You may have omitted murderer. Old Kootenai had to get out of town fast and across the Medicine Line after his little shoot-'em-up in Fort Benton. Somebody made a real brutal movie about that deal a few years back.

Now there would be some colorful family history.

A friend of mine was married to a girl from Lac La Biche who her great great grandmother was Riel's mother. It turns out her great great great grandmother was the first recorded white woman in the west, or Alberta territory. Marie-Anne Lagimodière . Her family was taken prisoner by FN in the first decade of the 1800's and escaped by 5 days hard riding to Ft. Augustus. One of Marie-Anne's children gave birth to Louis Riel.
I would think some script land is still in the family in Alberta or Sask or Manitoba.

With Kootenai being a wolfer at one time too he probably traded in whiskey too.
He had to be willing to fight and resourceful enough to live to be in the early west.

40+ years before the Hudson Bay company built forts in what is now Alberta...

In 1751 Legardeur de Saint Pierre sent "DeNiverville" into the west from a trading post the french had built at the forks of the North and South Saskatchewan rivers.
They sent 10 men in canoes up the North Saskatchewan river who supposedly got as far as the rocky mountains. DeNiverville built a fort somewhere but no one knows where it was made along the river. Some historians think possibly the men canoed up the South Saskatchewan and made the fort there but most think they went up the North fork.

David Thompson's diary's reveal that Rocky Mountain House was actually out on the prairie but, with the loss of the buffalo and slow human settlement, the tree line moved east from the mountains.

The legendary Sam Steele of the NWMPolice commented in his book, Forty Years in Canada, that when he was with the Alberta Field Force going from Edmonton to Saskatchewan, he noticed that the tree line had moved south by quite a bit since he was first in the area 11 years earlier (1874-1885) all due to the absence of the buffalo during that period.

How's that for a run on sentence? :)

Alberta
 

People who enjoy learning about early Alberta would find this book interesting.
Stone by stone by Liz Bryan. Exploring ancient sites on the Canadian plains.
It gives descriptions of living sites, prehistoric quarries, several buffalo jumps, tipi rings and other related subjects with pictures.
Sites which I learn are near where I live causes me to understand and view them with more appreciation.
I got a copy from Audreys books for just over $20

Wow! I didn't see the caption at first but said to myself
" dang that looks like Bitumont"!!
I used to trap just downstream from there .
We used to use the stacks as a marker point in the evening
Because they stood out above the horizon
The shore has all grown in now of course!
Cat

Cool !!!

This thread is incredible! So who was the first whitey to set foot in AB? And make their way across the Rockies?

Debatable on who was the first white but supposedly it was Anthony Henday who came here in 1754. He was the first person to have a written journal about the south Saskatchewan river so he was considered the discoverer.

Supposedly David Thompson found and crossed certain passes in the Rockies first but again there may have been others before him that were not historically mentioned.

But the french who were technically white too were here in 1751. A couple years before Henday.

*Some historical writings write Henday's last name as Hendry so there are two spellings.

That's a good question.

Found an interesting tid bit while googling around about a post on here where bessie dog and wonder pooch scrambled up Thunder Mountain at the Livingston Gap.

First summit in the Canadian Rockies to be climbed by a non native was Thunder mountain in 1792 by Peter Fidler. "a sober steady young man"
http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/fidler_peter_6E.html

He must have been impressed. Here's a nice group of pics from up there.
http://www.explor8ion.com/vern/scram...r/thunder.html

The accounts of the early explores and traders in Alberta are impressive. They must of been some strong guys with amazing skill sets to just survive. Mackenzie's trip to the Arctic Ocean from Fort Chip (and back) and his trip from Peace River to Bella Coola (and back) are epic.

Ultimate Alberta outdoorsmen.....

Lots of great content in the biography site above with links to other explorers and traders.

