Iron Confederacy
The Iron Confederacy or Iron Confederation was a political and military alliance of Plains Indians of what is now Western Canada and the northern United States. This confederacy included various individual bands that formed political, hunting and military alliances in defense against common enemies. The ethnic groups that made up the Confederacy were the branches of the Cree that moved onto the Great Plains around 1740, the Saulteaux, the Nakoda or Stoney people also called Pwat or Assiniboine, and the Métis and Haudenosaunee. The Confederacy rose to predominance on the northern Plains during the height of the North American fur trade when they operated as middlemen controlling the flow of European goods, particularly guns and ammunition, to other Indigenous nations, and the flow of furs to the Hudson's Bay Company and North West Company trading posts. Its peoples would take part in the bison hunt, and the pemmican trade. The decline of the fur trade and the collapse of the bison herds sapped the power of the Confederacy after the 1860’s.
Origins
The Assiniboine are believed to have originated on the southern edge of the Laurentian Shield in present-day Minnesota. They became a separate people from their closest linguistic cousins, the Yanktonai Dakota, sometime prior to 1640 when they are first mentioned by Europeans in the Jesuit Relation. They were not a member of the "Seven Fires Council" of the Great Sioux Nation by this time and were referred to by other Sioux speakers as the Hohe or "rebels". By 1806, the historical evidence definitively locates them in the Assiniboine River valley in present-day Saskatchewan and Manitoba.The Cree had been in contact with Europeans since around 1611 when Henry Hudson reached their ancestral homeland around Hudson and James Bays. The traditional view of historians, based on the accounts of European traders, is that once the Hudson's Bay Company began to establish itself in the Hudson Bay region, two branches of the Cree began moving west and south to act as middlemen traders. They denied other plains peoples access to the HBC, except for the Assiniboine, in exchange for peaceful relations. A more recent view, based on oral history and linguistic evidence, suggests that the Cree were already established west of Lake Winnipeg when the HBC arrived, and were likely present as far west as the Peace River Region of present-day Alberta.
When the Hudson's Bay Company opened its first bayside posts in 1668 and 1688, the Cree became their main customers and resellers. Prior to this the Cree had been at the northwestern edge of a trade system linked to the French, from which they received only the secondhand goods others were ready to discard. Once in possession of direct access to European tools and weapons, the Cree were able to expand rapidly West.
The earliest written record of the military and political relations of the nations west of Hudson's Bay comes from Henry Kelsey's journal. In it, he states that the Cree and the Assiniboine had good relations with the Blackfoot and were already allies against the "Eagle Birch Indians, Mountain Poets, and Nayanwattame Poets".
The history of the Stoney before the mid-eighteenth century are obscure. They speak a Siouan language they call cat=no, which is little different from Assiniboine. The present-day Stoney Nation of Alberta believes that Kelsey's mention of the "Mountain Poets" may refer to their ancestors. However, the consensus view is that they were not yet a separate people from the Assiniboine. There is clear evidence of them as a separate group from 1754–1755 when Anthony Henday wrote of camping with "Stone" families near present-day Red Deer, Alberta. The Stoney were already trading with the Cree fur traders at this point and were military allies.
Early expansion and the fur trade
American ethnographer and historian Edward S. Curtis wrote about the close but unstable relationship between the Assiniboine and the Plains Cree, and how, after the Plains and Woods Cree territories diverged, the Woods Cree were no longer a part of this military alliance:During this early period the north front of expansion is better documented. By the early 1700s the Cree had come into conflict with the Chipewyan to their northwest. With the help of a Chipewyan interpreter, Thanadelthur, the HBC was able to help broker a peace between the Cree and Chipewyan in 1715. By 1760, the western front of Cree expansion reached the Lesser Slave Lake region of what is now northern Alberta where the Cree eventually pushed out the Beaver people. The Cree-Beaver conflicts lasted until the smallpox epidemic in 1781 decimated the Cree in the region, leading to a peace treaty ratified by a pipe ceremony at Peace Point, which gave its name to the Peace River. The river became the boundary with the Beavers on the left bank and the Cree on the right bank.
In the south little political or economic history is recorded for several decades. Recounting his story to David Thompson many years later, a Cree man named Saukamappee told of a band of Cree aiding the Piegan in their conflict with the Snake near the Eagle Hills around 1723. The battle was fought on foot with bows-and-arrows tipped with obsidian, and neither guns nor horses were involved at this point. By 1732 the Snakes had horses, which they were using to great effect against the Piegan, and so the Piegan called upon the Cree and Assiniboine for assistance. This time, however, Sukamappee says that Cree and Assiniboine muskets turned the battle in their favour. By 1750, Legardeur de Saint Pierre noted that the Cree and Assiniboine were successfully raiding the "Hyactljlini" "Brochets" and "Gros Ventres", and despite his peacemaking efforts the Assiniboine massacred a group of the "Hyactljlini".
