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Taken from the Globe and Mail, Saturday February 14, 1998.

It’s cold in them thar hills. . .
by Candace Savage

… Hugh A. Dempsey’s biography of rodeo star Tom Three Persons takes the lid off these painful and seldom-acknowledged tensions. Three Persons was born in 1888, just as the cattle industry was securing its hold over the buffalo prairies of southern Alberta. The son of a Mountie-recruit-turned-whisky-trader and a native woman, he was raised on the Blood Reserve near Cardston and then briefly interred in a Catholic “industrial” school. It was shortly after his release from school that he met his spirit helper – a white-skinned cowboy clothed in black – who identified himself in Blackfoot as Siksinum, the Black One, and in English as Billy. With Billy (or was it the devil?) as his guide, Three Persons set out to become the wealthiest person on his reserve.

Fame, if not fortune, followed quickly thereafter. At the first Calgary Stampede, in 1912 (perhaps with Billy’s help), Three Persons defeated a field of U.S. talent to become the bronc-riding champion of the world. The only Canadian to win a major title at the much-ballyhooed event, he was pushed into the national spotlight; yet this flash of celebrity was his first and last. Barred by racism from rodeos in the United States and unable to evade the paternalistic control of the Department of Indian Affairs at home, he was prevented from pursuing a professional career. Restricted to local contests, he continued to win respect as a rider and roper, and served as trainer and mentor to an upcoming generation of Blood rodeo performers.

If Three Persons was frustrated in his progress as an athlete, he did not allow himself to be held back in business. With a singleness of purpose that would have done a cattle baron proud, he built up his holdings and herds, despite the interference of Indian Affairs. He figured out just how far he could push the system, turning over some of his earnings to the Indian agent (as required by law) and hanging on to the rest to spend as he chose. Unfortunately, for all his success as a cattleman, he did not always choose well, and much of his income was spent on liquor. In the words of a friend, Three Persons was “an awful drinker,” persistently in violation of the Indian Act and often of his own best interests.

Three Persons was also a bully, probably a thief and certainly an arsonist. (When one neighbour offended him, he ordered his barn to be torched.) Although Dempsey is unsparing in his revelation of these excesses, he seems at a loss to account for the darkness and doubleness of Three Person’s character. He ends up asking us to excuse the inexcusable, on the grounds that his subject was a rodeo star and a wealthy Indian who, against the odds, “carved a deserved place for himself in Canadian history.”

This is hardly satisfying. Instead, it seems to me that the trouble with Tom Three Persons is the very trouble that the mythic cowboy was designed to cover up. His life is an expose of the racism, violence and greed that underlay the appropriation of the West….

read a passage from Tom Three Persons: Legend of an Indian Cowboy
read a passage from Urban Reserves: Forging New Relationships in Saskatchewan
return to Purich Publishing
return to Spotlights