The older members will remember the times before the farmers were using combines to harvest their crops. Up until the mid 1950's quite of farmers were still using a piece of horse or tractor drawn equipment called a binder to cut their crops. Then they would stand up the bundles of grain in the fields, like shown in the picture. Then they would haul in the grain and run the bundles through the thrashing machine. The fields used to look so beautiful in fall time.

My best memory and the point of this post was to say that when the fields used to be in stooks the sharptail grouse would come in huge flocks to roost on the stooks and eat the grain. I remember seeing flocks of a couple hundred sharptail sitting on stooks. They were very wary grouse. You couldn't get too close or they would fly. I remember my Dad and I going out and shooting 20 (daily limit 10 each then) with his 22 from 100 yards away. In about 10 minutes.

I don't think a person can see those big flocks anymore. Maybe there are in some rural areas. Anyone remember the big flocks or maybe still seeing them?

I used to ride the 4 car ferry crossing the north saskatchewan river where the Berrymore Bridge is. Used a few north of Hwy 16 too.There used to be several ferries around the province and now I think there are only 3 or 4 left.

7

When we lived in Calgary, we used to cross on this ferry to visit relatives in Big Valley. It is straight east of Trochu.

Donald McIntosh was born Sept 3rd 1838 at jasper Place (Now in Alberta) to John McIntosh, a Hudson Bay employee and Charlotte Robertson, a Metis - half English, half Chippewa. Charlotte was the daughter of a Chipewyan woman and an English Factor.

Donald worked at being a clerk in what is now the Dalles in Oregon. Donald then joined the U.S. Army as a clerk and eventually was commissioned in the 7th Cavalry. Donald died in battle with the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians on June 25, 1876 at the Little Big Horn River.

Lt Col George Custer had two commissioned officers that were born in Canada with him at the Little Big Horn. 1st Lt Donald McIntosh, from
Jasper Place, Alberta, was commander of Company G and 1st Lt William W. Cooke from Mount Pleasant, Ontario (next to the city of Hamilton) who was Custer's Adjutant. There were also several Non Coms born in Canada who served in the 7th Cavalry. Both McIntosh and Cooke died with Custer.

Just as an aside: 1st Lt Cookes civil War gun, a Remington 44 cap and ball and his farriers knife that was recovered from the battle of the Little Big Horn by the NWMP when the Sioux came up to Canada in 1878 and returned to the Cooke family, was sold at auction by Bud Haynes in Red Deer, AB on April 5th 1999. I was at the auction and had the gun in my hand. It and the knife was sold to an American by the name of Art Unger. There is a person from Alberta who has written an article in a U.S. history magazine denying that this gun and farriers knife was at the Little Big Horn. He agreed that they belonged to W.W.Cooke, just that they were not at the LBH with Cooke. There is another Albertan who has proof that this gun and knife was in fact at the LBH. He is currently writing to the denier. I'm waiting to see how this turns out.

According to one of my sources it was: "On Wednesday, September 11, 1754, north of where Chauvin stands today, a band of Crees crossed the eastern boundary of the future Province of Alberta. With them was a lone Englishman, Anthony Henday."

We can celebrate the anniversary next weekend.

Strix

My first payed job was stooking 40 acres of wheat.
I didn't do too good, my stooks all blew down overnight. The next morning dad got up before sunrise and went and restooked the whole field so that I would get paid. He never told me what he had done. I learned about it years later.

Stooking was an art form. One would pick up two bundles by the strings, hold them close together in front of you and then swing them down into the stubble so that they ended up butts to the ground and the tops leaning against each other. In an upside down V.
A bit of force was needed to get them to bite into the dirt a bit to stabilize them and to make the tops mesh together a bit to stabilize the tops. Then one would take two more and plant them in the same fashion, at right angles to the first two, and so on up to ten bundles per stook. Most people made a six bundle stook. One could make a four bundle stook but the more bundles in a stook the less work it was to load them when it was time to thresh them.
I lacked the streangth to plant them solidly enough. And those strings tore my hands up something fierce. My hands were raw for days.

