 5: High Noon

Dude Wrangling

The Elk Trail

The Hill of the Flowers

The Roof of America

Chapter 6: The Fiery Cloud

Fire over the Foothills

The Rock Paintings

Chaos

Grass

Counting the Losses

Chapter 7: Gone West

Wartime

Rex and Mollie

The Pass in the Clouds (2)

Travellers in the Snow

The Kootenay

Endnotes

Glossary

Index

Foreword

My father once told me that when he was writing The Buffalo Head, he had initially concentrated solely on his time at the ranch in the Alberta foothills. He had then sent off his manuscript to his New York publisher, and it had been returned to him. We need a bridge, he was told. We need to know where you came from in England and how it was that you came to Canada and finally to a ranch southwest of Calgary. This explains the opening chapters of The Buffalo Head. Certainly one friend of mine thought them to be incongruous and wondered why they had been included; however, they do explain the circumstances that led RMP to his life as a rancher, dude wrangler and guide.

RMP himself explains that his need for freedom and for space was conditioned by confinement, by the nine months he spent in a German prison camp at the end of the 1914–1918 war in Europe, and by his three years as a probationer at the Bank of England in the City of London. His escape was complete. After he arrived in Canada he was never again confined by office hours, schedules and routines. RMP was one of those who had seen an exit from routine and taken it, with some measure of success. He was lucky: he always managed to keep his head above water. He was full of surprises; my mother said she never knew what he would do next.

The Buffalo Head Ranch is in a most beautiful part of the foothills country of Alberta. The Highwood River forms one boundary, and the eastern slopes of the Rockies are no more than 10 miles (16 kilometres) away. This is not prairie country; there are rolling hills with limber pines growing along their rocky summits, groves of aspen poplars to provide shelter for cattle, and small clear streams running through coulees treed with cottonwoods and spruce. The Highwood is a beautiful, clear river with rapids and deep emerald green pools. The water is frigid, but on a hot summer day that fact is no deterrent to swimmers. RMP describes his adventurous expeditions into the mountains, but he does not cover some of the more mundane events of ranch life. As a child and a young teenager, I spent many happy afternoons at a pool in the Highwood that was close to the ranch buildings. We used to take a basket with a thermos of tea and some sandwiches and cookies with us, and walk across the river flats to our favourite place on the Highwood. First we would swim, and then we would bask on a platform of smooth rock that jutted into the river. The sun was hot, there was always a little downstream breeze, and there were no mosquitoes. When the shadows from the high banks fell across the river we would return to the ranch house for supper; it was a wonderful way to spend an afternoon.

By the time I was 13 or 14, riding for the mail was one of the tasks that I would undertake. I usually had a girlfriend staying with me during the summer holidays from school, and this weekly expedition was one of our great pleasures. The two of us would saddle our horses after breakfast and set off. We crossed the Highwood at the shale ford that was quite close to the Buffalo Head and then headed for our first stop, the Schintzes’ ranch, where we would pick up any mail that was to be posted. We continued to the Runciman ranch, where we paused for the same reason. We then went on to the Chinook Ranch, owned by the Hansons, where we stayed for lunch. We timed our arrival carefully, as we did not want to be late. Quite often we did not have to continue to the nearby mailboxes, as someone would have already picked up the mail and brought it to the Hansons’ place. We then sorted mail and started for home, making the same calls on our return journey to deliver letters. The ride was 10 miles in each direction; we made the journey last all day. Now, in these days of electronic communication, it is difficult to imagine receiving mail just once a week. Back then, it was simply the way it was in this remote area.

RMP describes his journeys with Marigold into the mountains, expeditions that she remembered happily all her life. However, Marigold was not only a cheerful companion on camping trips: she had an important role on the Buffalo Head. She was practical, capable, she had a sense of humour, and she was a good organizer. She planned the large vegetable garden and looked after the produce. She organized the household, and when there was no cook working, she took over the kitchen. Throughout all the ups and downs of ranch life she retained a balance, and she also retained the attitudes of an English lady who is involved in a life of adventure, but who must retain an air of civility at all times.

The years on the Buffalo Head Ranch were among the happiest years for my parents. Despite the responsibilities of building up, running and maintaining a functional cattle and dude ranch through difficult times, they were young enough and able enough to enjoy the country. And they had the energy, the initiative and the resources to do so. Their freedom was their great success.

