The North-West Mounted Police reached Fort Whoop-Up, the notorious American whisky trading post in what is now southern Alberta, on Oct. 9, 1874, ending a march of nearly three months across the Prairies.
The young force had expected a fight. Instead, the traders had already left, and the police found no whisky at the post, according to accounts of the march.
Parliament created the North-West Mounted Police in 1873 to assert Canadian authority over the western territory and to stop the illicit whisky trade. The force left Fort Dufferin, Man., on July 8, 1874, with about 275 men in six divisions, according to Wikipedia’s account of the March West. Its leaders were Commissioner George Arthur French and Assistant Commissioner James Macleod.
Fort Whoop-Up had been built in 1869 by John J. Healy and Alfred B. Hamilton, both from Montana, at the junction of the Belly (now Oldman) and St. Mary rivers near present-day Lethbridge, The Canadian Encyclopedia said. The first post burned after a single trading season, and a larger second fort was begun in 1870.
The traders swapped cheap, often adulterated whisky for bison robes with Blackfoot and Cree people on the unpoliced southern plains. The region became known as Whoop-Up country, and the trade left deep harm in Indigenous communities.
The arrival of the police did not bring a battle, but it did bring a change in who held authority on the southern Prairies. Within weeks, Macleod and his men moved about 30 kilometres west to build Fort Macleod on an island in the Oldman River, according to FortWiki. The post became the force’s first base in the region and the starting point for patrols that pushed the whisky posts out of business.
Historians have long treated the 1874 march as a founding moment for the force that became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It also helped set the stage for Treaty 7, signed with the Blackfoot Confederacy and neighbouring nations in 1877, although the treaty’s legacy remains contested among many First Nations.
A note on sources: the exact day is not given everywhere. The Canadian Press Today in History feature and Wikipedia both list Oct. 9, 1874. The Canadian Museum of History, The Canadian Encyclopedia and FortWiki say only that the police arrived in October 1874. No source reviewed gave a different date.
Fort Whoop-Up did not last long after the police came. For a few years part of it served as a police outpost, then it fell into disrepair, and settlers burned it and salvaged its lumber and metal, The Canadian Encyclopedia said. A replica of the second fort was built in 1967 and now stands in Lethbridge, where it operates as a national historic site and museum.
The story still echoes in how Western Canada understands its past. The Mounties arrived as the instrument of a new federal government, in a land where Indigenous nations had lived for millennia. What began as a campaign against whisky traders became part of the larger story of treaties, settlement and the opening of the Prairies.
Sources: Canadian Press Today in History, Wikipedia, March West, The Canadian Encyclopedia, Fort Whoop-Up, Canadian Museum of History and FortWiki, Fort Whoop-Up.
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