Post by cinemo on Aug 1, 2015 12:53:08 GMT -5
In a remote corner of the North West Territories, in present-day southwest Saskatchewan, there occurred an event which would have far-reaching consequences for the rest of the country. It would be the subject of many newspaper articles, and controversial court proceedings in both the United States and Canada. It would stir the Dominion government to move quickly to protect Canada's sovereignty in the West.
The North West Mounted Police force was already in the process of being created by John A. Macdonald's government when news of the Cypress Hills Massacre reached Ottawa in mid-August of 1873. The Massacre, which happened on Sunday, June 1, 1873, made it apparent that Canada must do something quickly to police its vast North West Territory. Reports of increasing violence and illegal whiskey-trading had been filtering in for some time, but the government was moving slowly to deal with the problems. Now something had occurred which convinced the government it had better do something sooner rather than later. News of the massacre hastened recruitment and organization of the new police force, and the N.W.M.P. were dispatched to the West the following year. This police force, and its successors, would stamp its mark on the country for many years to come. The colourful image of the "mountie" would impress itself on two nations, and become known around the world.
American adventurers had been trading rot-gut whiskey on Canadian territory since 1869. This whiskey was 100% grain alcohol cut down with water before other ingredients, such as tobacco, red ink, jamaica ginger, and sometimes strychnine, were added. Throughout present-day southern Alberta and southwest Saskatchewan these traders operated without competition or interference. The Hudson's Bay Company, to whose nominal control this territory belonged, seldom ventured into these southern areas, and the bison robe trade was left to the American free-lancers.
The robes were a valuable commodity, for they were used primarily to make belting leather. This was the leather used to make the drive-belts which ran the machinery of the industrialized eastern seaboard of the United States. This mechanization would consume the vast buffalo herds of the North American prairies, just as it would the many whales of the world's oceans. Buffalo leather drive-belts turned the factory machines; whale oil lubricated them. The industrial revolution, also, would cast a long shadow over the U.S. and Canadian west.
In the Cypress Hills of 1873 at least four trading posts were operating. Between them they employed at least thirteen whiskey traders. The scene of the Cypress Hills massacre was near two of them. Moses Solomon operated one whiskey-fort, and a short distance away across the stream which would become known as Battle Creek, the other was owned by Abel Farwell. Both of these men, and most of their hired help, were Americans based out of Fort Benton, Montana; a boomtown and hide depot 150 miles south-southwest of the Cypress Hills.
As the 1872-1873 trading season drew to its close the rival traders Farwell and Solomon summoned local Métis freighters to their forts to haul their winter's take to Fort Benton, where it would be sold. A late spring that year delayed their departures until the end of May. About the middle of May a group of about thirty lodges of Nakoda (Assiniboine) arrived under the leadership of Hunka-juka.. This band had experienced a very bad spring, and about thirty of their people had died of starvation and exposure during their recent trip from the Battle River, near present-day Battleford, Saskatchewan, to the Cypress Hills. They camped near the whiskey posts in hopes of trading the little they had for provisions. Farwell hired some of them to do odd jobs in return for food. Hunka-juka (or Manitupotis, as he was known in Cree) found his lodges joined by those of Minashinayen, an old friend of his. Inihan Kinyen's twelve lodges also arrived from the vicinity of Wood Mountain. As May drew to a close the camp of some three hundred Nakoda remained near the two whiskey-trading posts while Hunka-juka's people recovered from their recent ordeal.
There were thus quite a number of people living at the quiet creek-bend in the Battle Creek valley that June first of 1873. There were the Nakoda, at least ten Métis freighters with their Red River Carts and oxen, and the people of the two trading forts: nine or ten at Farwell's, including at least two women; and six at Solomon's. Not everyone was getting along perfectly. There were some hard feelings in particular between Solomon's fort and some in the Nakoda camp.
On May 31 one more group would arrive. These were wolfers; hide hunters who obtained wolf-pelts by poisoning buffalo carcases with strychnine and collecting the pelts of the wolves who died as a result of eating the poisoned meat. Wolfers might collect as many as twenty wolves from one poisoned "set" - one buffalo carcase. Such tactics provided pelts without bullet-holes that were easy to get. As many of these men were displaced as a result of the U.S. Civil War, they were eager to make fast money. Poisoning would also provide the pelts of coyotes and foxes, but using poison also led to the deaths of magpies and other wildlife, as well as Indian dogs. First Nations people at this time still relied on dogs to a certain extent to pull their travois, and they greatly resented the wolfers' hunting techniques. Wolfers found themselves unpopular with White trappers and traders as well. It was almost universally agreed that poisoning was a wasteful and dangerous practice.