Janet (Patterson) Blanchet

North Vancouver, British Columbia

January 2004

Introduction

Readers of an earlier book of mine have written to ask how it happened that I, with an Oxford degree and a probationer’s training in the Bank of England, came to trap and hunt in the Northwest Territories of Canada and, later, to ranch cattle in Alberta. In this book I have tried to give the answer—which is, as I see it, that this progress was ordained for me by the various places in which it has been my fortune to live, work, play and be imprisoned. Putting it briefly, one place led to another and I just trotted along.

Some people maintain that heredity is almost completely responsible for the making of a man. I disagree with that: I am certain that environment has far more to do with it than is generally conceded. In my own case, and on the side of heredity, I have to admit that I was born with the disease of itching foot—and I came by that honestly enough. But—and now I am on the side of environment—the disease was aggravated for me by a nine months’ spell in a German prison lager, followed soon by three years’ hard in the Bank of England. Claustrophobia set in; and a break for the wide open spaces followed, as day follows night … And so I have told my story by means of the places that have been the landmarks along my trail, and by recounting some of the events that took place on the way. Landmarks I have called them: they were more than that—they were signposts placed at turning points in the trail; and, one after another, they changed the course of my life until I, who might have been an official in the Bank of England, or a professor of history, or something in the Diplomatic Service, became a cattle rancher and mountain guide.

A queerly assorted lot these places are: the Southdown country of Kipling’s Sussex, the Black Forest, a fortress town in Silesia, Oxford, a cluster of stone huts in the Swiss Alps, the Bank of England. And then Canada—a Peace River homestead, Deadmen’s Valley in the Northwest Territories … And the Buffalo Head Ranch in the Rockies of Alberta, a place that was home to me for more years than any home I have ever known. But this is not a book about ranching: it is a book of the hills—of all those hills, from Poland to the Rockies, that have been the background to my life. The one constant feature in a constantly changing scene.

In an age of wars, when almost every man of my generation has either taken part in a battle, or at least heard the crash of high explosive from close at hand, I have wondered whether I was justified in telling anything of my war days. But had these wartime events never taken place my story would have been a different one. If I had never gone back to get a forgotten revolver from a half-ruined dugout, then I should never have known the long, empty days of the prison lager. And without that memory as a spur to freedom I might never have seen the white sheep of the Nahanni River, or galloped with my wife full tilt after a fleeing grizzly in the Rockies. A whole wide world might have passed me by while I dutifully caught the 8:15 a.m. to the City, returning again to my suburban lair in the evenings by the 5:10 after drab, musty, meticulous days. And so I have included some of those war experiences, grave and gay. They left their mark, and so they have their place.

You will not find a chapter in this book that has not at least a hill in it. And when the Buffalo Head was my home the mountains themselves lay at my very door. The grazing lands of the ranch ran into the outer range of the Rockies, and west of the place there was no house or settlement until you came to the little village of Windermere in the East Kootenay. All the Rockies lay in between, crisscrossed with a spider’s web of old Indian trails—an ideal safety valve for one who came to the foothills of Alberta straight from the empty countries of the north. It is of my escapes from ranch routine into this wild country, so close that in a few hours one could vanish into its green fastnesses, that I particularly wish to tell here. Later, in another book—that is, if fortune smiles on this one—I plan to write of my return to the rivers of the North, and so to complete the story. But here the mountains are the theme.

In the end I rode away and left those mountains of the Buffalo Head behind me, for it is in my nature to be moving on. But even now, as I write, I see them once again—blue-shadowed, outlined in gold against the setting sun, flaunting their tattered banners of glowing cloud . . .

They were my friends. Those earlier hills were but my pathway to them.

R. M. Patterson

Sidney, British Columbia

December 1960

Part One

Destination Unknown

1

Growing Pains

The Upland Road

The little outfit clattered up a steep, stony rise with Flat Creek down below, on the left. From the shadow of the hill, I saw the man ahead of me top the crest and ride straight on into the evening sun; for a moment he seemed to be outlined in fire: man and horse, big hat, fringed buckskin jacket and woolly chaps. Two packhorses swayed over the skyline close behind him, and then the full glare of the low sun hit me straight between the eyes. I turned in my saddle to see the last packhorse come into view, swiftly followed by the third man of the party whose cheerful countenance puckered into a screwed-up scowl as the light caught it—and the outfit was complete.

