In the summer of 1879 Egerton and Robert Steinhauer arrived in Cobourg, a town of nearly 5,000 people, immediately to the east of Toronto. The two brothers, Egerton, twenty-one years old, and Robert, nineteen, came from White Fish Lake, a Cree farming community 200 kilometres northeast of Fort Edmonton. These two sons of Rev. Henry B. Steinhauer, the first Native Christian minister in what would later become Alberta, travelled over 3,000 kilometres to attend Cobourg Collegiate Institute, in preparation for Victoria University.
Their father, one of the Methodists’ early Ojibwa converts, had attended Upper Canada Academy in the late 1830s and had come to the North-West in 1840. He served as a teacher, interpreter, and missionary at Rainy River, in what is now northwestern Ontario, and then at Norway House and Oxford House, in present-day northern Manitoba.
Henry met his Cree wife, Jessie Joyful Mamanuwartum, at Norway House, just north of Lake Winnipeg, where he served as a teacher and interpreter. Shortly after his ordination as a Methodist minister in 1855 the Steinhauers moved to Lac La Biche in present-day Alberta to establish a new Methodist mission among the Woods and Plains Cree. In 1857 he began the White Fish Lake mission which he located in the wooded parklands north of the Saskatchewan River, just beyond the reach of Blackfoot raiders, but close to the northern border of the prairie, and the still abundant buffalo herds. The soil was suitable for farming, and the lake contained an abundance of fish. As soon as their numbers and needs increased, the White Fish Lake people established a satellite community at neighbouring Good Fish Lake, just ten or so kilometers away.
At White Fish Lake the Steinhauers raised a large family of seven girls and five boys. At home they encouraged a strong sense of spirituality, a belief in a higher power. Every morning and evening they held family devotions. Elizabeth Barrett wrote in the Missionary Notices of the Methodist Church in April 1876: “Mr Steinhauer’s is, indeed, and amiable and God-fearing family. I never saw more dutiful and respectful sons and daughters.”
The Ojibwa minister and his Cree wife regarded education as vital, as the key to self-reliance. By learning to read, Natives could master the doctrines of the Methodist church, as well as acquire the skills to survive in a future Canadian-dominated society. With great difficulty Henry Steinhauer obtained teachers on a short-term basis for the White Fish school. Years later Egerton recalled his early school days: “Sometimes I had the pleasure of going on a buffalo hunt with my parents, who accompanied the band on their annual hunt, the school teacher going as well, and holding school in the open air when circumstances permitted.”
One of the most gifted and well-trained teachers was Elizabeth Barrett, an Ontario woman who taught at White Fish for two years in the mid-1870s. Upon arriving at White Fish Lake she promised the Steinhauers that she would “train these two boys [Egerton and Robert] so that they can enter any high school or college in Canada.” Under her guidance Egerton advanced fast enough to take over as the White Fish teacher after Miss Barrett’s departure in 1877. He taught there until he and Robert left for Ontario in the spring of 1879. Although the school lacked sufficient equipment and books, Egerton taught reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, geography, and spelling.
From 1879 to 1883 the brothers prepared for their university entrance at the Collegiate Institute. The Victoria College campus had just expanded the year before. In May 1878, Faraday Hall, named after the famous English scientist and devoted to science, became the college’s second building. Faraday Hall contained a museum which included a well-preserved Egyptian sarcophagus, a female mummy, and a revered object from Alberta, a 145 kilogram iron stone from Iron Creek, a tributary of the Battle River, about 150 kilometres southeast of For t Edmonton. The Cree and the Blackfoot venerated the meteorite as a sacred object until Methodist missionary George McDougall removed it without consulting the non-Christian people. Eventually it was shipped to church officials in Toronto who later gave it to Victoria University in Cobourg.
Both Egerton and Robert matriculated in 1883. Two years earlier, their father had visited them while on a tour of Ontario to raise money for the Methodist missions in the North-West. A photo has survived which shows the proud father and his two sons.
To support their studies, the brothers worked in the summers to supplement whatever assistance their parents could provide, and both Egerton and Robert matriculated in 1883. But by then the Steinhauers no longer could afford to keep the two of them at school. The school at Good Fish Lake needed a teacher so reluctantly Egerton made “the sacrifice of his life”. He agreed to come home even though he had just gained entrance to Victoria. His responsibilities greatly increased a year later when his father died and during the troubles of 1885 he worked very hard with Pakan and James Youmans to keep the White Fish and Good Fish Lake Crees out of the struggle.
After the rebellion, Egerton independently continued his theological training which led to his ordination in 1889. He had a good sense of humour, for although he never graduated from Victoria, he always mentioned that he too had a B.A. – “Born Again”.
