Calgary & Southern Alberta

Disastrous Consequences

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Fort Whoop-Up, built along the banks of the Oldman River (modern day Lethbridge)
by American Whiskey Traders: Courtesy of Alberta Tourism

By the early 1840s, the Blackfoot were trading directly with American fur traders and this contact linked the Blackfoot into a transportation network that funnelled goods up and down the Missouri River via Fort Benton, Montana. With the collapse of the dominant American Fur Company in 1864, independent (and often unscrupulous) American traders moved into the vacuum. When the American government imposed measures to restrict their activities on US territory, these American traders moved to what is now southern Alberta. They built a string of whisky forts where they bought buffalo robes from the area's First Nations and sold liquor. Both of these lucrative enterprises had disastrous repercussions on southern Alberta's Native people.

By the 1870s, the Blackfoot and their neighbours could no longer ignore the expanding number of Europeans encroaching on their territories. The new arrivals included the North-West Mounted Police, sent to remove the whisky traders from soil Ottawa regarded as Canadian, and Christian missionaries, who came to "civilise" the local population. The missionaries urged Aboriginal people to adopt not only Christianity, Western dress, and Western customs, but also a sedentary way of life, and a foreign image of the land as real estate one bought, sold, and planted with farm crops. In doing so, they posed a direct challenge to traditional Aboriginal beliefs, customs, and economic adaptations.

Europeans also directly disrupted Aboriginal societies by engaging in hostilities with indigenous people, and by introducing new illnesses to the plains. Smallpox and other virulent imported diseases ravaged southern Alberta's First Nations settlements in 1781-82, 1837-38, and again in 1857-59 and 1869-1870 (killing more than 600 Blackfoot members). Moreover, the presence of Europeans indirectly elevated the intensity and frequency of conflict amongst the First Nations themselves.

As they advanced westward in the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans intruded on Aboriginal territories. In doing so, they triggered a domino effect that pressed indigenous groups progressively westward onto their neighbours' territories. In addition, Europeans destabilised relations amongst First Nations peoples by introducing horses and guns to the continent. Not all Aboriginal groups had equal access to these valued items. Unlike the Blackfoot, for example, the plains Cree were supplied with guns by the late 1700s. Conversely, unlike their Blackfoot rivals, they had few horses. In the 1800s, horse raiding became a continual source of friction between the two groups. The horse also generated ill-feelings amongst Aboriginal neighbours simply by augmenting the efficiency of bison hunting methods and hunters' geographical mobility. It thus intensified competition for a resource now under increasing pressure form the influx of new European hunters.

The high European demand for bison hides and meat rapidly reduced the size of the bison herds on which the indigenous people depended for survival. After the last of the herds had disappeared from Alberta's plains in 1879 and from the Montana plains in the early 1880s, southern Alberta's Aboriginal population, already designated by Ottawa as British subjects, became economically dependant on the Crown as well.