In 1754 Henday reported that he was able to buy a horse from the Assiniboine camped near present-day Battleford, Saskatchewan, and was the first European witness to Cree-Assiniboine trade with the "Archithinue". From this and later accounts, the content of the trade is well known: the Cree and Assiniboine gave European goods including guns, knives, kettles, hatchets, and gunpowder to the Blackfoot people in exchange for horses, buffalo-skin robes, and wolf, beaver, and fox furs, which they would take to York Factory. A gun was worth roughly fifty beavers, and a horse was worth one gun according to Henday. In 1772, Mathew Cocking reported that the Cree and Assiniboine with whom he travelled were always alarmed when they saw an unknown horse, fearing that they might belong to the Snakes. Cocking also suggests that at this time the Cree-Assiniboine held an annual gathering with the Blackfoot in March near Saskatchewan River Forks where they would trade and the Blackfoot would ask for volunteers for their wars with the Snakes.
Transition to Plains Culture
As the HBC and NWC moved inland to the West, the Confederacy also moved inland and west so that they would not lose their control of the trade. As the HBC and NWC moved northwards and inland after 1760, the Crees were no longer required as intermediaries to ferry furs from place to another, but they gained new opportunities in the supply of pemmican and other provisions that European fur traders needed when travelling to the companies' new posts in the subarctic. Some Cree, historically a woodland people, adopted the ways of the plains people, including nomadic bison hunting and horsemanship. These emerging Plains Cree were initially allies of the Blackfoot, helping them to drive the Kootenay and Snakes across the Rocky Mountains. At the same time, many Assiniboine people moved farther west, eventually spawning the Nakoda people, who were a separate group by about 1744.The Confederacy fought a series of wars over the control of the trade in major commodities on the plains. Before 1790, the Cree relied on the Mandan as a source of horses, for their own use and to trade to the isolated European fur trade posts. They were allies of the Blackfoot and Mandan against the Sioux in the great horse wars of this period. The Cree made significant profits from the trade with the Blackfoot; one HBC journal entry notes that a Cree trader bought a musket from the HBC for 14 prime beaver pelts and sold it to a Blackfoot warrior for 50 prime beaver pelts. From the Mandan they also received beans, maize, and tobacco, in exchange for European goods.
By the mid-19th century, the Confederacy had lost control of the trade with the Mandan. From 1790 to 1810, intermittent wars were fought between the Confederacy and its former horse suppliers to the south. As the Confederacy reached out to the Arapaho as a potential new source of horses, they were blocked by the Gros Ventres. In 1790, the Gros Ventres joined the Blackfoot Confederacy, making the Iron Confederacy and the Blackfoot enemies for the first time. In response, the Plains Cree allied with the "Flathead" Indians as a new source of horses. In the 1810s, Peter Fidler described the Cree and Sacree peacefully sharing the Beaver Hills, but he also records that a new geographical place name had been added to the region, the Battle River, which had not been mentioned by this name before, was so-called to commemorate a battle between the Cree and Blackfoot, who would go on to be long-term rivals. By the 1830s, the mixed buffalo-hunting parties of Crees, Assiniboine, and Métis reached what is now northern Montana, and the United States government gave the Crees some limited recognition when U.S. officials invited the Cree leader "Broken Arm" as one of the representatives of tribes living near Fort Union to meet President Andrew Jackson in Washington D.C.
Histories of this later period do not clearly state which bands are being referred to when it is said that "the Cree" were in a particular place. Neal McLeod makes clear that these bands were loose, temporary groupings that were often multiethnic and multilingual, so that most mentions of "the Cree" by historians of previous decades actually refers to mixed Cree-Assiniboine-Saulteax groups. Further, the whooping cough outbreak of 1819–1820 and the smallpox outbreak of 1780–1781 decimated many bands, forcing them to merge with neighbours.
In 1846, travelling artist Paul Kane identified a man he met at Fort Pitt, Kee-a-kee-ka-sa-coo-way, as "head chief" of the Cree, though it is doubtful that any such title existed. Kane mentions a man named Mukeetoo as his associate, but historians believe this person to be Black Powder, who was Plains Ojibwa rather than Cree. This may indicate how intertwined the two peoples were at this time.
By the 1850s, two bands, the "Cree-Assiniboine" or, and the Qu'Appelle were established in the region between Wood Mountain and the Cypress Hills and traded on both sides of the international border.
From around 1800 to 1850, the Iron Confederacy was at its apogee, controlling the trade with HBC posts such as Fort Pitt and Fort Edmonton. Their southern expansion peaked in the 1860s when the Plains Cree controlled most of present-day southern Saskatchewan and east-central Alberta with the Assiniboine also moving south.