From the mid-1880s to his death in 1932, Egerton served in several Methodist mission stations. He labored at Morley with the Stoney (Nakoda) from 1885 to 1894; at Fisher River in Manitoba with the Woods Cree from 1894 to 1907; at Hobbema (Battle River) with the Plains Cree from 1907 to 1911; at Morley again from 1911 to 1919; amongst the Ojibwa (Chippewa) at Saugeen on Lake Huron in Ontario from 1919 to 1924; and at New Credit in Ontario with the Mississauga (Ojibwa) from 1924 to 1926. He was truly energetic. Fred Stevens, a school teacher at Fisher River in the mid 1890s, later recalled that in winter Egerton made trips by dog-train across Lake Winnipeg, even travelling as far as Norway House, 300 kilometres away at the northern end of the lake.
Egerton married Toronto-born Elizabeth Helliwell, a Methodist church worker and teacher at Morley Indian Day School, the year of his ordination, 1889. With Elizabeth’s help he performed a multitude of tasks. In a letter written in 1906 from Fisher River he mentioned his “ministering of the daily wants of the people.” “Reserve work too means visiting the sick, providing food, and dispensing medicine as they may need it.” Egerton and Elizabeth had one son, Wesley, who completed four years of his five-year degree at the University of Toronto shortly after his return from service in the Canadian Army Medical Corps in World War One.
After his wife’s death in 1928, Egerton lived briefly in Calgary, then joined his brother at Saddle Lake where he assisted with the mission until his own death in 1932. Robert’s diary entry explains Egerton’s death in this way: “This sudden demise must have been caused by his putting too strong an effort in trying to bring his hearers [to] see what Christian life is.”
The year that Egerton returned to White Fish Lake, 1883, Robert entered Victoria College. In sports the six-footer excelled as a football player and runner. He also was a gifted singer, with a deep, bass voice. Very popular amongst his fellow students they elected him “Senior Stick,” or class president, at the end of his third year in 1886. That August and September he accompanied the Rev. John McDougall and the Cree chiefs Pakan and Samson, and the Stoney chief Johas Goodstoney on a tour of Ontario towns and cities, as well as Montreal. A reporter in Peterborough, Ontario, summarized Robert’s remarks to the large audience in that city. “The Indians, he said, have a great respect for God, and do not take His name in vain, as he heard the white do.” Then, he added that, “he was glad he had learned the language of the white, that he might learn their good qualities, and by God’s help might help in bringing the Indians to a higher knowledge of God.”
At one of the Toronto meetings Robert sang the hymn, “Tell it Again," before Sir John A. Macdonald. Chief Pakan joined Robert in singing it in Cree. Although the prime minister did not realize it, he had before him, in Robert Steinhauer, one of his most articulate Native critics. That very spring the Cree undergraduate had written an article on "The Indian Question" for Acta Victoriana, the college magazine. In it he underlined the disappointments of western Indians. "Ever since the treaties were signed," he wrote, "there has been much discontent, and complaints made by him [the Indian]. He asks those who have taken the ownership of his country to give him his rights, at least the fulfilment of the promises made to him." They had wanted assistance, but, in the place of competent government intermediaries, they received Indian agents, selected, "because they happen to be friends and right-hand supporters of the Government in power; men whose knowledge of what they were intended to teach was so limited that they were rejected in some places." Ottawa had placed "low and unprincipled characters" in authority over them.
Robert Steinhauer worked to see his people regain their self-reliance and initiative. Within a decade of graduation he had secured his own personal independence when he "enfranchised" in 1896. By giving up his legal status as a ward of the Crown, he became a citizen with the same civil rights and liberties enjoyed by all of Her Majesty's subjects. Egerton also enfranchised, but not until 1926.
In Robert's case, enfranchisement brought several immediate advantages. No longer under the Indian Act he could vote, sign legal contracts, and travel away from the reserve without reporting his absences to the Indian Agent. And now that he had become a citizen he no longer had to tolerate the Agent's colonial attitudes. His great nephew, Ralph Steinhauer, later recalled that around 1930 the Saddle Lake Indian agent talked to the people through a wicket. "If the agent didn't like the discussion or if he thought it went on too long, he shut the wicket down in the face of the speaker."
For over half a century Robert lived with his wife and family at numerous Methodist missions across Alberta. Shortly after his return from Cobourg he married Charlotte Pruden, a woman of Cree and English heritage, whose father had worked for the Hudson's Bay Company at Lac La Biche. They had a family of six daughters and four boys. Robert served at Saddle Lake, forty kilometres or so south of White Fish Lake, from 1887 to 1890. He returned as the missionary to White Fish Lake from 1890 to 1893; then served at the Red Deer Industrial School in 1894; at Morley from 1895 to 1903; at White Fish Lake from 1903 to 1911; at Hobbema (Battle River) from 1911 to 1919; and at Saddle Lake, where he would try several times to retire - unsuccessfully, as his services were so badly needed - from 1919 to his death in 1941.
