Saskatchewan, big whitetail country!!! | 6V53N - 2/14/2015 10:16 Definitely the case after the bison were gone. Much changed before and after the bison. I am not sure where your from in Sask, but I recommend you to go and see Fort Walsh down in the Cypress Hills. One remarkable photo they have blown up on the wall was before and after the bison; they show a proud prosperous Blackfoot family. 5 years later they were poor and had pawned off all furs and anything of value. I read a good book about Canadian prairie settlers called "The Pioneer Years 1895-1914" by Barry Broadfoot. It mentions that it was not that uncommon for settler bachelors who lived alone to freeze to death in winter.
Been to FT Walsh several times. Well the books I have read, and explorer notes from as early as Henry Kelsey, show that even with the bison, the indians were in tough. As Henry Kelsey was guided into the interior by the indians, they went MANY DAYS without seeing a single game animal, and often ate things like Seagull eggs, and the odd pigeon to keep them alive...
Palliser in the 1870;s bailed out the indians on many occasions as he came across them emaciated and starving, and this was pre-bison disappearance. He also noted that the indians would INTENTIONALLY burn the prairies, as some kind of a "cultish cleansing", and wonder where the meat animals had gone...
When he crossed the mountains, he found in the BC interior, indians growing food, and commented they were in completely different condition that the wandering, starving prairie tribes.
These are notes directly from the explorers themselves, not from an interviewer taking notes half a century or more after the fact. I am sure there was the odd band that were somewhat proud and such. But I believe they were few and far between, judging by what early settlers found.
Both of those men intervened when the guide parties wanted to raid and collect scalps from other bands they encountered along the way. Sometimes the guides would slip out in the night to make an attack and never be seen or heard from again.
Both these men found very few natives in the land, and the ones they found, were inadvertently in tough shape, hanging on for their lives. And then history books were re-written to say otherwise.
Up in the northland, early trappers found the same condition, even into the thirties, while game was still abundant. I have read trappers journals that speak about terrible camp conditions and starving indians. One particular entry made me recognize how little some things change: an indian had shot a deer, and then found a moose and shot it. He left the deer floating in the lake, instead of utilising it for his kin. The trapper was mystified because food was so scarce. Not unlike the dead moose and elk I find every year on my land, shot by indians, and left to rot.
History is not what we all think it was in some instances....
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How did the settlers/Indians not freeze too death?
