Bill Greenwood has seen a thing or two.
My former brother-in-law was a native fellow, and a stand-out chuckwagon outrider. June of 1973, he flew into Calgary and rented a green Satellite Sebring to get up to the (now defunct) Rimbey Stampede to line up his rides for the Calgary Stampede. It was a rainy weekend that year.
During the course of the wagon races, Ralph Vigen, IIRC, had an upset. One of his horses spooked and broke free of the guy handling him in the course of getting things sorted out. He bolted and managed to head right for the parking area, dragging harness and tack behind him. He found a lane in the lot, and found some speed. The lane came to a ‘T’. The horse didn’t skip a beat, and jumped. Cleared the hood of a green Satellite Sebring, but dragged his hooves and all the harness across. They found him munching on the grass in the cemetery.
So, my BIL returns the car at the rental place on Sunday afternoon, and the guy behind the counter ain’t buying the story that this Indian’s telling him about a runaway chuckwagon horse. Rimbey being pretty close to Hobbema and all. Luckily, he had the business card of the Rimbey RCMP detachment head, and the Mountie verified the story over the phone. 🙂
Bill Greenwood for Prime Minister (I mean that in a nice way).
Okay that’s funny
We have seen family photos of an uncle and aunt’s wedding. If we didn’t know otherwise, we would have said the participants were Métis if not outright First Nations. There’s a lot of Québec Cree in that side of the family. Even know one of the crowd who was mistaken for being First Nations while up working in the Territories. Kid had gone up right after finishing his year at uni and found himself helping build the campsite for the incoming crew. Another student, coming up some weeks later after attending field school, saw kid who was seriously tanned and immediately assumed kid was native – and also openly said how great it was to see a native kid doing so well. Some embarrassment as realized the kid wasn’t Treaty 7 or Métis, but the reality was that a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks and having a fair bit of native ancestry was rocking it, and that was to be celebrated.