Alexander Sutherland, the superintendent of the Methodists' Canadian missions, declared in 1904, "that we have not produced many Indian teachers or preachers is true, but this is owing chiefly to the lack of educational facilities. Besides, it is better as a rule that Indians should be under the care of white men." This negative attitude prevented Robert, the only Methodist missionary in the Manitoba and North-West Conference at the turn of the century with a B.A., to advance in the church hierarchy. He never became the Conference's Superintendent of Methodist Indian Missions. No Indian did.
At the turn of the century, the churches viewed residential schools as the most effective institutions for assimilating the Native children. Robert remained of two minds about them. On the one hand the schools gave a number of students their only chance for an education. On the other hand, as a college graduate he knew how inferior they actually were in contrast to provincial public schools. Briefly, around 1908, he urged a boycott of the Red Deer Indian Industrial School. Only the reforms introduced by the new principal, the Rev. Arthur Barner, led him to reverse his position and to support the institution.
What solution did the Cree minister propose? In 1903, the Toronto Globe quoted him as stating, "that existing methods of educating the Indians were not productive of the best results ... If the Indian boys and girls were taken into Christian homes and given the same chance as other children who are brought into Canada, and given the opportunity of studying at the public schools, and afterwards allowed to homestead land, they would stand shoulder to shoulder with any class of people in the country."
Robert's eldest daughter Gussie spent nine years at the Red Deer Industrial School, attending from the age of nine to eighteen. Immediately after her discharge in 1913,her parents sent her to Alberta College, the Methodist college in Edmonton, where she took a business course. Robert and Charlotte's oldest son, Harry, attended Red Deer for four years, from age ten to fourteen; and upon his discharge in 1914,he also went to Alberta College. A daughter, Caroline, was at Red Deer for three years, from eleven to fourteen, until her discharge in 1914.From there she went to a public school in Edmonton. Daughter Mary attended Red Deer for only one year, from age eleven to twelve, then, too, on her discharge in 1914 went to public school in Edmonton. The youngest daughter, Ruby, born in 1911, and youngest son Barner, born in 1913, never had to attend residential school at all. Robert arranged for them to stay in Edmonton and enrol in the public school there.
When the industrial school was moved in 1924 from Red Deer to Edmonton, Robert interpreted at its opening. There he translated into Cree the frank statement of Charles Stewart, Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, that it was "the white man's duty" to educate Indians and thereby, "help them to be assimilated ..." Perhaps, in the hope that things had improved at the new school, Robert sent his adopted son Larry but in 1931, when the fourteen-year old boy ran away, Robert did not make him go back.
During the 1920s and 30s Robert faced a continuing challenge from Indian traditionalists at Saddle Lake, anxious to hold onto their own old religious beliefs. The veteran Methodist minister also faced opposition from the Roman Catholics. Much of the pressure to send children away to the Edmonton school arose from the existence of a Catholic boarding school at Saddle Lake; unless Protestant children went away they might end up there. Robert wanted to avoid this at all costs.
The Catholics maintained a formidable offensive in the surrounding area. They began a boarding school at Saddle Lake, and also opened missions at both Saddle Lake and Good Fish Lake. Rev. A. R. Aldridge, a Methodist minister, forecast in 1908, that, "north of the Saskatchewan is going to be largely French Roman Catholic."
In the early twentieth century the Methodists' mission work in Canada declined as a priority as the church devoted more and more of its financial resources to the rapidly expanding missions in China and Japan. As a result, Robert had great difficulty in obtaining authorization from church offices in Toronto for even small expenditures. At White Fish and Good Fish Lakes, where he served from 1903 to 1911, he lived in a poorly built manse. Reverend Aldridge, in fact, commented after a visit in 1906: "Mr. Steinhauer's family does not seem healthy since he has lived in that house - he lost a child lately, I hear. Yet until 1909, the church refused to provide the funds to build a new house. They conceded, but only after Robert threatened to resign.
Just after World War One, Robert supported a new pan-Indian political organization, the League of Indians of Canada. The League worked to persuade the Canadian government to improve the standard of education it offered the Indian people. In 1921, claimed organizer Fred Loft, "scarcely five per cent of the adult population of a vast majority of reservations in Canada is competent to write a coherent intelligible letter.
The League held its first conference at Ohsweken, Ontario, in December 1918. Subsequent annual meetings followed at Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in 1919; Elphinstone, Manitoba, in 1920; Thunderchild Reserve, Saskatchewan, in 1921; and Hobbema, Alberta, in 1922. At the 1922 meeting, Robert served as the chief interpreter. His youngest brother, Augustine Steinhauer, was later elected president of the Alberta branch of the League of Indians of Canada in 1931.
