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Canada — Starvation on the Plains and the Battleford Hangings

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

Canada — Plains Starvation and the Battleford Hangings, 1879–1885

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record. Every claim below is named, dated, and sourced. Where scholars disagree — on a minister's responsibility, a commissioner's role, a death rate, or whether schoolchildren were made to watch an execution — the disagreement is printed, never silently resolved. Quotations are verbatim and labelled; the government's own categories, where quoted, are quoted as evidence, not adopted as this record's language.

How this file relates to the starvation account already in the corpus. how-they-were-exterminated.md §4 built the starvation mechanism principally on the United States record: the buffalo destroyed, scorched earth, the ration withheld in Minnesota in 1862 and codified in the Code of Indian Offenses (1883). That record holds — and at its centre stands a gap this file fills. On the US side a written starvation order has never been found (Smits, 1994, conceding the point, in HWTE §4.1). The Canadian case is the one where documentary intent is most explicit. Here the prime minister stated the policy in Parliament, in words preserved in the official record, and the government's own correspondence shows rations withheld to force compliance and reserve settlement. The mechanism is the same. The paper trail is not.

1. The book and its evidence — Daschuk, Clearing the Plains (2013)

The governing modern work for this file is James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (University of Regina Press, 2013). It won, among other honours, the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize of the Canadian Historical Association for 2014 — the prize for the year's most significant contribution to Canadian history, awarded, as commentators noted at the time, to a work whose central subject is that prime minister and his government's starvation policy (Canadian Historical Association; Trent University, 2014; the Association renamed the prize in 2018).

Daschuk's method matters to how this file uses him. The book is built substantially on the Canadian government's own archive: departmental correspondence, agents' reports, ration records, and the parliamentary debates. Of its most quoted line Daschuk has said directly (interview, Don't Call Me Resilient): "This wasn't me being a conspiracy theorist. This was me cutting and pasting from Hansard, the official record of the House of Commons."

The argument, in brief: the Plains peoples before the 1870s were, on the bison economy, among the best-nourished and tallest populations then recorded; epidemic disease, climate shocks, and the collapse of the fur and bison economies destroyed that position within a generation; and the government of John A. Macdonald — who held the Indian Affairs portfolio personally from 1879 to 1887 — used the resulting famine as an instrument, withholding, reducing, and conditioning treaty-promised food until the plains peoples settled on the reserves Ottawa chose, clear of the railway corridor and the surveyed settlement lands (Daschuk, 2013; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, "Macdonald, Sir John Alexander").

2. The food base gone — and the treaty promise

The bison's destruction on the northern plains followed the southern pattern of HWTE §4.1 a few years behind it: the herds sustaining the Cree, Assiniboine, Saulteaux, Blackfoot Confederacy peoples, and Métis hunters had effectively vanished from Canadian territory by 1879 (Daschuk, 2013). Independent hunters became, within a season, applicants for government rations at government posts. The dependency was created by the collapse; it was then administered by the state.

Against the collapse stood a written promise. Treaty 6 (1876), covering the central plains peoples including the Cree and Assiniboine of §6 below, contained a famine clause without parallel in the earlier numbered treaties: assistance in the event of a general famine, together with a medicine chest at the agent's house. Daschuk's record is that when the famine came, the promise was administered as leverage rather than honoured as relief (Daschuk, 2013). The Senate of Canada's later review puts the sequence bluntly (Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples, testimony summarising Daschuk): "If you remember one of the terms of Treaty 6 was famine relief, humanitarian relief, and in eight years Mr. Macdonald appears to have forgotten that."

3. The ration withheld — the mechanism in operation

Daschuk documents a system, not a series of local cruelties. Its documented features, each on the government's own records (Daschuk, 2013, as summarised in the published reviews and scholarly discussions):

• Work for rations. Able-bodied people had to labour for the food issued to their families. Indian agent Hayter Reed reported to Dewdney in 1881 that "the system… of no work no pay was carried out… to advantage" (Dictionary of Canadian Biography). Deputy minister Lawrence Vankoughnet's standing instruction, 1879: "Strict instructions have been given to the agents to require labor from able-bodied Indians for any supplies given them" — defended expressly for "the moral effect" and to prevent expectation of "gratuitous assistance."
• Reduction as policy. Rations were cut to one-half and one-quarter issues as an economy measure while famine continued — Macdonald's own parliamentary words, §4.
• Food withheld while food existed. The Active History review of Daschuk (5 December 2013), on his archive: "Available food rotted in government storehouses as malnutrition, sickness, and death ravaged the reserve population," while treaty-promised agricultural assistance was simultaneously neglected, leaving no alternative food source on the reserves. Daschuk also records officials exchanging food for sex and colluding with ration contractors.
• Bad food issued. Issued rations were repeatedly documented as tainted or rotten — condemned meat consumed in desperation, with predictable results (Daschuk, 2013; BCcampus open-textbook summary of Daschuk).
• Movement forced by hunger — the Cypress Hills. Thousands of Cree and others had gathered in the Cypress Hills, in the south of present Saskatchewan, where some hunting remained. Ottawa wanted the hills cleared: the Canadian Pacific Railway's route ran south of them, and an autonomous Indigenous concentration outside reserve control was intolerable to the administration. Rations at Fort Walsh were cut off. Daschuk's summary (p. 123, widely quoted): "Within a year, 5,000 people were expelled from the Cypress Hills. In doing so the Canadian government accomplished the ethnic cleansing of southwestern Saskatchewan of its indigenous population" — the characterisation is Daschuk's own, printed as his. The people were driven north to the reserve districts around Battleford and Qu'Appelle — the Battleford district that returns in §6.

