article
The Cypress Hills massacre: a century's retrospect
Saskatchewan history • 26 (3) • Published In 1973 • Pages: 81-102
By: Goldring, P..
AbstractBrief abstract written by HRAF anthropologists who have done the subject indexing for the document
In the spring of 1873, a number of Assinboine were camped at a location called Cypress Hillls in southwestern Saskatechewan '…where two traders named Abel Farwell and Moses Solomon had erected trading posts the year before. Tension and mistrust between traders and Indians came to a head while a dozen or more frontier characters from Fort Benton happened to be camped a stone's throw from Fort Farwell. A strayed horse was mistakenly believed to have been stolen, and in the resulting confusion firing broke out which culminated in the complete destruction of the Indian camp and the deaths of twenty or more persons. American and Canadian attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice were thwarted by the climate of opinion in Montana, which was quite ready to condone the massacre whatever it origins, and by the failure of the government witnesses to tell a convincing story in the face of conflicting testimony' (p. 81). Goldring examines some of the major publications on the massacre including reconstruction of the events from various historical documents as well as surviving accounts of the massacre given by alleged participants from ten to fifty years later, and the judicial records of the legal proceedings of the American and Canadian governments which lasted virtually from the time of the massacre until three participants were tried for murder in Winnipeg in the last week of June 1876. From the analysis of these records the author attempts to present to the reader a clearer picture of what actually happened at Cypress Hills in 1873.
- SubjectsDocument-level OCM identifiers given by the anthropology subject indexers at HRAF
- External trade
- Retail marketing
- External relations
- Warfare
- cultureCulture name from the Outline of World Cultures (OWC)
- Assiniboine
- HRAF PubDateThe date HRAF published the document
- 2002
- RegionThe area the document pertains to
- North America
- Sub RegionThe more specific area the document pertains to, which is located within the Region
- Plains and Plateau
- Document TypeMay include journal articles, essays, collections of essays, monographs, or chapters/parts of monographs
- article
- Evaluation
- Creator TypeThe type of person writing the document, e.g. Ethnographer, Missionary, Archaeologist, Folklorist, Linguist, Indigenous Person, and so on.
- Unknown
- Document Rating A ranking done by HRAF anthropologists based on the strength of the source material on a scale of 1 to 5, as follows: 1 - poor; 2 - fair; 3 - good, useful data, but not uniformly excellent; 4 - excellent secondary data; 5 - excellent primary data.
- 4: Excellent Secondary Data
- AnalystThe HRAF anthropologist who subject indexed the document and prepared other materials for the eHRAF culture/tradition collection
- John Beierle ; 2001
- Field DateThe date the researcher conducted the fieldwork or archival research that produced the document
- no date
- Coverage DateThe date or dates that the information in the document pertains to
- 1873
- Coverage PlaceLocation of the research culture or tradition (often a smaller unit such as a band, community, or archaeological site)
- Cypress Hills, southwestern Saskatchewan, Canada
- NotesAdditional notes
- P. Goldring
- Includes bibliographical references
- LCCNLibrary of Congress Control Number
- 54026145
- LCSHLibrary of Congress Subject Headings
- Assiniboine Indians