On the social side, Robert greatly enjoyed church music and translation. He bought a piano while stationed at Hobbema and loved to translate sacred songs and hymns. Together with Egerton he worked on a Cree hymn book which appeared in 1920. Like his father, Robert was a wonderful linguist. As one of his colleagues wrote, the Cree minister could "read from the English Bible translating into Cree as he proceeds."
Early in 1937 Robert was informed that the Senate of Victoria University, to mark the college's 100th anniversary, wanted to offer him the degree of Doctor of Divinity, "For as your father was one of the first students a hundred years ago you will be one of the first graduates of the new century of Victoria's life." On the evening of April 27th the tall seventy-six-year-old missionary received his D.D. from his alma mater, now affiliated with the University of Toronto. He became the first Indian in Canada to obtain an honorary Doctor of Divinity. He died four years later and more than four hundred parishioners and non-Native neighbours and friends attended the funeral.
Ralph Steinhauer, later to become the first Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta of Indian descent, recalled his two missionary uncles in a talk to the Historical Society of Alberta at Edmonton in 1955. Fortunately Alberta historian Hugh Dempsey attended and made notes on the address. Ralph first spoke of his Uncle Egerton, whom he had known in the early 1930s after Egerton moved to Saddle Lake to help Robert at the mission. Ralph, then in his mid-twenties, recalled that Egerton, who was once a great athlete, encouraged the young people to participate in sports. Often he would tell them: "Never let yourself think that you are not as good as the white man." Egerton also challenged them about education: " ... if your people don't perk up and follow the white man's way in business, you'll find yoursel ves left out in the cold! Can't you become doctors, lawyers or businessmen? You are just afraid that you can't compete with the white man." Egerton, as did Robert, sought equality with, and respect from, the dominant society.
Both uncles saw no contradiction in the fact that they were both Cree and Christian. They had two loyalties. Egerton, the devoted Methodist missionary, admitted to Ralph the amazing similarity between the Christian missionaries' teachings and Native beliefs. He did not dismiss Native spiritual concepts as superstition. Speaking of the Sun Dance he told his great-nephew: "There was a bit of torture there, but it was no worse than training for the commandos. They also had the ceremonial dances. There was a good deal of paganism, whooping and hollering but you know, I'm still an Indian. Actually, I can't say too much against it. There were some great prayers said - heartfelt and sincere. The Sun Dance was a form of worship."
According to Ralph Steinhauer, his Uncle Robert was a thunderous preacher. When in the pulpit he had his "arms, hands, feet and head all going like mad as he made the points in his sermon." Once Ralph missed Sunday service, held back by impassable roads. As he passed by the church he saw Uncle Robert through the window giving one of his impassioned sermons. The minister looked up, and as he recognized Ralph driving by, "stopped in mid-flight, arms outstretched, not saying a word until I drove the team out of sight." Two days later he stormed over to Ralph's home to confront him about missing church.
"Which would have been the greater sin,
Uncle Robert," Ralph protested, "to miss
church, or to kill a poor dumb beast by
trying to get home Saturday night?"
"Bad planning," replied Uncle Robert, "you don't need to starve your family or kill your horses. You just need to plan better and keep the Lord's day in mind!"
Throughout their lives, Egerton and Robert Steinhauer followed closely in their father's footsteps in seeking accommodation with the larger non-Native society. But they lived in a period of domination where the Indian Act and society in general made no accommodation for their culture and Native practices. It was a great tribute to them and their wives that they were able to minister at the various missions in Alberta and at the same time provide their children with the best education available at the time. They saw education as the key to freedom for First Nation people. The success of the later generations of Steinhauers is a true tribute to their dedication and tenacity.
The author wishes to thank and acknowledge the following persons for their help: Neil Semple, Stephanie McMullen, Hugh Dempsey, Ruby Erasmus, Herb and Marg Steinhauer, Caroline Jackson, Edna Quinney, Henry Quinney, Larry Steinhauer, Melvin Steinhauer, Hope Steinhauer Trommels, Harold Averill, Valerie Scott, Sally Swenson, and the Reverends Ernie Nix and GelTy Hutchinson. For historical work on the Steinhauer family the starting point has been Isaac Kholisile Mabindisa's invaluable Ph.D. thesis, "The Praying Man: The Life and Times of Henry Bird Steinhauer" (University of Alberta, Department of Educational Foundations, 1984).
Dr. Donald B. Smith is professor of history at the University of Calgary and the author of numerous books and articles on western Canadian history.
ENDNOTES
This article is an abridged version of "The Steinhauer Brothers: Two First Nation Christian Missionaries," in Canada, Confederation to the Present, eds. Bob Hesketh & Chris Hackett (Edmonton: Chinook Multimedia, 2001). It appears with permission from the hybrid web/CD-ROM, Canada, Confederation to Present.
