The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History

Creating a Border and Dividing a People

Michel Hogue

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469621067
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Born of encounters between Indigenous women and Euro-American men in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Plains Metis people occupied contentious geographic and cultural spaces. Living in a disputed area of the northern Plains inhabited by various Indigenous nations and claimed by both the United States and Great Britain, the Metis emerged as a people with distinctive styles of speech, dress, and religious practice, and occupational identities forged in the intense rivalries of the fur and provisions trade. Michel Hogue explores how, as fur trade societies waned and as state officials looked to establish clear lines separating the United States from Canada and Indians from non-Indians, these communities of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry were profoundly affected by the efforts of nation-states to divide and absorb the North American West. Grounded in extensive research in U.S. and Canadian archives, Hogue's account recenters historical discussions that have typically been confined within national boundaries and illuminates how Plains Indigenous peoples like the Metis were at the center of both the unexpected accommodations and the hidden history of violence that made the "world's longest undefended border."

Chapter One: Emergence

Creating a Metis Borderland

Dawn broke to a frenzy of activity. It was October 3, 1803, and families at the North West Company’s Pembina fur trading post had risen and tacked their horses before sunrise. By ten o’clock they had loaded their carts and travois with their baggage, assembled their dogs, and set course for a satellite post in the nearby Pembina Hills, known to some as the Hair Hills. Their goal: to supply the smaller post for the upcoming winter’s trade. Alexander Henry the Younger, the North West Company (NWC) partner who had established the post at the confluence of the Pembina and Red Rivers, watched the procession while perched atop the roof of his house. The group’s guide, Antoine Payet, along with his wife and their young child, led the caravan. Charles Bottineau followed, with his two horses and a cart loaded with packs, baggage, and kettles. His two eldest children also sat in the cart while Madame Bottineau followed, carrying their “squalling” baby on her back. Other couples trailed behind them, each bringing their young children and the necessary supplies for their trip. The single men traveled lightly, some having left with nothing more than their guns, pipes, and pouches of tobacco. A long train of twenty dogs brought up the rear. According to Henry, the colorful procession stretched for nearly a mile and appeared “like a large band of Assiniboines.”¹

The caravan Henry described in October 1803 was part of a broader trade strategy to draw Cree and Assiniboine bands away from his Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) rivals and to secure valuable furs and the provisions needed to sustain the North West Company’s far-flung trade operations. Pembina was located on the contested fringe of the territories occupied by the Ojibwas, Crees, Assiniboines, and Dakotas.² The threat of attack had prevented all but the most fleeting occupation of the region in the previous years, limiting the presence of the Ojibwa bands who were Henry’s principal clients. Henry had tried to strengthen his position by enticing bands of Crees and Assiniboines, who typically traded with the rival HBC at Brandon House and who also joined forces with the Ojibwas to combat the Dakotas, to trade instead at Pembina. When they refused, he established a series of satellite posts (like the one in the Pembina Hills) that were located between Pembina and the Assiniboine and Souris valleys and thus less susceptible to Dakota attack. These posts became important points for the collection of furs and buffalo meat traded by the Crees and Assiniboines.³

Charles Bottineau and the other men in the caravan were North West Company voyageurs, that is, contracted servants or workers for the company. In the years after 1803, many of these men gradually left or were forced out of the company’s service. They formed part of a growing population of so-called freemen on the Plains and in the Northwest who continued to work in the fur or provisions trade but who did so on their own account. Although formally independent from company contracts, they worked as part of a growing community comprised of other Euro-Canadian men who had left the service but remained at or near the posts with their Indigenous wives and their children of mixed descent. Charles Bottineau, his male associates, and their wives and children soon carved out an economic niche for themselves carting furs and provisions to and from fur trade establishments in the Red River country and the smaller satellite posts in and around Pembina.

The close links these men forged with Indigenous women, meanwhile, were equally important to the success of the fur and provisions trade in the region. The caravan’s resemblance to an Assiniboine band was not accidental; many Assiniboines were among its members, including Bottineau’s first wife, Techomehgood Assiniboine. The two had married according to the custom of the country sometime between 1797 and 1801, and by 1803 they had three young children. Within a few years, a number of their sons and daughters (as well as those Bottineau had with his second wife, Margaret Ah-dick Songab) married other children born of similar unions between Indigenous women and Euro-Canadian men.⁴ These mixed groups were increasingly prominent in the human landscape of the northern Plains, especially in and around the fur trade posts that had sprouted up across the Plains at the end of the eighteenth century. The children of Charles Bottineau and Techomehgood Assiniboine formed the first generation of what would become a new ethnic group, known variously as bois-brûlés (or “burnt wood”), half-breeds, Michif, or Metis, that increasingly distinguished itself from both its Indigenous and Euro-Canadian forbears.