4. The prime minister's words — 27 April 1882

The centre of the Canadian documentary record is a statement in the House of Commons, preserved in Hansard and quoted by Daschuk from it. The date is fixed by the scholarly literature reproducing the Hansard page: 27 April 1882, Hansard p. 1186. Macdonald, defending his department's expenditure, described the ration policy in his own words [PRIMARY DOCUMENT — Hansard]:

"I have reason to believe that the agents as a whole, and I am sure it is the case with the Commissioner, are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense."

The fuller context, as reproduced in scholarly summaries of the debate [PRIMARY DOCUMENT], adds that the starving "have been helped, but they have been reduced to one-half and one-quarter rations," and closes: "Indians are Indians, and we must submit to frequent disappointments in the way of civilizing them."

The dispute over these words, printed, not settled. Two readings stand. (1) Daschuk's reading (2013): the words state a policy — hunger administered deliberately, to the edge of starvation, as an instrument of economy and control — and the surrounding archive of withheld rations, forced movement, and rotting storehouses shows the words in operation. (2) The contextual defence (Donald B. Smith; Bob Plamondon, Globe and Mail, 19 February 2018): Macdonald spoke under Opposition attack for spending too much on relief, and insisted in the same debates that "when the Indians have been starving they have been helped." The Dictionary of Canadian Biography's assessment stands between them and is quoted as the standard reference's judgement: western First Nations' destitution "was regarded by the government more as an opportunity to compel Indigenous people to do what Ottawa wanted than as a humanitarian crisis." What no party disputes is the text: the words are in Hansard, they describe food refused until people stood "on the verge of starvation," and the purpose attached to them in the sentence is "to reduce the expense."

From the same record: when Assiniboine deaths followed poor-quality rations and fraud was charged, Macdonald answered that "it cannot be considered a fraud on the Indians because they were living on Dominion charity… and, as the old adage says, beggars should not be choosers" (Dictionary of Canadian Biography, quoting the Commons record) [the government's own category — "Dominion charity" for treaty-promised food — quoted and labelled].

5. Dewdney's administration — and the disagreement over his role

The "Commissioner" of Macdonald's sentence was Edgar Dewdney, Indian Commissioner for the North-West Territories (1879–1888), later lieutenant-governor — the official through whom the ration regime was administered on the ground. His own stated preference survives in the standard biography's summary: Dewdney "favoured a policy of 'sheer compulsion'" (Dictionary of Canadian Biography). His administration conducted the Cypress Hills clearance, controlled ration issue through the famine years, and reported to Ottawa on peoples fed at half and quarter rates.

Disagreement, printed. How much of the policy was Dewdney's and how much Macdonald's is contested, and this file does not choose. Robert Alexander Innes, "Clearing the Plains of Accountability" (2018), records that John L. Tobias, in his foundational Cypress Hills studies, concluded Dewdney "hoped that starvation would drive them from the Fort Walsh area," was angered in the summer of 1882 when Mounted Police fed starving people against his orders, and knowingly violated his own promises of 1880–81 and the treaty right to choose reserve locations; Maureen Lux's health history reaches substantially the same conclusion. Against that allocation, Innes notes, Daschuk "downplays Dewdney's role in the starvation policy" and places Macdonald as its architect. The disagreement concerns the distribution of responsibility between minister and commissioner. Whether the policy existed is not in disagreement: on that, Tobias, Lux, and Daschuk — and the departmental correspondence on which all three rest — are one record.