As a result of the bitter feelings Indians had against the wolfers, feelings towards the traders cooled as well. Traders held the wolfers responsible for their own decreasing popularity among the Indians, even though some of the whiskey traders' own practices helped compound the ill feelings. Wolfers, for their part, resented the traders' trading army surplus breech-loading single-shot and repeating rifles to the Indians at their whiskey forts. Indians armed with such weapons made the wolfers' existence just that much more precarious. So it was a potentially explosive combination of people who came together in the Cypress Hills that June first of 1873.
These particular wolfers had spent the winter of 1872-1873 on the plains of what is now southern Alberta. On their way back to Fort Benton with their pelts they had their saddle horses, together with the driving horses used to pull their wagons, a total of forty head, stolen by a four-member Cree raiding party of Kakiwishtahaw's band. The wolfers had no idea who stole their horses, but they carried on into Benton and got remounted and reinforced. They set out to run the horse thieves down, but lost the trail near the Cypress Hills. These men knew there were trading posts in the vicinity, so their leaders, Thomas Hardwick and John Evans, set out to find them and ascertain if there was any rumour of their stolen horses.
Hardwick and Evans rode into Abe Farwell's fort the evening of May 31, 1873. Farwell told them he had heard nothing, and he assured them the nearby Nakoda camp were not the culprits, as they only had a very few thin horses as a result of the hard winter. He also told them that the Nakoda had proved to be good neighbours as they had returned his junior partner George Hammond's horse that very day when they had found it strayed away from the fort. George had unwisely rewarded this kindness with a keg of rot-gut. Farwell was as hospitable as any westerner of the time, and he invited Evans to bring the rest of the party, about a dozen men, in for breakfast. Tom Hardwick spent the night at Farwell's.
The next morning, June first, the rest of the wolfers arrived. A holiday atmosphere prevailed as the traders packed up the gains of a successful season's trade, and a fair amount of drinking was going on. Many of the traders and wolfers knew each other, and a party was soon under way at Solomon's post. Some of the Metis joined the festivities. Drinking was going on in the Nakoda camp as well, thanks to Hammond's reward of alcohol the previous day.
Inihan Kinyen was at Farwell's when the wolfers arrived, and he did not like the look of the men. As events unfolded that morning he encouraged his band to break camp, but was ridiculed by a drunken member of his band. This was an example of the social changes which the increased use of alcohol was causing among the people of the First Nations. Such cheek would not have been countenanced by the community were it not for the destructive influence of alcohol. The more-or-less positive trading relationships which once had existed were rapidly giving way to wholesale exploitation and social, environmental and economic decline after the Civil War.
About noon a half-drunk George Hammond found his horse was missing again. He invited the wolfers, many of whom were also drunk, to cover him while he went into the Nakoda camp to retrieve two of their horses to hold as a surety until his good horse was returned to him. Hammond supposed those Nakoda who were drinking must have run out of whiskey and had taken his horse so they could once again return it to him for another reward of whiskey. The wolfers for the most part were more than willing to go along with this drunken supposition. One of Solomon's men, Philander Vogle, had been filling their heads with stories about how untrustworthy these Nakoda were, since some of the band had argued with Solomon and threatened his men. The wolfers were still angry enough at the loss of their own horses that it mattered little to them who paid for that loss, so long as someone did, and they would not sit by while yet another horse was stolen. Several Métis also answered Hammond's summons for back-up.
While the wolfers and Métis took cover in a small coulee between Solomon's fort and the Nakoda camp Hammond stumbled into the camp and grabbed two horses and began leading them away. At the same time Farwell's interpreter, Alexis Lebombard, shouted across the creek to Hammond that his horse had just turned up, but Hammond did not appear to hear him. Things heated up in the Nakoda camp immediately, and George was prevented from leaving with the horses. The Nakoda were very insulted by this rude approach to their camp, and comments flew back and forth between the sides. Farwell intervened and called for cooler heads until Alexis could get there to make some sense of the arguments which in several languages were getting more and more heated, as people began to shout and shoot in the air. Before Alexis could get there Hammond returned to the coulee, and squeezed off a shot in the direction of the camp. The shooting then began in earnest.
