Backgrounder

The winter of 1873 was hard in southern Saskatchewan. The buffalo were not plentiful and many among the Assiniboine starved that year. Three groups, about 300 people, made their way in the Spring, to camp just east of Moses Solomon’s trading fort in the Cypress Hills where they hoped to trade and rest.

The Cypress Hills had long been important to the Assiniboine and other First Nations. By the late 1800s, however, it had also become a centre of the whiskey trade.

In May 1873, not long after the Assiniboine had settled in, ten angry wolf hunters arrived from Montana, looking for 40 horses they believed had been stolen by Indians. Abel Farwell’s trading fort sat across the Milk River (now Battle Creek) from Moses Solomon’s and the hunters inquired there after their horses. Farwell told them that the Assiniboine camped to the east were honest and had with them only a few thin horses.

The hunters began drinking and, when a horse went missing, they decided the Assiniboine had stolen it.

On June 1, 1873, the hunters, and some Métis men who had been drinking with them, marched over to the Assiniboine camp where many were also drunk and seized two horses. Words were exchanged and, although the missing horse had already been found grazing in a nearby field, shots were fired. The hunters had the advantage of superior rifles and cover, some of them firing from the top of Moses Solomon’s fort and a nearby coulee. The Assiniboine – with only muzzle-loaders and bows and arrows – were caught exposed and unprepared. Between 25 and 80 Assiniboine died.

Fighting went on through the day and atrocities, into the night: Elders were shot hiding in the river bed, girls and women were raped, lodges burned, bodies dismembered; the exact number of dead is not clear. The hunters left in the morning, leaving the forts burning behind them.

The newly formed federal government was outraged at news of the massacre and, by next summer, the North West Mounted Police (NWMP) were dispatched to the Cypress Hills. They built Fort Walsh and Fort McLeod in what is now Saskatchewan and Alberta to try to establish peace amid the whiskey trade. The North West Territories Act was passed in 1875 to assert Canadian sovereignty and to establish government in the region. The NWMP tried to have the hunters extradited and finally did try three of them after they were found in Winnipeg. The hunters were acquitted.

The federal government created a national park in the Cypress Hills, recreating Fort Walsh. The exact location of the massacre, however, is now privately owned. Ancestors of the Carry the Kettle Band remain buried at the site and, every spring, the Band travels from its reserve in Maple Creek to the site to mark the massacre. In 2000, the Band purchased land nearby.