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 Plain Indians, such as the Blackfoot, Blood, and Peigans eventually adapted to semi nomadic 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 a 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 cattle to include the export of petroleum as well.

Native 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. In both cases the evidentiary base is thin, however.

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 (for example Comanche and Shoshoni) are from the Uto-Aztecan language family and came to the Plains from the southwest. Algonquian speakers (Plains Cree, Blackfoot, Saulteaux) are originally from the northeast. The Siouxan peoples ( Great Sioux, Assiniboine, Nakoda, Mandan, Crow, etc.) 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 (a clan), common language and religion (a tribe), or a common age or rank (a ritual society or a warrior society, referred to in anthropology as a sodality).

Population density for both Plains and Subarctic peoples (as for most hunter-gatherer societies) 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 (or tribal) 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 (and to some extent the Subarctic) is one of shifting membership in a number of large confederacies, consisting of dozens of bands from multiple tribes.

First recorded politics

From the journal of Henry Kelsey , we get the first glimpse of alliances in the wider region. He reports that the emerging Iron Confederacy (Cree and Assiniboine) were on friendly terms with the Blackfoot Confederacy (Peigan, Kainai, and Siksika) and allied with them against a list of other groups whose identity is not known, the "Eagle Birch Indians, Mountain Poets, and Nayanwattame Poets". Another early account comes from Saukamappe (a Cree later adopted into the Peigan), who was 75 years old when he recounted his early years 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 (present-day Alberta) to the Platte River in the south ( Wyoming) 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 in order 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 in order 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 (HBC) to the northeast, often via Cree and Assiniboine middlemen. The Piegans (and other Blackfoot) 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 (mostly Cree and Assiniboine but also Stoney, Saulteaux and others) 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 European to reach Alberta was likely a Frenchman such as 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 of Alberta 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 comes to us from the fur trader Anthony Henday, who explored the vicinity of present-day Red Deer and Edmonton in 1754–55. He spent the winter with a group of Blackfoot, with whom he traded and went buffalo hunting.Government of Alberta
– About Alberta – History 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 (HBC) 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 (NWC), 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 a mission in 1847.

In 1864, the Roman Catholic Church in Canada tasked Father 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. In order 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 whiskey traders and hunters to expand into southern Alberta, disrupting the Native way of life. Of particular concern was the infamous Fort Whoop-Up near present-day Lethbridge, and the associated Cypress Hills massacre