Denny - Dennys trek: a mounties memoir of the march west

In the early 1870s the 1,000-mile region between Winnipeg and the Rocky Mountains was a lawless wilderness. In what is today southern Alberta, upwards of 500 whiskey peddlers from the U.S. were wiping out the Indians with bullets and liquor. They had even established a series of forts, with one of them, Whoop-up, complete with cannon.

The problem began in 1869 when the fledgling Dominion of Canada agreed to give the Hudsons Bay Company some $1.5 million and land grants to relinquish its rights to Ruperts Land and its trading monopoly in what was then called The North-Western Territory. In return, the Dominion gained control of a region from which evolved much of todays Quebec and Ontario, all of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, and the Yukon and Northwest Territories. To maintain order, Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald decided to form a mounted police force. Unfortunately, prolonged procrastination meant that a region rivalling in size the United States became a land of no law.

In the previous 200 years a semblance of order had been maintained by the Hudsons Bay Company. Under its jurisdiction, Chief Factors were given powers to try criminal cases and an endeavour was made to preserve law and order for the benefit of profit and loss.

But with the transfer from Hudsons Bay control a new element was tragically introduced into the Aboriginal way of lifeunlimited liquor. Not that the HBC and other traders were teetotallers in their transactions with First Nations. But they did exercise control on the sensible premise that drunken Natives made poor trappers and were unpredictable and very dangerous. In 1804 Alexander Henry, a trader for the North West Company at Pembina, noted in his journal: Indians having asked for liquor and promised to decamp and hunt well all summer, I gave them some. Grand Gueule stabbed Capot Rouge, Le Boeuf stabbed his young wife in the arm, Little Shell almost beat his old mothers brains out with a club, and there was terrible fighting among them. I sowed garden seeds.

But not all traders peacefully sowed their seeds during the Natives brawls. Some became the victims, their bodies lying in lonely graves. It was obvious to the businessmen of the Hudsons Bay Company that dead traders or dead Natives made them no profit. Hence, they strove to have the Natives way of life disturbed as little as possible, even to the extent of actively discouraging any settlement of their vast domain.

In the late 1860s, however, a dramatic change occurred in the form of aggressive Yankees from Montana Territory. The U.S. Civil War was now history, and covered wagons rumbled across the plains carrying settlers to California, Oregon, and other western regions. Among new communities to appear was Fort Benton on the Upper Missouri River, about 100 miles south of what would one day be Alberta.

Fort Benton became the supply area for a massive region of the U.S. plains and unprincipled free traders who ventured north to challenge the HBC trading monopoly. Their main stock-in-trade was what the Natives called firewater. Without concern for its catastrophic consequences, they dispensed it from trading posts, or forts as they called them, with colourful names such as Whiskey Gap, Robbers Roost, Fort Slide Out, Fort Stand Off, Spitzee Post, and Fort Whoop-up. The latter became the focal point of the liquor traffic.

It was born in 1869 when John Jerome Healy and Alfred B. Hamilton, two U.S. traders from Fort Benton, built 11 log cabins at the junction of the St. Mary and Oldman rivers. They surrounded the cabins with a flimsy palisade and that winter netted $50,000 in furs. Unfortunately, the Natives set fire to it, feeling that they were being cheatedan assessment that was undoubtedly correct.

Hamilton and Healy, however, werent about to leave so lucrative a land. They started another fort a few hundred feet awayone that wouldnt burn so easily. It was built of heavy, squared timbers with a sturdy palisade loopholed for rifles and two bastions complete with cannon. On one of the bastions was a flagpole from which fluttered Healys personal flagblue and redwhich at a distance resembled the Stars and Stripes. The fort also had a bell like that on a locomotive, which was rung when trading was to start.

The interior contained a cookhouse, a blacksmith shop, stables, and living quarters with huge stone fireplaces. All windows were barred, as were the chimneys, since in their craving for whiskey, Natives had broken into trading posts by dropping down the chimney. The post, called Fort Hamilton (but soon to be known as Whoop-up), took 30 men two years to build and cost some $25,000.

Natives were seldom permitted inside the palisade. They pushed their buffalo hides and other items through a small wicket near the main gate and exchanged them for blankets, guns, and whiskeyparticularly whiskey. When the furs were gone and the whiskey too, they traded not only the horses they needed to hunt the buffalo on which they survived, but also their wives and even daughters as young as 12.

The firey [fiery] water flowed as freely as the streams running from the rocky Mountains, wrote a Catholic missionary, and hundreds of poor Indians fell victims to the white mans craving for money, some poisoned, some frozen to death whilst in a state of intoxication, and many shot down by American bullets.

The Reverend John McDougall, one of the Wests renowned missionaries, noted: Scores of thousands of buffalo robes and hundreds of thousands of wolf and fox skins and most of the best horses the Indians had were taken south into Montana, and the chief article of barter for these was alcohol. In this traffic very many Indians were killed, and also quite a number of white men. Within a few miles of us forty-two able-bodied men were the victims among themselves, all slain in the drunken rows. These were Blackfoot There was no law but might. Some terrible scenes occurred when whole camps went on the spree, as was frequently the case, shooting, stabbing, killing, freezing, dying.

Thus these atrocious debauches were continuing all that winter not far from us. Mothers lost their children. These were either frozen to death or devoured by the myriad dogs of the camp. The birth-rate decreased and the poor red man was in a fair way towards extinction, just because some men, coming out of Christian countries, and themselves the evolution of Christian civilization, were now ruled by lust and greed.

In May 1873 the Canadian Parliament had passed a bill providing for the establishment of a Police Force in the North-West Territories, and for magistrates, courts, and jails. But a surprise obstacle was Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald. Not that he opposed the Force. In fact he had been the primary motivation behind the legislation. But Macdonald was a marvellous procrastinator, so accomplished that he earned the nickname Old Tomorrow. Now he put off implementing the legislation.

A remarkable contrast to this lack of action and consequent rule by lust and greed was the province of British Columbia across the Rocky Mountains. It was born in 1858 when gold was discovered on the Fraser River. At the time there were only a few hundred whites in a region as big as Washington, Oregon, and California combined. This far-flung wilderness was essentially a Hudsons Bay Company fur preserve, the only dots in the wilderness a few company forts. Into this region surged some 30,000 men with gold in their eyes.

Most were from the U.S., virtually all heavily armed. In June 1858 one writer noted that they were all equipped with the universal revolver, many of them carrying a brace of such, as well as a bowie knife. Another observer, English author Kinahan Cornwallis, wrote of one: He carried a couple of revolvers, and a bowie knife, with the point of which he took the opportunity of picking his teeth immediately after supper.