The man in the lead was George Pocaterra, owner and founder of the Buffalo Head Ranch over which we were riding. Before his time there was nothing there—only a Stoney Indian camping place sheltered by woods and hills, with good grazing for horses and a wonderful spring. It was a much used camping place; tepee poles were standing there, as they had always stood, waiting for the Stoneys to come again, ready to have the tepees rolled around them; Pocaterra and his cousin, Arturo Talin, picked them up and piled them out of the way—and so, with their going and with the whirr of the first mower, the long day of the Indian was over. For better or for worse the white man had come.

That was in 1905, and as time went on Pocaterra added grazing leases and more land, and so brought the Buffalo Head into being. There, for almost thirty years, he raised horses and cattle and hunted, trapped and prospected in the mountains that lay to the westward.

The ranch got its name from the horse brand—the small outline of a buffalo skull branded on the left thigh. It had started life as a bluebell in silhouette, but a casual remark from the local Justice of the Peace, to the effect that he couldn’t see any bluebell in it: it looked far more like an old buffalo skull, set Pocaterra off on a new track; he swung on to his horse and hit for home, to turn petals into buffalo horns and generally reorganize the design of his brand. He had plenty of models to work from. There were all kinds of old buffalo skulls whitening on the grass and one frequently dug them up in springs and peaty places. The brand, when Pocaterra had got it to his liking, was a good one—none better. The cattle brand that was allotted to the Buffalo Head was also good—X N on the right ribs: easy to read and not to be mistaken for any other brand in that district.

George Pocaterra at the Kananaskis Lakes

The trip on which we were now setting out was by no means the first that Pocaterra and I had made together into the mountains. So by this time we had come to know each other well—which was, in effect, to know that at any moment anything might happen. Each one of us was (and possibly still is) utterly unpredictable. We each had enormous patience when it came to some long-enduring physical feat—and yet every shred of that patience could fly to the winds over some absurd trifle. Each one could rise to the crest of the wave and ride there, triumphant in the sunlight, only to pass with equal swiftness into the depths and the shadows. We usually managed to convince ourselves that we were completely practical. We were wrong: it was often the unacknowledged quest for romance that drove us on. The problems of history fascinated us; a map (especially if it had blank spaces on it) was an enthralling book to each one. Pocaterra spoke five languages and was liable to burst into song (or into anything else) in any one of them. I could be counted on to underline the absurd side of any situation, however grave, or to bring, often at the wrong moment, my gift of mimicry into play, with results that were sometimes devastating.

With us there rode a man of an entirely different stamp—the perfect foil. From behind I could hear, every now and then, Adolf’s voice urging on the last packhorse, which seemed disinclined to leave home. It was some four years now since he had left his family farm in East Prussia and come to Canada. The hills had appealed to this man from the great plain of northern Europe, and for the last two years he had worked for Pocaterra, learning English from him and much of hunting and mountain travel. It was the desire to see new lands that had jarred Adolf loose from Aulowönen—that and the disorder of the Germany of that time. No man’s life was safe, he told me, in those troublous years: stacks were fired, cattle and horses were stolen; it was all a man could do to guard his own.

Another reason for Adolf’s leaving Germany was that he had had no wish to serve in the armed forces that were, even then, being rebuilt. He had seen enough of armies: in 1914, as a boy, he had hidden with his brother and watched the Cossacks—big men on little horses he told us—riding hell for leather after terrified, fleeing piglings, spearing them to roast over their fires. Boys, too? the young Baumgarts had wondered—but it was not so bad as all that. Full of roast suckling pig and bonhomie the Cossacks had not troubled themselves about small boys but had ridden up to the lord’s castle to see what they could find there. It seems that the lord kept a well-filled cellar, for a terrific binge started up—and then, in the fullness of time, the Cossacks reappeared, driving before them the lord’s pedigree dairy herd which they generously distributed amongst the farmers and villagers.

All this was told at the Buffalo Head at a bachelor Christmas dinner party in 1936; and at this point an old American cow-puncher, Art Baldwin, broke in. Well, what the hell was wrong with that, Adolf? he said. Why kick about that?

"We did not kick. It was wonderful. Yet there was something to spoil it: the Cossacks rode away to the west and left us with the lord’s cows all right, but in a week or two they were back with the Germans after them, chasing them—and then we had to take all those good cows back up to the lord again! What a pity!"

