The Cypress Hills massacre

In June 1873 a party of American wolf hunters, having lost horses and having been drinking, attacked a camp of Nakoda people in the Cypress Hills and killed something over twenty of them, mostly as they fled. It was violence of a kind the border country had come to expect, and Ottawa’s response changed the West: the formation of the North-West Mounted Police was accelerated and they marched out the following year. None of the accused was ever convicted. The site is a provincial historic park and the hills are an island of forest standing above the plains.