The wolfers and their allies had the advantage. Firing in rapid volleys with their repeating rifles from the cover of the coulee, the Nakoda could not match them. They were exposed on the open flat where their camp stood, and most were armed only with muzzle-loading muskets, or bows and arrows. The women and children fled away from the shooting to the cover of nearby trees, but a number of people had already been killed. By the end of the day more than twenty Nakota, including some women and children, had been killed. One of the wolfers was also killed.
A number of the wolfers and one of the Métis then ransacked the camp, and burned the lodges. Some women were captured, and wounded people were executed. Other atrocities occurred throughout the night. Farwell's seventeen year old Crow Indian wife, Mary Horseguard, confronted some of the drunken men with a pistol and saved a teen-aged girl from mistreatment. She also made sure the remaining female captives were released the next morning.
The traders hurriedly packed up and headed for Fort Benton, with some of the wolfers returning with them. They burned their forts as they left. The rest of the wolfers carried on in pursuit of the horse thieves. They never found them.
The Nakoda bands were scattered and terribly traumatized by this massacre. Some of them found assistance among the Métis at Chapel Coulee, near the present-day town of Eastend. Others fled southeast into the United States.
One of the first duties of the North West Mounted Police when they arrived in the West the following year was to investigate the events of the Cypress Hills Massacre. Their investigations led in the spring of 1875 to the arrest of eight of the participants by United States authorities. At the extradition hearing in Helena, Montana these men had to face up to their actions on the day of the massacre. Because of conflicting testimony, however, and no clear evidence of premeditation, the mounties failed to get them extradited to Canada for trial for murder.
Three of the participants in the massacre were later captured on Canadian soil, however, and a murder trial was held at Winnipeg in June of 1876. Again, because of conflicting evidence and the lack of evidence of premeditation, no convictions were obtained. The violence of that day in June, 1873 would go unpunished.
The mounties had made a valiant, if unsuccessful, effort and First Nations people were quick to appreciate this point. The attempt to prosecute the offenders had fairly convinced them that the N.W.M.P. meant what they said. Everyone would be held equally accountable before the law. This Queen's law might be a law the Indians could respect. Her red-coated policemen might be friends First Nations people could trust. They seemed to be friends in words and theory, and in the next few years the N.W.M.P. would prove to be friends in deed.
Source: www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/sk/walsh/natcul/histo.aspx
cinemo
The North West Mounted Police force was already in the process of being created by John A. Macdonald's government when news of the Cypress Hills Massacre reached Ottawa in mid-August of 1873. The Massacre, which happened on Sunday, June 1, 1873, made it apparent that Canada must do something quickly to police its vast North West Territory. Reports of increasing violence and illegal whiskey-trading had been filtering in for some time, but the government was moving slowly to deal with the problems. Now something had occurred which convinced the government it had better do something sooner rather than later. News of the massacre hastened recruitment and organization of the new police force, and the N.W.M.P. were dispatched to the West the following year. This police force, and its successors, would stamp its mark on the country for many years to come. The colourful image of the "mountie" would impress itself on two nations, and become known around the world.
American adventurers had been trading rot-gut whiskey on Canadian territory since 1869. This whiskey was 100% grain alcohol cut down with water before other ingredients, such as tobacco, red ink, jamaica ginger, and sometimes strychnine, were added. Throughout present-day southern Alberta and southwest Saskatchewan these traders operated without competition or interference. The Hudson's Bay Company, to whose nominal control this territory belonged, seldom ventured into these southern areas, and the bison robe trade was left to the American free-lancers.
The robes were a valuable commodity, for they were used primarily to make belting leather. This was the leather used to make the drive-belts which ran the machinery of the industrialized eastern seaboard of the United States. This mechanization would consume the vast buffalo herds of the North American prairies, just as it would the many whales of the world's oceans. Buffalo leather drive-belts turned the factory machines; whale oil lubricated them. The industrial revolution, also, would cast a long shadow over the U.S. and Canadian west.
In the Cypress Hills of 1873 at least four trading posts were operating. Between them they employed at least thirteen whiskey traders. The scene of the Cypress Hills massacre was near two of them. Moses Solomon operated one whiskey-fort, and a short distance away across the stream which would become known as Battle Creek, the other was owned by Abel Farwell. Both of these men, and most of their hired help, were Americans based out of Fort Benton, Montana; a boomtown and hide depot 150 miles south-southwest of the Cypress Hills.