He sounded so rueful about it, just as if it had all happened yesterday; and the table burst into an absolute roar of laughter.

And now here he was, riding behind me—active, capable and a good shot. We rode on into the shadow of the mountain. The autumn glory of Flat Creek faded into a blue, cold twilight. As darkness fell we made camp in the valley of the South Fork, at the foot of Mount Head, and there, later, we slept by the dying fire and the ice-rimmed stream—three men whom the chances of life had brought together in the Rockies from Lombardy, East Prussia and the north of England.

•  •  •

Precisely what twists and turns of fortune had led Pocaterra and Adolf from their homelands to this camp below Mount Head must remain, for each one of them, his own affair. As for me, there is no secret about it at all—it was purely and simply the result of a long drawn-out love affair. Child, boy, and man, I had always adored the distant hills.

It was a natural thing, for my whole life has been passed within sight of hills. My first memory of them is of a sunny morning in a garden in Ireland. We were on a lawn and my father was holding me up so that I could see over a high hedge and across the waters of Killiney Bay to a couple of blue silhouettes on the southwestern horizon. The Big Sugarloaf—and the Little Sugarloaf, he said, slowly and clearly in a rich Scots accent—and I repeated the words after him as well as I could. Those were the Wicklow Hills that we were looking at, around 2,000 feet and some eight or ten miles from home.

Another isolated memory of that period is of my first excursion into politics. The Boer War had broken out and Ireland was—as usual—split in twain. My father, a Scot from the valley of the Tweed, was editor of a strongly pro-English Dublin newspaper. The pro-Boer faction was violently active and my father was a marked man for he never let slip any opportunity of attacking his opponents—even to the point of priming and rehearsing me in his puckish fashion, so that I, charging across the lawn one summer afternoon, burst through the French windows into a sedate tea party at which my mother was entertaining a number of Irish friends—anti-Imperialist and pro-Boer, most of them—shouting Damn Oom Paul! Damn Oom Paul!(1) at the top of my voice. That performance won me no applause; and the speed at which I was seized, smacked and propelled through the drawing-room door into the clutches of a hastily summoned nanny was an eye-opener, even to one possessed of a young and agile mother.

Not long after that, the two of us were sitting together on a garden seat flanked at either end by big cypresses. My father was wearing some funny-looking clothes: khaki, he called them—a uniform, whatever that meant. He was going away to a place called South Africa, and he was getting a thorn out of my thumb and telling me to be sure and behave myself while he was gone. And then that picture fades like the rest of them and twenty-three years went by before I set eyes on my father again …

The next few years were spent at my grandfather’s in the north of England. I soon discovered that, from the upper windows of this tall, red-brick house, the blue outline of hills could be seen in the southwest, through the gaps in a row of pine trees. What hills were they? I wanted to know—and also, what lay behind them. The man who would have told me was in Africa. Here, in this large and cheerful house, people were busy and the days seemed always full: there were the family steel foundries, and tennis and garden parties with the most delectable strawberries and cream; and there were weddings, and comings and goings of men from all over the world—engineers, most of them, and not a few with strange-sounding foreign names. And somebody, sparing a moment in the midst of all this, said: Those hills? Oh, I don’t know. You can call them the Distant Hills—that’s a good name; and somebody else, paying no attention, said: Behind them? The sea, of course. Ships and the sea. So I called them the Distant Hills for a time, till I noticed a smile going around. And I thought of the sea and built dream harbours beyond the hills and filled them with my ships, until, at an early age, I learnt the meaning of a map. Then I found that the sea lay in the opposite direction, to the eastward; and from that day I shut up, on that subject, like the proverbial clam, deciding that, where hills and maps were concerned, most grown-ups were not worth listening to—an opinion that time has done little to alter.

During these small-boy years a great-uncle and a great-aunt from Ottawa were often visitors at my grandfather’s house. I think that even then they intended that I should make my home in Canada for they always brought me presents that would turn my thoughts in that direction—maple sugar, a real Indian war bonnet, small sugary candies with a tart red berry hidden at their centres—and books: Mooswa, Murder Point, Stewart Edward White’s Magic Forest, and A Child’s History of Canada which I absorbed up to the point at which it became parliamentary and therefore dull. Champlain and Frontenac, the Huron and the Iroquois were my constant companions. I read all the long story of raid and counter-raid, of armed men—Indians and coureurs de bois—gliding on snowshoes through the frozen stillness of the forest. It all sounded wonderful, and in my mind’s eye I saw them, a silent, hooded procession of ghosts, purposeful and relentless, gliding in some mysterious way down the frozen Hudson River towards unsuspecting Albany.

