Index

2.  B.B. LaRiviere - Entrepreneur The First Stopping Place in the Southwest There are, or were, two Wakopas. Many people refer to the first one as Old Wakopa. The first entrepreneur in the Turtle Mountain district was a fur trader, Bernard B La Rivière. The story of “Old Wakopa” begins with Mr. La Rivière.  What we know about his past is a bit hazy. Word of mouth has it that traded furs at Crookston, Minnesota where he owned a large fur warehouse. It seems that in 1874 he was asked to leave that community by law officers after being suspected of selling liquor to the Aboriginals. Whatever the motivation, he settled in Nelsonville, a would-be boom town, that quickly disappeared when Morden was established. On a hunting trip to Turtle Mountain in 1876, he saw an opportunity. The Red River valley was already dotted with farming communities. Everyone knew that European settlers would be pushing westward soon.  Treaties were being signed and railways were being planned. Homestead regulations were being formulated. He decided to be ahead of the crowd, to have a stopping place and store up and running for when the trickle of traders, surveyors, and travellers already venturing westward gave way to a steady stream of homesteaders. There would be many of them and they would need supplies. Just as a would-be gas station owner in later times would prefer to be on a highway, La Rivière  had the same plan. The Boundary Commission Trail was the highway. He selected a spot on the Long River, just east of the slope of Turtle Mountain, a spot once used by Assiniboine hunters as a camping place. About a kilometre east of his property the Boundary Commission surveyors had built the Turtle Mountain Depot in 1873.  The next year it was used by the Northwest Mounted Police on their famous trek to Alberta.  It was now vacant and La Rivière bought it and all the supplies that were left.    Returning to Nelsonville, he loaded several wagons, rounded up 20 cattle and returned. He soon built a house and store, one on either side of the Trail, which became the settlement's main street. He became the area's first general store owner and founder of the very first settlement town in the southwest. At first the settlement was called La Rivière, but an Assiniboine man who lived nearby called him by the name of Wakopa—meaning “White Haired Father”. This name was adopted by the village and came into regular use in 1881. ( * See endnotes for some discussion on this point.) The trading post was the chief source of supply for settlers for miles around. Prices were high. In the spring of 1880 a pioneer complained that he had to pay $8.00 for a bag of flour. That same year La Rivière bought 2,000 bags at Nelsonville at $1.75 a bag. But high prices were normal on a frontier. Transportation costs were heavy when goods had to be brought by wagon or oxcart from Emerson, Nelsonville or Morden. Everything that La Rivière did set the stage for the next few years as Wakopa became established at the heart of a newly populated district. *Naming Wakopa There is some disagreement amongst pioneers when it comes to the story of the name Wakopa. George Monteith, the son of a pioneer,  tells it this way: “In the early days, a Frenchman named Lariviere came there as a fur trader. There was also a post of the Hudson Bay Co. fur traders there. Lariviere gathered a force of half-breeds and they had a fight with the Hudson Bay Company and defeated the company men and drove them out. The name of the fight was called the Battle of the Broken Wheel, a Red River cart having overturned and a wheel broken. The name Broken Wheel is the Indian name for Wakopa.” We’re not sure where Mr. Monteith got his information but Mr. Henderson, also a pioneer, passed down this story of his first visit… “There was a little village started, a house and a store were there, built by a man by the name of La Rivière. The village was at first called Lariviere, afterwards named Wakopa by an old Indian, who thought a lot of La Rivière, Wakopa meaning ‘White Feather’.” In the Johnson family, yet another version is told. “Wakopa – a small village five miles from the U.S. boundary, through which runs what is known as the old “Commission Trail” up which in the Rebellion of /85 the half breeds from the U.S. ascended to the North West. Inhabitants suffered greatly though fear. Its Indian name means Running Water. In the story of Peter Bryan we come across a variation of our first example. “ Wakopa is the Indian name for Broken-Wheel. A few years earlier the Indians and half breeds under La Rivière  had fought a battle on this very spot. During the fray a wheel of one of the Red River carts was broken. Hence the name of the town that sprang up.” So what are we to believe? Who was B. B. La Rivière?  In 1880 Reverend Armstrong made a trip west along the Boundary Trail which ended with a visit to Wakopa. His account of that trip included this assessment of Mr. La Rivière… Mr. Bernard B. La Riviere was one of the most colourful characters in southern Manitoba history. Originally a resident of Ottawa, in 1869 he moved to St. Paul and from there to Crookston, Minnesota where he opened a general store and also became a fur trader. Here, in the phrase of the Winnipeg Daily Times of 7 July 1880, he soon amassed “a princely fortune.” Jealous business rival brought charges against him that he was selling liquor to the Indians of a nearby reservation. These charges resulted in the seizure of his property worth more than $25,000. About the time when the Boundary Commission was completing its work, he arrived in Manitoba and, making his way to the Turtle Mountains, decided he would establish himself in this district. He purchased the Turtle Mountain Depot from Commissioner Cameron with its remaining unused stores and again went into business as a fur trader with the neighbouring Sioux Indians, fugitives in their region after the Minnesota massacres in the early 1860s and the St. Joe Massacre of 1874. He also went into stock raising and starting with four cows in 1874 by the fall of 1879 he had a herd of 61 head on his claim of 1,280 acres. His relationship with the neighbouring Indians was quite remarkable for that period as noted in the December 1879 report of the Dufferin Immigration agent, Mr. J. E. Tetu: “To encourage them he furnished them with means and instruction, lent them oxen and taught them how to till the land, gave them seed corn and potatoes and generally assisted them.”