6. Disease as the amplifier — tuberculosis in the starvation years

Starvation did not kill alone; Daschuk's book is as much a history of disease as of rations. Malnutrition, the scavenging of diseased animals, the consumption of tainted issued rations, and confinement on reserves in poor housing converted tuberculosis into an epidemic killing at rates without parallel in the neighbouring settler population (Daschuk, 2013). The figures, printed at the levels their sources support:

• The Active History review's summary of Daschuk (2013): "Staggering rates of tuberculosis mortality — rising from 40 deaths per 1,000 in 1881 to 127 per 1,000 in 1886 — were significantly higher than in nearby settler communities," with contemporary medical researchers attributing the rates to supposed racial susceptibility rather than nourishment — a reading Daschuk's archive contradicts.
• The University of Saskatchewan's tuberculosis history (study of the Saskatchewan Indian population, reviewing the epidemic's onset): it "began in the early 1880s. Rapidly assuming epidemic proportions, the death rate from tuberculosis among the Qu'Appelle Indians peaked in 1886 at a rate of 9,000 per 100,000," the acute phase lasting about two decades.

The two figures are not reconciled here: they rest on different populations and compilations — Daschuk's reserve figures as summarised by his reviewer, and the Qu'Appelle agency series. They agree in order of magnitude and in date — a peak in 1886, in the immediate aftermath of the famine years and the 1885 resistance — and in what they measure. Daschuk's larger point stands on his opening contrast: a population within living memory among the tallest and best-fed in the world was, within a generation, described by its administering department's doctors as a race characterised by disease (Daschuk, 2013; Trent University, 2014).

7. Battleford — 27 November 1885

7.1 The road to the scaffold

The starvation years are the documented context of the 1885 North-West Resistance in the Battleford district. The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan (University of Regina) opens its account of that background with the same record as §§2–5: "Prior to the rebellion the Canadian government's actions in the District of Saskatchewan resulted in starvation, disease, and death among the Indigenous peoples of the area." In spring 1885, as Métis forces under Louis Riel formed a provisional government at Batoche, Cree bands in the Battleford and Frog Lake districts — hungry, their treaty grievances unanswered — looted the abandoned town of Battleford, and on 2 April 1885 at Frog Lake, men of Big Bear's band under the war chief Wandering Spirit, against Big Bear's own efforts to prevent it, killed nine men, including the Indian agent Thomas Quinn. The killings for which the eight men below were tried were the Frog Lake killings and killings connected with the looting of Battleford (Stonechild & Waiser, Loyal Till Death: Indians and the North-West Rebellion, 1997; Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan).

7.2 The trials

The accused were tried at Battleford in September–October 1885 before Charles Rouleau, stipendiary magistrate. The scholarship establishes (Stonechild & Waiser, 1997; Bill Waiser, "The White Man Governs: The 1885 Indian Trials," Canadian State Trials, vol. III, 2009; Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan):

• Rouleau's position was compromised in fact: his house had been burned and his property looted in the rising he was now judging; later accounts report his stated determination, after his losses, to hang those brought before him if it lay in his power.
• The trials were conducted in English, a language most of the accused did not speak, through interpreters.
• The Battleford accused had no defence counsel. Poundmaker and Big Bear, tried separately at Regina on treason-felony charges, were defended — Beverley Robertson acted for Poundmaker — which is why the contrast belongs in the record: the capital trials at Battleford proceeded without it.
• The climate of the proceedings stands in the Saskatchewan Herald's editorial of 23 April 1885, quoted in the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan: "the only good Indians are the dead ones" [the newspaper's own words, quoted and labelled].

Macdonald's instruction for the executions' purpose survives in his correspondence, in the form quoted in the scholarship of the trials (Waiser, 2009, taking his chapter title from it): "The executions ought to convince the Red Man that the White Man governs" [PRIMARY — the prime minister's own words, quoted and labelled].

7.3 The eight men

On the morning of 27 November 1885, at Fort Battleford, eight men were hanged simultaneously on a single gallows — the largest mass hanging in Canadian history (Stonechild & Waiser, 1997; standard reference summaries). Their names, as the record carries them — spellings vary between the trial record, the Saskatchewan sources, and modern Cree orthography, and the variants are printed rather than normalised away:

• Kah-paypamahchakwayo (also Kah-Paypamahchukways) — Wandering Spirit, war chief of Big Bear's band — for the killing of agent Thomas Quinn at Frog Lake.
• Pahpah-meekee-sick (also rendered Walking the Sky, and in some lists Round the Sky) — for the killing of Father Léon-Adélard Fafard at Frog Lake.
• Manchoose — Bad Arrow — for the killing of Charles Gouin (Govin), Quinn's interpreter.
• Kit-awwah-ke-ni (Kit-Ahwah-Ke-Ni) — Miserable Man — for the killing of Gouin.
• Nahpase — Iron Body — for the killing of George Dill, trader.
• Apischaskoos (A-Pis-Chas-Koos) — Little Bear — for the killing of Dill.
• Itka — Crooked Leg — Assiniboine — for the killing of Payne, farm instructor.
• Waywahnitch — Man Without Blood — Assiniboine — for the killing of a rancher named Tremont, in the Battleford district.

