![]() Then the old soldier looked at the map of U.S. President Grant read his ambassador’s report from Canada. Not a crack cavalry regiment, but an efficient police force for the rough and ready - particularly ready - enforcement of law and justice.” The new force’s motto was “Maintiens Le Droit” - “Maintain The Right.” With as little gold lace, fuss, and fine feathers as possible. “They are to be purely a civil, not a military body. Adding that a company of “fewer than 300 brave men” was no danger to our neighbour to the south. MacDonald dipped pen into inkwell, scratched out some words and neatly wrote: “North-West Mounted Police.” The name change, he explained in Parliament, reflected the non-military goals of the new force. Prime Minister MacDonald took the Act to Create a Canadian Field Force out of his desk. And Seward had spoken publicly about “next annexing British North American territories.” American trading posts in the Canadian northwest, including the ruthless outposts Fort Whoop-Up, Fort Spitzee, Fort Kipp, Fort Stand-Off and Fort Slide-Out, were already flying the Stars and Stripes. Secretary of State William H Seward was then bargaining for the acquisition of Alaska from the Russian Empire. Doing so would be considered an Act of War against the USA. President Ulysses S Grant warned MacDonald not to send that military field force west. An armed, self-reliant mounted company to be sent west to establish law and justice. MacDonald announced that he was going to create a Canadian Field Force. When news of the atrocity reached the East, the Catholic Church and Protestant newspapers hotly demanded that MacDonald finally do something. They were ignored.Ī ragtag group of sixty drunken wolfers, buffalo hunters and outlaws calling themselves the “Spitzee Cavalry” attacked a band of Assiniboine men, women and children. They pleaded with the MacDonald government to halt the devastating whiskey trade. Blackfoot Chief Crowfoot would later say, “Bad men and whisky were killing us so fast that very few of us would have been left today.”īoth Père Lacombe and Methodist missionary Rev George MacDougall made trips to Ottawa. Fort Stand-Off earned its name in 1872 when its men successfully stood off a posse, led by a US Marshall, that had chased their supply train from Montana. Other whiskey posts were also re-christened. ![]() Originally called Fort Hamilton, its wild occupants quickly renamed it Fort Whoop-Up. Their people traded everything they owned. Either killed in drunken quarrels, shot by whisky traders, frozen to death while drunk, or poisoned by the whisky itself. The biggest post was Fort Whoop-Up, a place of “drunken debauchery, fraud and cruelty.” Īnd a place of ever-present violence: “Hundreds of Blackfoot Indians died as a result of the whisky trade. And offering guns and potent “rotgut” trade whiskey in return for furs, buffalo robes and horses from an already anguished, desperate native people.įort Whoop-Up, Canadian North-West Territories, 1873 The Frontier traffickers pushed into the limitless unprotected “Indian country.” Building fortified trading posts. Then the ravening whiskey traders came, “Flogging their teams north with loads of ‘Injun whiskey’ to finish the job of destroying a race which their pestilence had started.” Which the First Nations people had found abandoned on the open plains. It had originated with wagonloads of infected blankets from the U.S. Père Albert Lacombe, a beloved priest of the Oblat de Marie-Immaculée in Winnipeg, reported on the source of the virulent Smallpox. ![]() Every village, every tipi, echoed with their death songs as the people suffered fever, delirium and death. Two years after Confederation, they were recalled to England.īy 1870, First Nations tribes were being devastated by a Smallpox epidemic. Keeping peace and good relations with the Native Peoples on behalf of “The Grandmother” (Queen Victoria). Rupert’s Land (an area as big as Europe, soon to be renamed the Canadian North-West Territories) was falling into a state of chaos.īefore Confederation, a small number of red-coated soldiers of the British Army patrolled Rupert’s Land. Shortly after Prime Minister John A MacDonald had led the Confederation of our new Dominion of Canada in 1867, he was given alarming news about the Canadian West. Fort Whoop-Up, Five Thousand Outlaws and the Mounties’ Great March West… Canadian Mounties: What’s in a name?Ī Brief History Note. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on Linkedin Share on Pinterest Share on XingĬanadian Mounties: The Story of the North-West Mounted Police is an epic one.Ĭanadian Mounted Police.
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