History of Alberta
The province of Alberta, Canada, has a history and prehistory stretching back thousands of years. The ancestors of today's First Nations in Alberta arrived in the area by at least 10,000 BC according to the Bering land bridge theory. Southerly tribes, the Plains Indians, such as the Blackfoot, Blood, and Peigans eventually adapted to seminomadic plains bison hunting, originally without the aid of horses, but later with horses that Europeans had introduced.
Recorded or written history begins with the arrival of Europeans. The rich soil was ideal for growing wheat and the vast prairie grasslands were great for raising cattle. The coming of the railways in the late 19th century led to large-scale migration of farmers and cattleman from Eastern Canada, the United States, and Europe. Wheat and cattle remain important, but the farms are much larger now and the rural population much smaller. Alberta has urbanized and its economic base has expanded from the export of wheat and beef to include the export of oil and gas as well.
Indigenous groups
More northerly tribes, like the Woodland Cree and the Chipewyan also hunted, trapped, and fished for other types of game in the aspen parkland and boreal forest regions.Later, the mixture of these native peoples with French fur traders created a new cultural group, the Métis. The Métis established themselves to the east of Alberta, but after being displaced by white settlement, many migrated to Alberta.
Political history of the indigenous peoples
Following the arrival of outside European observers it is possible to reconstruct a rough narrative history of the nations of what later became Alberta. Using later-recorded oral histories as well as archaeological and linguistic evidence, it also possible to make inferences back further in time. But in both cases the evidentiary base is thin.It is believed that at least some parts of the Great Plains were depopulated by a prolonged period of the drought during the Medieval Warm Period. The area was repopulated once the drought subsided, by peoples from a diverse number of language families and from all parts of the North American continent. The Numic languages are from the Uto-Aztecan language family and came to the Plains from the southwest. Algonquian speakers are originally from the northeast. The Siouxan peoples speak a family of languages different from both of the above, and are from southeast. There are also small offshoots of the Na-Dene languages from the far northwest found on the Plains, including the Tsuu T'ina.
Lodges, bands, tribes, and confederacies
The smallest unit of organization for both plains and subarctic people was what the European-Canadian explorers called a "lodge". A lodge was an extended family or other close-knit group who lived together in the same teepee or other dwelling. Lodges travelled together in groups which anthropologists call "bands". In the case of the Blackfoot during the historic era this would include 10 to 30 lodges, or roughly 80 to 240 persons. The band was the fundamental unit of organization on the Plains for both hunting and warfare. Bands were loose associations that could be formed and dissolved depending on circumstances, which gave their member lodges much freedom, but also less certainty. Therefore, people would also be socially bound to others in variety of other groups, such as common descent, common language and religion, or a common age or rank.Population density for both plains and subarctic peoples was quite low, but distributed very differently. Plains bands could often congregate into large, pan-tribal hunting or war parties—especially once horses were available—due to the abundant supply of bison for food and the open, easily traversed landscape. As well, bands could migrate over vast distances, following the bison or for military purposes. Subarctic peoples also migrated, but in much smaller groups since the productivity of the boreal forests is so low that it cannot support any large groups in one place for long. Migrations in the subarctic would include following traplines, snowshoeing onto frozen lakes for ice fishing, searching for moose and other game, and returning to favourite berry patches.
When historians speak of political units on the Great Plains they often speak of "inter-tribal warfare" but most political decisions were not made strictly on the basis of ethnic identity. Most often, bands from a number of different tribes would form a semi-permanent alliance, called a confederacy by English-language observers. The pre-settlement political history of the Great Plains is one of shifting membership in a number of large confederacies, consisting of dozens of bands from multiple tribes.
First recorded politics
An early account comes from Saukamappe, who as a very old man recounted events going back as far as his youth to explorer David Thompson in the 1780s. French explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye made it as far west as the upper Missouri River in 1738, and his sons were also explorers of the West. Based on these and other sources it is possible to derive a rough picture of the political map of the northern Great Plains during the eighteenth century. The Eastern Shoshone were able to acquire horses from their southern linguistic cousins at an early stage, and therefore became dominant on the northern Plains. By the early 1700s their hunting range extended from the North Saskatchewan River in the north to the Platte River in the south and all along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains and out onto the plains to the east. The Shoshone became extremely feared for constantly launching raids to capture more war prisoners. This earned them the hatred of all of their neighbours, and resulted in a temporary alliance between the Blackfoot Confederacy, Sarsis, Plains Crees, Assiniboines, and Gros Ventres to resist the Shoshone.The Shoshone could not keep a monopoly on the horses, however, and soon the Blackfoot had their own, obtained through trade from the Crow, captured in raids, or bred by the Blackfoot themselves. At the same time the Blackfoot began to acquire firearms from the British Hudson's Bay Company to the northeast, often via Cree and Assiniboine middlemen. The Peigans were then able to begin to push the Shoshone south of the Red Deer River by 1780. The 1780–1782 smallpox outbreak devastated both the Shoshone and Blackfoot; however, the Blackfoot used their newly acquired military superiority to launch raids on the Shoshone in which they captured large numbers of women and children, who were then forcibly assimilated into Blackfoot culture thereby increasing their numbers and reducing their enemy's. According to David Thompson, by 1787 the Blackfoot conquest of Shoshone territory was complete. The Shoshone moved across the Rockies or far to the south, and only rarely came onto the plains to hunt or trade. The Blackfoot claimed an area from the North Saskatchewan River in the north to the upper reaches of the Missouri River in the south, and from the Rockies east for.
Blackfoot control of the sources of horses was not secure, however, and neither were their hunting grounds. From the northeast the Iron Confederacy were losing their position as middlemen traders as the HBC and the North West Company moved inland, and they were instead taking up horse-mounted bison hunting on the very territory the Blackfoot had recently captured from the Shoshone.
