Experience the Old Forts Trail North Wes t Mounted Police office Image cou rs pose at Fo rtesy of Ko otenai Bro rt Macleod wn Pionee . r Vilalge.
Im
rtesy age cou
of Peel’
s Prairie
Provinc
es
1874 Old Fort Woop-Up a Alt ge rid thb Le ar Ne Image courtesy of ces Peel’s Prairie Provin a.ca), ert alb y.u rar lib (peel.
The history of forts in North America is a long and complex one. Rivalries, sometimes brutal, were common between fur trading companies, European nations, and First Nations.
as far south as Yellowstone in southern Montana. The antipathy between these two nations helped shape the story of Canada’s west for over a hundred years.
Starting with the arrival of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1670, the fur trade quickly became a rapacious, productive, and not entirely a peaceful process. Just as in today’s world, individual nation’s economies rose and fell depending on their trading relationships or fortuitous geography.
When the Blackfoot dared to travel northward to HBC’s Fort Edmonton to trade they did so in force out of concern over conflict. But trade they did. For the allure of European goods was compelling. ‘Thunder sticks’, or rifles, were the iPhones of their day, an absolutely essential piece of technology helping transform one’s life, specifically in the ability to hunt and feed a family - or to engage in war.
In eastern Canada, Iroquois and Cree Nations, for example, prospered in the early days from their relationship with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Eventually, as their own lands were depleted of viable furs, the HBC encouraged their indigenous suppliers to migrate westward, either peaceably or forcefully, into new hunting grounds. By 1774, many forts were being established is now today’s Alberta by both the HBC at Fort Edmonton and their bitter rivals the Northwest Company at Fort Chipewyan north of Fort McMurray. Aided by their European muskets, the Cree Nation’s westward expansion eventually brought them into contact, and often conflict, with the Blackfoot confederacy, a nation covering much of what is now southern Alberta and Saskatchewan and
By the 1830’s, the Blackfoot Confederacy was seen as North America’s last great untapped market by a new wave of fort builders – American fur and whiskey traders. Prohibited by law from trading whiskey to U.S. tribes, they would haul their goods in large wagons overland to Canadian territory where there was no cavalry to bother them. For early traders, like those at the notorious ‘Fort Whoop-Up’, which was originally built by Americans and known as Fort Hamilton near today’s Lethbridge, the new market was a gold mine! Buffalo fur robes that might take a native woman many months to create, were purchased sometimes for just a cup of
10 | Enter our Photo & Selfie Contests