Pembina was one of the key sites where Plains Metis communities flourished in the nineteenth century, and the members of the caravan bound for the Pembina Hills were among its progenitors. The emergence of increasingly distinct Plains Metis communities in the early nineteenth century was part of a broader pattern of ethnogenesis across the Great Plains. The emergence of new peoples was itself inseparable from colonial intrusions, particularly those generated by the advance of Atlantic market economies deep into the continent’s interior. The exchange of furs between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in the Great Lakes and along the shores of Hudson Bay linked Indigenous hunting practices to the expanding transatlantic market for furs and enmeshed members of both groups in alliances and rivalries. Trade also provided the critical vectors along which new material goods and deadly diseases could travel. As natives and newcomers displaced the effects of trade encounters and rivalries onto neighboring peoples, the postcontact Plains emerged as both a site of ethnogenesis and “a shatter belt of dispossession, repression, and population collapse.”⁵

The Plains Metis were among the Indigenous peoples who emerged or reimagined themselves in the shadow of these changes and who harnessed the political, economic, and military possibilities that accompanied such displacements.⁶ The year-round pursuit of buffalo that the Metis helped create gave a particular shape to Plains Metis communities. Their involvement in the buffalo economy also gave meaning to the different commercial or national jurisdictions that existed on the early nineteenth-century northern Plains. Indeed, the ascendance of the Plains Metis as a new and formidable power in the region meant that their trade loyalties, military power, and connections to their Indigenous neighbors were key to the commercial ambitions of U.S., Canadian, and British-based trade entities.

The Emergence of the Plains Metis

Henry’s fur trade post (and others like it) was a relatively recent addition to this corner of the northeastern Plains. The establishment of fur trade posts by Montreal-based fur traders and their rivals along the Red River at the turn of the nineteenth century had its roots in the first French explorations of the region 150 years earlier. In the 1730s, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Vérendrye, had established posts in the Red River valley, along the shores of Lake Winnipeg, and in the Lower Saskatchewan River region.⁷ The French trading presence was part of a vast commercial network that, by the mid-eighteenth century, extended from Montreal, through the Great Lakes, into the Canadian Northwest, and down the Mississippi Valley. The French expansion west of Lake Superior was aimed squarely at undermining the efforts of British fur traders who had established their own fur trade posts along the shores of Hudson Bay. Under its 1670 royal charter, the “Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay,” or Hudson’s Bay Company, claimed exclusive rights to trade and colonize the vast Hudson Bay basin, known as Rupert’s Land (after King Charles II’s cousin, Prince Rupert). Trade in the Northwest took place on lands the HBC considered its trading domain. Competition between French and British agents drove fur trade expansion.

New France’s collapse after the Seven Years’ War halted these ventures, but a renewed fur trade reemerged after 1763 with Montreal as its headquarters. Although Francophone merchants were squeezed out of the upper echelons of the fur trade after the British conquest, the nature of the trade remained largely unchanged even under British financial control. The loose collection of business partnerships that were at the heart of this trade coalesced in the 1780s to form the North West Company and launched an aggressive expansion deep into North America’s northern interior. In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, Montreal trading companies expanded aggressively in the Northwest, eventually establishing a string of posts from the western Great Lakes through the Saskatchewan River country in the 1770s and 1780s.⁸

Meanwhile, continued fur trade expansion beyond the Saskatchewan River country into the Athabasca country in the 1780s created long supply lines between fur trade posts and Montreal and an acute need to obtain supplies for both post employees and the fur trade brigades. As a result, trading companies began to build posts at the northern edge of the Plains to secure buffalo meat, grease, and pemmican, a staple made from buffalo flesh, tallow, and wild berries. This energy-rich and transportable food source was essential to sustaining fur trade operations across the North and West and became a fundamental part of the trade complex on the Plains.⁹