(Saskatchewan Indian, "Battleford Hangings," July 1972, reproducing the trial attributions; Cree Literacy Network list; Stonechild & Waiser, 1997. The men are described across the sources as six Cree and two Assiniboine/Nakota.) One trial detail belongs here because the scholarship preserves it: Miserable Man, pleading not guilty, asked the witness William Cameron to confirm his alibi — that he was inside the Hudson's Bay store when the Frog Lake killings began. Cameron, who disliked him, said nothing; in his later memoir he confirmed the alibi he had withheld in 1885 (Cameron, Blood Red the Sun, 1926 [witness memoir]; Battleford hangings literature). Wandering Spirit, who had pleaded guilty, was the only one of the eight who did not speak on the scaffold. The eight were buried together in a common grave near the fort, its site later marked by a concrete slab (Stonechild & Waiser, 1997).

7.4 The account of the schoolchildren — printed with its sourcing, settled neither way

An account carried for fifty years in Saskatchewan sources holds that children of the Battleford Industrial School were taken to the fort and made to watch the hanging, as a lesson. The account's own trail is part of this record:

• Its earliest located published form is the Saskatchewan Indian magazine's "Battleford Hangings" (July 1972) — eighty-seven years after the event — carried forward in the Saskatchewan residential-schools literature (University of Regina, Shattering the Silence project, on the school: "The day the hangings took place all the Indian students at the Battleford Industrial School were taken out to witness the event. The reason for this was to remind them what would happen if one made trouble with the crown and to provide a lasting reminder of the white man's power and authority," citing Saskatchewan Indian, July 1972). It is repeated in modern national writing (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Indian Summer: children "were brought out to watch their relatives hang"), and a captioned photograph — "Battleford Industrial School 1885 – Students assembled to watch hanging" — circulates with the Cree Literacy Network's list of the eight men as its source.
• The complicating record is contemporaneous. The Gladue Rights Research Database's school history (University of Saskatchewan), built on Principal Thomas Clarke's papers and the Sessional Papers of 1887, establishes that on the outbreak of the Resistance instruction at the school stopped; staff and students abandoned the building; the students were scattered, some going missing; and the building was plundered and then used through the summer and autumn of 1885 as barracks for Canadian troops, Clarke being notified in October 1885 that it would be needed as winter barracks for a gunnery battery (Clarke Papers; Sessional Papers, 1887, Paper 6; Vankoughnet to Macdonald, 15 October 1885). The University of Regina's school history likewise dates the school "damaged and evacuated (1885–1886)." A school whose pupils were scattered and whose building was a barracks in November 1885 could not parade its students in the ordinary way the later account describes — unless some children had been gathered back, which no contemporaneous document located in this research states. Contemporaneous newspaper coverage of the trials and executions — the Saskatchewan Herald, Battleford's own paper, which reported the proceedings and Rouleau at length (e.g., 14 December 1885) — was likewise found in this research to name no schoolchildren among the spectators; the detailed accounts of the morning describe a limited, guarded attendance.
• This record settles neither. The 1972 account may preserve an oral tradition of the Battleford community that the paper record does not reach — this corpus's evidence discipline carries Indigenous tradition labelled as tradition, and does not require it to produce a white document to be printed. The contemporaneous administrative record may equally show that the account, in its usual form, cannot be right as stated. Both are printed. What is not in dispute, on any source, is the documented intent of the execution itself, in the prime minister's own words (§7.2): it was staged to teach — "to convince the Red Man that the White Man governs." Whether children from the school were among those made to learn it is the part the record leaves open.

Sources for this file

Daschuk, Clearing the Plains (University of Regina Press, 2013) • Hansard, House of Commons, 27 April 1882 [PRIMARY DOCUMENT] • Dictionary of Canadian Biography, "Macdonald, Sir John Alexander" • Innes, "Clearing the Plains of Accountability" (2018), on Tobias and Lux contra Daschuk on Dewdney • Active History, review of Clearing the Plains (5 December 2013) • University of Saskatchewan, tuberculosis history of the Saskatchewan Indian population • Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples, testimony on Treaty 6 • Plamondon, Globe and Mail (19 February 2018), and Smith — the contextual defence, at §4 • Stonechild & Waiser, Loyal Till Death (1997) • Waiser, "The White Man Governs: The 1885 Indian Trials," Canadian State Trials III (2009) • Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan, "North-West Resistance and First Nations" • Saskatchewan Indian (July 1972) • Cameron, Blood Red the Sun (1926) [witness memoir] • University of Regina, Shattering the Silence — Battleford Industrial School • Gladue Rights Research Database (University of Saskatchewan), "Battleford Industrial School Evicted," on Clarke Papers and Sessional Papers (1887) • Canadian Historical Association / Trent University (2014), on the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize.

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