Calgary & Southern Alberta

The Surveyor, 1855 by Paul Kane
Courtesy of the Glenbow Collection

French traders were probably the first Europeans to meet Aboriginal people in southern Alberta. To this day, the Blackfoot word for "Frenchman" remains "real white man". The first written record of contact, however, was made in 1754, when Anthony Henday, an Englishman working for the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), visited a probable Blackfoot encampment near present day Red Deer.

Henday's aim was to convince Aboriginal people living in the western interior of the area called Rupert's Land to establish direct trade contact with the HBC. Unfamiliar with canoes and the terrain to the east, and fearing hostilities with the Cree and Assiniboine people – through whose territories they would have to pass to travel to the Hudson Bay – Henday's hosts showed little interest in the proposal.

Thirty-three years later, explorer David Thompson, working at the time for the HBC, wintered at a Peigan encampment on the Bow River. In 1792, yet another HBC employee, Peter Fidler, accompanied a party of Peigan to the Nose Hill area in what is now Calgary.

Despite these early encounters, it was not until the 1800s that the Blackfoot and their neighbours on the southern Alberta plains had more than passing contact with European newcomers. Nevertheless, European trade goods influenced how indigenous southern Albertans lived even before the first visitors actually passed through the region. As Aboriginal people to the east obtained increasing quantities of metal goods directly from Europeans, they began trading away their surplus inventory. The items started moving westward from community to community long before European explorers and traders arrived in southern Alberta.

In some respects, these early products of cross-cultural contact enhanced the quality of life for southern Alberta's indigenous population. Access to metal, for instance, eliminated the laborious task of making pottery and stone implements. Yet another European import, the horse, eased difficulties of transportation. Horses could carry eight times as much baggage as a dog and could travel twice as far in a day. They thus enabled their owners to move larger tipis than had been possible in the old "dog days", and to accumulate a wider variety of material goods.

The horse dramatically affected many other aspects of local culture as well, including bison hunting techniques. Along with the gun, which spread across the plains from the northeast, horses also altered political and military relations amongst First Nations people.

Some historians have called the period between the 1750s and the 1850s a "Golden Age" for the Aboriginal people of the plains. With the benefits of the European presence in North America, however, came events with disastrous consequences for southern Alberta's Native communities.