Those stooks made super duck hunting blinds. All one had to do was to make a super sized stook with ten or more bundles planted in a circle.

Dad ran a thrashing machine until 1965 when he bought a Gleaner A combine, the first self propelled combine in the area. Like this one.

http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p.../IMG_4790a.jpg

Dave Befus had the first combine a pull type affair that was broke down more then it worked.

http://previews.123rf.com/images/bar...-harvester.jpg



I wasn't old enough to load bundles or work on the binder or the thresher but I loved to watch them work.
Watching the tying mechanism on the binder tie bundles was fascinating, it had a big curved needle that ran the twine around the bundle.

https://gressenhallfw.files.wordpres...n-binder-2.jpg

The thresher had a device to count the bushels of wheat as it was threshed.
It was a large, roughly square trough on a balance. The weight was supposed to be set to weigh one bushel.
When the weight reached a set limit the trough would overbalance dumping the contents into an auger and tripping a counter. Then it would right itself and start filling again. I used to watch it do that for hours.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped..._In_Action.jpg

I still remember the sound of that thrasher. It had a huge blower at the back to blow the cleaned straw into a pile, that blower howled like jet engine. It was loud.

The bushel counter is the mechanism on the top of the machine, in front of the guy standing on top the thresher.
The blower is inside the round housing at the bottom rear of the thresher.
It was a paddle wheel affair that threw as much as blew the straw.
Kinda like a snow blower on steroids.

Dad's thresher looked exactly like the one in the photo.

Dad used a tractor to run the thresher. He had only one tractor and no horses but the neighbor had a team of horses so they worked together at harvest time. The neighbor, Howard Price, would use his team of horses to gather the bundles and bring them to the thresher, the older boys helped load the wagon with bundles and dad ran the thresher, using his tractor, and fed bundles into the thresher.
Each man had a wagon so the field team would swap a loaded wagon for an empty one so that everyone kept busy, except for me, I just watched.
And rode on the load of bundles, or chased mice that had been exposed when the bundles were loaded.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DN2FezKs9E...hines_0502.jpg


Fun times. There is no better life for a kid. Lots of fresh air, fresh food from the garden and from hunting and lots of interesting things to see and do. It was my favorite time of year, and still is.

And I still love being involved in the harvest, only now I do my part and work as hard as anyone. I've spend a lot of nights hauling grain and running grain dryer, simultaneously. Or running combine.

I learned about Thunders summit history
 

After I climbed it from a very good friend who used to hunt sheep up there.
To ascend that range back in the day too real courage I tell you!

Just off the road in the Gap right at the base of where we began our climb is this structure

http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/...E179476679.jpg

It is very deep and the stones made to build it are huge.... My research (from my same learned friend) informed me that this was a kiln of some type where pioneers would take chunks of scree from the mountain and convert it to lye (Lyme ?) in the kiln.... Then cart the product away by wagon. It is really something to see!

I'd also like to clarify my prev post about the spirit quest caves I claimed were on Thunder.... I was mistaken, the caves are on the mountain ACROSS from Thunder ( you gotta cross the OMR). There are 5 caves or so up there. So now I've done both sides.

SW Alberta absolutely bursts with amazing history!

Thank you
 

Deepest thanks to all of the contributors on this thread.

It is the first one I check when I come to the site, and it has led me off in to some fascinating research when I have time, as well as reminding me of many good memories of my own.

Thank you.

Thanks for the story Keg River. You forgot to mention how good the lunches the womenfolk made for the field tasted.

Another great memory from the grain fields when the combines started appearing.....

Even though I was only 8 or so after harvest time Dad would give me a pitch fork and a box of eddy matches. I would have to wait until dark on a calm night and then I would get the go ahead to start my duty. I would fill the pitchfork with straw, light it on fire and start running around dropping fire onto the harvested swaths of straw. I remember having a whole 80 acres or on fire at one time. Good memories.