Pre-Confederation
The first Europeans to reach Alberta were the French, such as Frenchman Pierre La Vérendrye or one of his sons, who had travelled inland to Manitoba in 1730, establishing forts and trading furs directly with the native peoples there. Exploring the river system further, the French fur traders would have likely engaged the Blackfoot-speaking people directly; proof of this being that the word for "Frenchman" in the Blackfoot language means, "real white man". By the mid-eighteenth century, they were siphoning off most of the best furs before they could reach the Hudson's Bay trading posts further inland, sparking tension between the rival companies.The first written account of present-day Alberta is by the fur trader Anthony Henday, who explored the vicinity of present-day Red Deer and Edmonton in 1754–55 in an attempt to establish direct trade between Hudson's Bay and the people of the prairies. He spent the winter with a group of Cree and met with others, likely Blackfoot. Other important early explorers of Alberta include Peter Fidler, David Thompson, Peter Pond, Alexander MacKenzie, and George Simpson. The first European settlement was founded at Fort Chipewyan by MacKenzie in 1788, although Fort Vermilion disputes this claim, having also been founded in 1788.
The early history of Alberta is closely tied to the fur trade, and the rivalries associated with it. The first battle was between English and French traders, and often took the form of open warfare. Most of central and southern Alberta is part of the Hudson Bay watershed, and in 1670 was claimed by the English Hudson's Bay Company as part of its monopoly territory, Rupert's Land. This was contested by French traders operating from Montreal, the coureurs des bois. When France's power on the continent was crushed after the fall of Quebec in 1759, the British HBC was left with unfettered control of the trade, and exercised its monopoly powers.
This was soon challenged in the 1770s by the North West Company, a private Montreal-based company that hoped to recreate the old French trading network in the waters that did not drain to the Hudson Bay, such as the Mackenzie River, and waters draining to the Pacific Ocean. Many of Alberta's cities and towns started as either HBC or NWC trading posts, including Fort Edmonton. The HBC and NWC eventually merged in 1821, and in 1870 the new HBC's trade monopoly was abolished and trade in the region was opened to any entrepreneur. Although the process of transferring Rupert's Land and the North-Western Territory to the Dominion of Canada began much earlier, the current land of Alberta then became a part of the North-West Territories as part of the Rupert's Land Act 1868 on July 15, 1870.
The economic struggle represented by the fur trade was paralleled by a spiritual struggle between rival Christian churches hoping to win converts among the native Indians. The first Roman Catholic missionary was Jean-Baptiste Thibault, who arrived at Lac Sainte Anne in 1842. The Methodist Robert Rundle arrived in 1840 and established Rundle's Mission in 1847.
In 1864 the Roman Catholic Church in Canada tasked Albert Lacombe with evangelizing the Plains Indians, with which he had some success. Several Alberta towns and regions were first settled by French missionary activity, such as St. Albert, and St. Paul. The Anglican Church of Canada and several other Protestant denominations also sent missions to the Natives.
The area later to become Alberta was acquired by the fledgling Dominion of Canada in 1870 in the hopes that it would become an agricultural frontier settled by White Canadians. To "open up" the land to settlement, the government began negotiating the Numbered Treaties with the various Native nations, which offered them reserved lands and the right to government support in exchange for ceding all claims to the majority of the lands to the Crown. At the same time the decline of the HBC's power had allowed American whisky traders and hunters to expand into southern Alberta, disrupting the Native way of life. Of particular concern was Fort Whoop-Up near present-day Lethbridge, and the associated Cypress Hills massacre of 1873.
At the same time as whisky was being introduced to the First Nations, firearms were becoming more easily available. Meanwhile, white hunters were shooting huge numbers of plains bison, the primary food source of the plains tribes. Diseases were also spreading among the tribes. Warfare and starvation became rampant on the plains. Eventually disease and starvation weakened the tribes to the point where warfare became impossible. This culminated in 1870 with the Battle of the Belly River between the Blackfoot Confederacy and the Cree. It was the last major battle fought between native nations on Canadian soil.
To bring law and order to the West, the government created the North-West Mounted Police, the "Mounties", in 1873. In July 1874, 275 officers began the March West towards Alberta. They reached the western end of the trek by setting up a new headquarters at Fort Macleod. The force was then divided, half going north to Edmonton, and half heading back to Manitoba. The next year, new outposts were founded: Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills, and Fort Calgary, around which the city of Calgary formed.
As the bison disappeared from the Canadian West, cattle ranches moved in to take their place. Ranchers were among the most successful early settlers. The arid prairies and foothills were well suited to American-style, dry-land, open-range ranching. Black American cowboy John Ware brought the first cattle into the province in 1876. Like most hired hands, Ware was American, but the industry was dominated by powerful British- and Ontario-born magnates such as Patrick Burns.
The peace and stability the Mounties brought fostered dreams of mass settlement on the Canadian Prairies. The land was surveyed by the Canadian Pacific Survey for possible routes to the Pacific. The early favourite was a northerly line that went through Edmonton and the Yellowhead Pass. The success of the Mounties in the south, coupled with a government desire to establish Canadian sovereignty of that area, and the Canadian Pacific Railway's desire to undercut land speculators, prompted the CPR to announce a last minute switch of the route to a more southerly path passing through Calgary and the Kicking Horse Pass. This was against the advice of some surveyors who said that the south was an arid zone not suitable for agricultural settlement.
In 1882 the District of Alberta was created as part of the North-West Territories, and named for Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, fourth daughter of Queen Victoria, and wife of the Marquess of Lorne, who was Governor General of Canada at the time.