There came to the north of England a hard winter, and all through that January the tennis lawn lay under deep and thickly crusted snow. A small Canadian cousin was staying at the house. She didn’t seem to know much about snowshoes but I noticed that she occasionally referred to them as raquettes, and that gave me an idea. Soon we were taking a couple of tennis racquets, the property of aunts or uncles, out of their presses; soon, with the racquets attached by a cat’s cradle of string to my feet, I floundered forth on to the tennis lawn. Encouraged by the cheers and jeers of my cousin, I started to break trail up the Richelieu River towards Lake Champlain. The thick crust made the going hard but, even so, there was something obviously wrong with the outfit—not even an Iroquois could have travelled far on things like these. Furthermore, these snowshoes were not standing up to the job, and soon I had put my foot through one and was wearing it round my knee. Baffled, we put the racquets carefully back in their presses and stowed them away. We told nobody and soon we had forgotten about the whole affair.

That particular storm broke over my head the following summer. With amazing discernment my elders pounced straight on to me; no other suspect was even considered, and I was assumed to be guilty unless I could prove my innocence—all of which is in direct contravention of British law and justice. I was very disgusted with the way things turned out—so much so that I gave Canada up for quite a time in favour of a coral island.

The years went by. In my playroom on the third story of this large house I secretly built a rope ladder. By means of a teetering chair, balanced on a chair that was set on a table, I could open a trap door that gave on to the roof and so fix my ladder to a ring-bolt set in the leaded trough of a valley. Once up there I could fling a rope round the base of a chimney and, by that means, scuffle up the steep slates to the sharp peak of a gable. It was a terrifying position, but it was also a delightful one because, from here, with the aid of field glasses, I could plainly see, over the pine trees, the distant line of the hills. Patches of dark woodland could be seen on the lower slopes, and up one spur climbed the thin white ribbon of a dusty road, making, before it vanished over the skyline, a dog-leg turn to the right. That road fascinated me. I knew by now exactly what sort of road it would be, for I had been up into that moorland country and seen the vale spread out below me like a map—crop and pasture; stream and woodland; shining, whitewashed farmhouses solidly built of stone. My road would be climbing upward between grey, dry stone walls with, here and there, a wind-twisted scrub oak or thorn. The summer scents of wild roses and sun-warmed dust would be on it, and through the heat of the day sheep would be lying in the shadow of the walls. And then there would come a gate and the walls would swing away on either side and the road would become a stony, rutted track running through a wild moorland of heather and bog; of brown, purling streamlets and grey, lichened stone. Where was it? Where did it go?

A gable at the top of Patterson’s grandfather’s home provided a dangerous perch for a view of the Distant Hills.

The Upland Road was what I privately called that crooked line of white, perhaps twenty miles away but yet so sharp and clear. I hunted for it on my bicycle. I knew just about where it would be but I had not been taught, then, how to take a bearing on an object and so to work out its position and visibility on a map. Nor, in any case, did I have the pocket money for large-scale maps. I spent much time and energy in that quest, but in all that hill country I never found that road of mine. Which is, perhaps, as it should be, for it still has for me, today, all the charm of the unknown, and it still leads, as it always did, to who knows what hidden pleasance in what lost valley of the hills.

The time came when I went away to school—westward across England, over the wide, purple moorland, through the great grass fells of the country’s backbone, down a brown, brawling river to the flats of Lancashire and the school by the Irish Sea. There, for six years, along with three or four hundred others, I was taught and drilled and toughened. Weather ceased to have any meaning for me: no matter what it was—bellowing west wind with rain driving in from the sea, or the thin, grey east wind from the frozen Pennine Hills with a powdering of snow in its icy breath—we were out in it. Games in that sort of weather and five- and six-mile runs across country, or down the hard-packed sands at low tide, kept us fit and hardy in the wintertime. The result was that one’s private internal heating arrangements became most incredibly efficient. This came in handy in later years. Sometime during my first winter in Canada I went out with a friend, a Canadian born, on his trapline.