(p/e)

CHIMNEY COULEE Pre-1890

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Not many have written firsthand accounts of life in the Chimney Coulee or Hunter's Settlement as it was also named or East End, the name given it by the NWMP.  But Palliser, Erasmus, Cowie and the NWMP non-commissioned officer, Constable John A. Martin (Turner, 1950), thin and life loving as he was, did leave accounts and those provide the slim history.

Cowie (see previous page) mentions his sole 1871-1872 wintering experience along with his impressions of working in such a natural and dangerous preserve. 

Burley (1992:85):  "In contrast to the open plains there was a broad resource base from which winter subsistence could be realized." He suggests that the Coulee could have been occupied as early as 1840, but he says Stegner (1966) makes a stronger argument for the first fifteen families being there in 1868 near the White Mud Creek. Burley also reports that Corky Jones (1953) tells of 60 hivernant families in 1873. It was apparently around this time that the name Hunter's Settlement was used and a chapel existed administered by either the desultory Fr. DeCorby or the freewheeling Fr. Lestanc, maybe both, who knows. Burley reports that usually a trading post was located in the vicinity of the detachment.

From 1876  to 1887 the NWMP occupied the post in the coulee, mostly during the summer and particularly to monitor Sitting Bull and the Sioux who camped close to the current site of Eastend in 1879. The post was doubled in size for that purpose. 

Burley suggests that by 1880 the resources of the coulees were severely depleted and probably provided little reason for any hivernant families to reside there, even though not long after, settlers moved into the area in the 1890s and began to set up huge ranches and in some cases farms. Much of this settlement was wiped out in 1906/07 by deep snows that killed most of the cattle.

Frenchman River Valley, The Eastend PFRA Irrigation Project and the Butala or Morvik cattle being moved, 8km S of Chimney Coulee

images and text © D. Wall (except where otherwise noted)

"Where the skies were not cloudy or grey"

You can easily imagine Peter Erasmus' (1976) view as he accompanied, he says, Palliser through a landscape like this not far to the west of the Cypress Hills in 1858. (Others say he was probably on a trip with Brisco and Mitchell in 1859 - see footnotes on Chapter 4).  Either way, on the Canadian side of the international border as they travelled to Fort Benton, "(w)e travelled through herds of buffalo nearly all the way. Deep ruts scored the prairie grass where the buffalo had travelled for centuries in their migrations ... . It is not surprising that few people in that day believed that they would ever be all killed.

 "...These vast herds were the greatest I had ever witnessed. ... we had been in the extreme northern edges of the great herds that grazed along our borders ... .

" ... Both the captain (Palliser) and Dr. Hector believed that a policy of buffalo extermination had been adopted as the quickest way to break down Indian resistance to American authority." (p. 71)