As the 1872-1873 trading season drew to its close the rival traders Farwell and Solomon summoned local Métis freighters to their forts to haul their winter's take to Fort Benton, where it would be sold. A late spring that year delayed their departures until the end of May. About the middle of May a group of about thirty lodges of Nakoda (Assiniboine) arrived under the leadership of Hunka-juka.. This band had experienced a very bad spring, and about thirty of their people had died of starvation and exposure during their recent trip from the Battle River, near present-day Battleford, Saskatchewan, to the Cypress Hills. They camped near the whiskey posts in hopes of trading the little they had for provisions. Farwell hired some of them to do odd jobs in return for food. Hunka-juka (or Manitupotis, as he was known in Cree) found his lodges joined by those of Minashinayen, an old friend of his. Inihan Kinyen's twelve lodges also arrived from the vicinity of Wood Mountain. As May drew to a close the camp of some three hundred Nakoda remained near the two whiskey-trading posts while Hunka-juka's people recovered from their recent ordeal.
There were thus quite a number of people living at the quiet creek-bend in the Battle Creek valley that June first of 1873. There were the Nakoda, at least ten Métis freighters with their Red River Carts and oxen, and the people of the two trading forts: nine or ten at Farwell's, including at least two women; and six at Solomon's. Not everyone was getting along perfectly. There were some hard feelings in particular between Solomon's fort and some in the Nakoda camp.
On May 31 one more group would arrive. These were wolfers; hide hunters who obtained wolf-pelts by poisoning buffalo carcases with strychnine and collecting the pelts of the wolves who died as a result of eating the poisoned meat. Wolfers might collect as many as twenty wolves from one poisoned "set" - one buffalo carcase. Such tactics provided pelts without bullet-holes that were easy to get. As many of these men were displaced as a result of the U.S. Civil War, they were eager to make fast money. Poisoning would also provide the pelts of coyotes and foxes, but using poison also led to the deaths of magpies and other wildlife, as well as Indian dogs. First Nations people at this time still relied on dogs to a certain extent to pull their travois, and they greatly resented the wolfers' hunting techniques. Wolfers found themselves unpopular with White trappers and traders as well. It was almost universally agreed that poisoning was a wasteful and dangerous practice.
As a result of the bitter feelings Indians had against the wolfers, feelings towards the traders cooled as well. Traders held the wolfers responsible for their own decreasing popularity among the Indians, even though some of the whiskey traders' own practices helped compound the ill feelings. Wolfers, for their part, resented the traders' trading army surplus breech-loading single-shot and repeating rifles to the Indians at their whiskey forts. Indians armed with such weapons made the wolfers' existence just that much more precarious. So it was a potentially explosive combination of people who came together in the Cypress Hills that June first of 1873.
These particular wolfers had spent the winter of 1872-1873 on the plains of what is now southern Alberta. On their way back to Fort Benton with their pelts they had their saddle horses, together with the driving horses used to pull their wagons, a total of forty head, stolen by a four-member Cree raiding party of Kakiwishtahaw's band. The wolfers had no idea who stole their horses, but they carried on into Benton and got remounted and reinforced. They set out to run the horse thieves down, but lost the trail near the Cypress Hills. These men knew there were trading posts in the vicinity, so their leaders, Thomas Hardwick and John Evans, set out to find them and ascertain if there was any rumour of their stolen horses.
Hardwick and Evans rode into Abe Farwell's fort the evening of May 31, 1873. Farwell told them he had heard nothing, and he assured them the nearby Nakoda camp were not the culprits, as they only had a very few thin horses as a result of the hard winter. He also told them that the Nakoda had proved to be good neighbours as they had returned his junior partner George Hammond's horse that very day when they had found it strayed away from the fort. George had unwisely rewarded this kindness with a keg of rot-gut. Farwell was as hospitable as any westerner of the time, and he invited Evans to bring the rest of the party, about a dozen men, in for breakfast. Tom Hardwick spent the night at Farwell's.
The next morning, June first, the rest of the wolfers arrived. A holiday atmosphere prevailed as the traders packed up the gains of a successful season's trade, and a fair amount of drinking was going on. Many of the traders and wolfers knew each other, and a party was soon under way at Solomon's post. Some of the Metis joined the festivities. Drinking was going on in the Nakoda camp as well, thanks to Hammond's reward of alcohol the previous day.
