Barnes Julien Muntain, The Prairie Phantom (1882-1964)

Born to Oskar Muntain and Amélie Bellamy in 1892 in Pile-of-Bones (known as Oskana kâ-asastêki by the Cree) in what was then the North-West Territories. For the first thirteen years of his life, Barnes Julien Muntain was raised on a government-granted homestead, where he learned to farm barley and live the frontier life. As a child, he watched his family struggle against the Wheat Barons, an illegitimate agricultural organization which terrorized farms in the lower territories from 1847-1929. By his teen years, he had become disillusioned by the frontier life, both due to the increasingly brutal tactics of the Wheat Barons and the realization that the land allotted to his family had previously belonged to the Plains Cree.

In 1898, he began experiencing mysterious dreams. In journals recovered in 1972, BJ offered the following description of these dreams: “They begin in a moonlit field stretching so far that the edges blur into the night. I feel the wind, a delicate thing that tickles the flesh until my skin crawls. Then there are the eyes: hundreds of pairs of white eyes appearing in the shadowy recesses of the field until I am presiding over an audience of small chittering creatures. When at last I have collected myself, I hear them rushing towards me, and I am suddenly lost in a dark wave of fur” (in The Collected Writings of the Wheat Barons War edited by Dr. Zeke Porter). Worried that his parents would have him sent to an asylum, he hid these dreams until his eighteenth birthday, when he walked into the prairie and never returned.

For the first three years, BJ lived in a makeshift shelter in an aspen forest overlooking the prairie, surviving mostly on grubs and needle and thread grass. Survivalists speculate that he may have had the GS11-1.9AB gene, a rare mutation which allows humans to digest various kinds of grasses and sagebrush. In March 1903, Wheat Baron zealots set fire to the prairie and chased BJ forty miles west; he escaped over a river, which the Wheat Barons could not cross because they did not have horses nor had they learned to swim due to the belief that it was sinful. BJ promptly rebuilt a shelter but found himself without sufficient resources for survival.

Two days later, he awoke to an astonishing sight: his dream of a sea of white eyes in a field had come true, and before him were thousands of prairie dogs standing at perfect attention. To this date, nobody knows why BJ could communicate with the prairie dogs or why they sought him out; regardless, from that day forward, he could control fully a third of the prairie dog population. Subsequently, he became known throughout the region as The Prairie Phantom.

For ten years, BJ led an army of prairie dogs on a vendetta against the Wheat Barons, sparking what some consider to be a war. While the Wheat Barons attempted to control the agricultural output of what would become known as Saskatchewan using a combination of violent threats and fires, BJ's dogs tore through wheat fields owned by Wheat Baron members, bankrupting the organization and forcing them to relinquish control of their homesteads to the indigenous peoples of the area. By 1915, 95% of all Wheat Baron territory had been relinquished in this fashion. Despite numerous efforts to assassinate him – including one nearly successful effort in 1914 – he survived to see the end of the Wheat Barons and the passage of the Agricultural Civil Rights Ordinance in 1929.

The remainder of BJ's years are difficult to trace. According to extended relatives, he lived outside of Regina in a prairie hut, communing with prairie dogs to the benefit of the farmers in the area. Some claim that Regina held a festival in his honor from 1932-1941 and 1951-1955 (interrupted by the Second World War). In 1964, BJ's journals were collected by George Bornsson, a local farmer, and a Cree philosopher named Herbert (last name unknown). It is believed BJ died shortly afterwards sometime in September 1964 and was possibly eaten by his prairie dogs, though other theories suggest he was reincarnated as a prairie dog and revered as a prairie dog god. Neither of these theories are particularly believable but have not been ruled out.