Native Americans had been adversely affected by the outcome of the settler independence war, and in the western lands of Canada beyond Lake Winnipeg (in what today is Saskatchewan) they had encountered serious trouble from white traders pressing into their traditional lands. In 1780 they attacked a party of fur traders at the Eagle Hill Creek, on the North Saskatchewan River. Several traders were killed and the survivors fled, abandoning the goods they had hoped to exchange.
The traders had spent the winter at a settlement on the creek, initially unmolested by the Native Americans, but a few days before they planned to move on, a large band had been ‘engaged in drinking about their houses’. One of the traders, ‘to ease himself of the troublesome importunities of an Indian, gave him a dose of laudanum in a glass of grog’ This effectively prevented him ‘from giving further trouble to anyone by setting him asleep forever’. Almost at once, according to a correspondent of the Winnipeg Free Press who recalled the story to his readers a century later, in 1885, the traders reaped their due reward.
While many Native Americans were prepared to trade with the whites, they could not allow a member of their community to be murdered with impunity. ‘This was the signal for a war of extermination of the whites’, wrote the Winnipeg correspondent, and the rage of the Native Americans was ‘only arrested by the greatest calamity that could have affected’ them. Here again, as at the time of Pontiac’s rebellion in 1763, the whites protected themselves by unleashing smallpox. ‘It spread with destructive and desolating power as the Are consumes the dry grass of the fleld. The fatal infection spread around with a baneful rapidity which no Aghter could escape, and with a fatal effect that nothing could resist.’
The notion that early contacts between traders and Native Americans were friendly and mutually convenient is contradicted by this report. For what took place at Eagle Hill Creek was symptomatic of what was to go on in Canada, and elsewhere in the Empire, wherever white settlers made contact with indigenous peoples. With laudanum for the individual and smallpox for larger Native American groups, the white man had the upper hand. Poisoning and the spreading of disease among indigenous peoples were two essential weapons of Empire. First practised in America, they were soon adopted elsewhere.
Conflicts to the west of Lake Winnipeg continued through the years after the attacks at Eagle Hill Creek. These skirmishes often developed out of intertribal flghting among the Native Americans themselves - quarrels exacerbated by the presence of the fur traders. In the summer of 1793, a group of Native Americans from the A’ani tribe arrived on horseback in the same neighbourhood, on the shore of the North Saskatchewan River. They planned to sell skins of wolf and fox at the trading post on Pine Island established by the North-West Company, a fur-trading enterprise based in Montreal. They also hoped to seize weapons from the traders’ store.
Living in the territory between Saskatoon and Edmonton, the A’ani were known to the French traders as Gros Ventres (‘Big Bellies’) and referred to by the British as (Water)Fall Indians. In theory, the various European trading posts along the river welcomed all Native American groups and happily purchased the skins that they offered for sale, exchanging them for weapons and other goods. In practice, the Cree were more favoured than the Gros Ventres since they brought the valuable beaver, while the Gros Ventres only sold the cheaper wolf and fox. As a result, the Cree were usually better armed than their rivals. Yet flghting between these rivals was not welcomed by the traders, since in the eyes of the Gros Ventres they were perceived as the allies of the Cree.1
The decision of the Gros Ventres to target the Pine Island fort arose from their need to revenge themselves on the Cree. Once inside the fort they made their intentions clear. James Finlay, the trader in charge, sought to placate them with presents, but James Hughes, his young clerk, called out Aux armes! To arms, men!’ The result was a typical frontier skirmish. Caught within the fort, the Indians turned and fled, though not before seizing the traders’ equipment and driving off their horses. The traders survived, but the North-West Company abandoned the fort. The Gros Ventres made a further attack later that year on Manchester House, another of the North-West Company’s trading stations. Stripping the traders of their clothes, they took the goods in the storehouse. The traders fled.
Encouraged by this success, the Gros Ventres made a further attack in 1794 on two forts on the South Saskatchewan River, north of Saskatoon. One belonged to the North-West Company while the other, the South Branch fort, had been established by the rival Hudson’s Bay Company. A cavalcade of 150 Indians descended on the South Branch fort where a trader, Hugh Brough, stood outside with his horses. His Indian interpreter warned Brough that the Indians were on the warpath, and quickly fled. Brough was shot and scalped, as was another trader, Magnus Annal. Two other traders, Van Driel and William Fea, were within the fort with a handful of Indian families. Feeling secure, they had made no preparations to defend themselves. Fea hid in a cellar, but was discovered and killed. Van Driel escaped downriver in a canoe to the fort at Nipawin to tell his story.
The North-West Company’s fort was on the far side of the river, manned that day by a skeleton summer team, commanded by Louis Chatelain. Here the traders had had the foresight to stay at home, and to reinforce the palisades. When an A’ani chief advanced towards them, he was shot, and the Indian force withdrew. Traders had received a fright, and Chatelain abandoned the post.
These and other attacks were successful in driving out the traders in the short term, and the spirit of resistance spread to other Indian groups. The NorthWest Company gave up its fort on Pine Island and their settlement on the South Saskatchewan River. A traveller through the area some ten years later found the Native Americans still in control. Arriving in April 1805 at the fort of Montagne a la Basse, on the Qu’Appelle River, to the south, Daniel Harmon found the gates firmly shut. About ‘eighty lodges of Crees and Assiniboins’ were encamped outside, threatening ‘to massacre all the white people’ within the gates.2
Considerable and continuing animosity towards the traders characterised the Saskatchewan frontier region. The Native Americans in this part of Canada were often well armed and capable of devising strategies of resistance. They had no intention of being exterminated without a fight.
World History