Inihan Kinyen was at Farwell's when the wolfers arrived, and he did not like the look of the men. As events unfolded that morning he encouraged his band to break camp, but was ridiculed by a drunken member of his band. This was an example of the social changes which the increased use of alcohol was causing among the people of the First Nations. Such cheek would not have been countenanced by the community were it not for the destructive influence of alcohol. The more-or-less positive trading relationships which once had existed were rapidly giving way to wholesale exploitation and social, environmental and economic decline after the Civil War.
About noon a half-drunk George Hammond found his horse was missing again. He invited the wolfers, many of whom were also drunk, to cover him while he went into the Nakoda camp to retrieve two of their horses to hold as a surety until his good horse was returned to him. Hammond supposed those Nakoda who were drinking must have run out of whiskey and had taken his horse so they could once again return it to him for another reward of whiskey. The wolfers for the most part were more than willing to go along with this drunken supposition. One of Solomon's men, Philander Vogle, had been filling their heads with stories about how untrustworthy these Nakoda were, since some of the band had argued with Solomon and threatened his men. The wolfers were still angry enough at the loss of their own horses that it mattered little to them who paid for that loss, so long as someone did, and they would not sit by while yet another horse was stolen. Several Métis also answered Hammond's summons for back-up.
While the wolfers and Métis took cover in a small coulee between Solomon's fort and the Nakoda camp Hammond stumbled into the camp and grabbed two horses and began leading them away. At the same time Farwell's interpreter, Alexis Lebombard, shouted across the creek to Hammond that his horse had just turned up, but Hammond did not appear to hear him. Things heated up in the Nakoda camp immediately, and George was prevented from leaving with the horses. The Nakoda were very insulted by this rude approach to their camp, and comments flew back and forth between the sides. Farwell intervened and called for cooler heads until Alexis could get there to make some sense of the arguments which in several languages were getting more and more heated, as people began to shout and shoot in the air. Before Alexis could get there Hammond returned to the coulee, and squeezed off a shot in the direction of the camp. The shooting then began in earnest.
The wolfers and their allies had the advantage. Firing in rapid volleys with their repeating rifles from the cover of the coulee, the Nakoda could not match them. They were exposed on the open flat where their camp stood, and most were armed only with muzzle-loading muskets, or bows and arrows. The women and children fled away from the shooting to the cover of nearby trees, but a number of people had already been killed. By the end of the day more than twenty Nakota, including some women and children, had been killed. One of the wolfers was also killed.
A number of the wolfers and one of the Métis then ransacked the camp, and burned the lodges. Some women were captured, and wounded people were executed. Other atrocities occurred throughout the night. Farwell's seventeen year old Crow Indian wife, Mary Horseguard, confronted some of the drunken men with a pistol and saved a teen-aged girl from mistreatment. She also made sure the remaining female captives were released the next morning.
The traders hurriedly packed up and headed for Fort Benton, with some of the wolfers returning with them. They burned their forts as they left. The rest of the wolfers carried on in pursuit of the horse thieves. They never found them.
The Nakoda bands were scattered and terribly traumatized by this massacre. Some of them found assistance among the Métis at Chapel Coulee, near the present-day town of Eastend. Others fled southeast into the United States.
One of the first duties of the North West Mounted Police when they arrived in the West the following year was to investigate the events of the Cypress Hills Massacre. Their investigations led in the spring of 1875 to the arrest of eight of the participants by United States authorities. At the extradition hearing in Helena, Montana these men had to face up to their actions on the day of the massacre. Because of conflicting testimony, however, and no clear evidence of premeditation, the mounties failed to get them extradited to Canada for trial for murder.
Three of the participants in the massacre were later captured on Canadian soil, however, and a murder trial was held at Winnipeg in June of 1876. Again, because of conflicting evidence and the lack of evidence of premeditation, no convictions were obtained. The violence of that day in June, 1873 would go unpunished.
The mounties had made a valiant, if unsuccessful, effort and First Nations people were quick to appreciate this point. The attempt to prosecute the offenders had fairly convinced them that the N.W.M.P. meant what they said. Everyone would be held equally accountable before the law. This Queen's law might be a law the Indians could respect. Her red-coated policemen might be friends First Nations people could trust. They seemed to be friends in words and theory, and in the next few years the N.W.M.P. would prove to be friends in deed.
Source: www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/sk/walsh/natcul/histo.aspx
cinemo