By the 1780s, Cree, Ojibwa, and Assiniboine bands had almost a century’s worth of experience with foreign fur traders in their homelands. The establishment of HBC trading posts along Hudson Bay allowed them to carve out a strategic position as intermediaries between the traders and the interior hunting and trapping bands. This gave the Crees and Assiniboines privileged access to guns, ammunition, and other manufactured goods and transformed them into a formidable economic and military power.¹⁰ Indeed, the Crees’ advantage in the gun trade apparently caused the Assiniboine, a Siouan-speaking people, to break their ties with their Yanktonai Dakota kin and seek an alliance with the western Crees. The alliance secured a key position for the Assiniboines as fur trade intermediaries along with the Crees but also inaugurated a long period of conflict between them and the Dakotas.¹¹

With the expansion of fur trade frontiers toward the northern plains, some woodland bands seized the opportunities that the traders’ demand for buffalo meat created and reoriented their lives and economies toward the Plains. By 1800, more and more Cree and Assiniboine bands had shifted their economic activities from the trapping, preparing, and trading of furs to the provisions trade and, in so doing, had migrated to the south and west onto the Plains. Like other Indigenous peoples to the south, they began to transform themselves into Plains equestrians. Unlike their neighbors, however, northern Plains peoples never acquired large horse herds, thanks mostly to the region’s climate. The relative scarcity of horses prevented the complete transition to mounted buffalo hunting that occurred elsewhere but nonetheless reworked social relations within bands. The disparities in horse access also provoked chronic warfare among northern Plains nations.¹²

This transformation of the northern Plains occurred in the shadow of epidemic disease. For instance, a smallpox epidemic tore through the northern Plains in 1781 and may have killed as many as 30,000 on the northern Plains alone and obliterated entire bands.¹³ The disease’s cross-continental reach illustrated how the infusion of new goods and the diffusion of horses accelerated movements and interactions among the peoples of the North American West. Trading and raiding routes “became the fissures by which epidemic became pandemic.”¹⁴ The consequences of smallpox were felt deep within these communities, and such effects were experienced unevenly across the Plains. For example, the disease struck the Assiniboines and Crees who lived east of the Red River particularly hard and may have resulted in the incorporation of surviving members into neighboring Ojibwa bands.¹⁵ If horses provided a pathway to genesis, disease provided its own macabre motives for reinvention.

The Ojibwa bands who traded at Henry’s Pembina post, for example, had only recently come to occupy the region. Their presence owed a great deal to the effects of fur trade rivalries to the east. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, for example, the Ojibwas and Dakotas had built an alliance that gave the Dakotas access to the European trade goods the Ojibwas traded with the French and that allowed the Ojibwas to hunt freely in Dakota territories. The alliance disintegrated after the French established direct trade relations with the Dakotas. Ojibwa bands began a series of armed migrations into Dakota territories, in present-day Minnesota. Ojibwa warriors joined Cree and Assiniboine raids on the Dakotas to the south. By the late eighteenth century, Ojibwa bands occupied the lands surrounding western Lake Superior as far as Lake of the Woods, Red Lake, and Leech Lake. In response to the Ojibwa attacks, Dakota bands gradually withdrew from their homelands in the Mille Lacs and Leech Lake region. The contraction of the buffalo herds and new trade opportunities also drew these Dakota bands west. By the end of the eighteenth century, only the Mdewakantons and Wahpekutes still lived in the woodlands. The Sissetons and Wahpetons (along with some of the Wahpekutes) abandoned the woodlands for life on the Plains. There, they joined other Dakota groups, the Yanktons and Yanktonais (with whom they became closely associated) and the bands that comprised the westernmost Sioux group, the Lakotas.¹⁶

By 1800, such changes had created an interethnic landscape of the northeastern Plains in which communities were characterized by varying degrees of mixing on a continuum that ranged from the creation of alliances among different ethnic groups to the formation of new, composite groups with distinct ethnic identities. The precise nature of these relations, and the patterns of ethnicity that resulted, depended on the specific historical context and varied across bands and kin groupings. As they did elsewhere, members of Cree and Assiniboine bands on the northeastern Plains intermarried, occupied joint camping sites, and collaborated in subsistence and ceremonial activities and in matters of trade. They were joined by growing numbers of Ojibwas who had also migrated from the woodlands onto the Plains. Like the Assiniboine and Cree before them, they too had begun to adopt an equestrian buffalo-hunting lifestyle. Indeed, the Ojibwa presence expanded in tandem with tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Metis and the Medicine Line
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Maps and Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Borders and Belonging
• Chapter One: Emergence
• Chapter Two: Exchange
• Chapter Three: Belonging
• Chapter Four: Resistance
• Chapter Five: Exile
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index