by J. William Brennan
Department of History, University of Regina
|
Walter Hildebrandt and Brian Hubner. The Cypress Hills: The Land And Its People. Saskatoon: Purich Publishing, 1994. pp. 136, maps, illustrations. ISBN 1-895830-02-8.
The Cypress Hills, which stretch across the south-western corner of Saskatchewan into neighbouring Alberta, was a much larger plateau 40 million years ago before glaciation began to erode it. Native people were early attracted to the fragment that remained (comprising roughly 1,000 square miles), and in time so were others: Métis provisions hunters, American whiskey traders, the Mounted Police and then ranchers. The history of the Cypress Hills, and of the people who have lived there over thousands of years, is the subject of this short and very readable account.
Hildebrandt’s and Hubner’s narrative begins with the native people, whose association with the Cypress Hills must date back at least 6,000 years judging from the remains of a camp site which archaeologists have discovered there. The Cypress Hills provided shelter from the biting winter winds and wild game was in abundance. The lodgepole pine grew there too. It was tall and straight, and native people found it well-suited for making the frame for their tipis and their dog (and later horse) travois.
Much of the book deals with the three decades—the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s—when the Cypress Hills were at the centre of the history of the western plains. The story is a familiar one. At the end of the Civil War American traders established a presence in the Cypress Hills as they did farther west in the foot-hills of the Rockies. Whiskey was their stock-in-trade, and lawlessness and violence followed. The most celebrated episode of violence in the Cypress Hills occurred in June 1873, when a group of drunken American wolfers (men who hunted wolves for their fine pelts) murdered at least twenty Assiniboin in cold blood. This led to the creation of the North-West Mounted Police, which established one of its earliest posts, Fort Walsh, there in June 1875. Eighteen months later Sitting Bull and nearly 3,0000 Dakota sought refuge on Canadian soil to escape an American army determined to avenge the defeat of Lieutenant-Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn. At the same time some 4,000 Cree and Assiniboin were also camped in the Cypress Hills. Their leaders — Big Bear, Piapot and Little Pine—were hopeful that a concentration of native people there would force the Canadian government to fulfill the treaty promises it had made.
Cree Chief Big Bear at Stony Mountain Penitentiary, 1885.
Source: National Archives of Canada
But Hildebrandt and Hubner tell the story with a great deal more sympathy for the native people than is found in some earlier histories of these events. They point out, for example, that the Dakota had sided with the British against the Americans during the War of 1812 and “... thus felt they had a right to Canada’s protection in their own time of need.” (89) However their plea for sanctuary fell on deaf ears. The Canadian government was insistent that they return to the United States, the North-West Mounted Police systematically undermined Sitting Bull’s authority over his people, and in 1881 the last of the Dakota left, destitute and dispirited. It was, the authors conclude, “... a regrettable page in the history of Canada.” (104)
They also demonstrate how the same policy of “divide and conquer” was applied against the Cree and Assiniboin. Recognizing that a large concentration of native people on contiguous reserves in the Cypress Hills would make it more difficult to control them, the Department of Indian Affairs forced first Piapot, then Little Pine, and eventually even Big Bear to leave and take up reserves farther north and east. Only one band, that of Foremost Man or Nekaneet, refused. It was 1913 before a reserve was eventually established for the band near the Cypress Hills, and 1975 before the band began to receive its treaty benefits, the authors note.
The research for this book was originally undertaken for Parks Canada in conjunction with the development of the Fort Walsh National Historic Site. Happily, it will now find a wider audience among those interested in the history of native people and of western Canada.
Page revised: 4 December 2011
