We got ourselves set up in the campground on the edge of town and went for a walk through the whole town from one end to the other. Even going at a snail's pace it only took us an hour...
Town of Eastend
from ranching.
And here is the ranch house soon after it was built in 1914. This is the family from Scotland who went west in 1909 and 1914 shortly after arriving in Canada. The little girl is my mother's first cousin, my Aunt Margaret who went out west as a baby. My greatgrandmother is sitting on the far left side. She was buried at Eastend in 1922.
One of the plans we made before coming, was to be sure to visit the Cypress Hills and Fort Walsh. My uncle used to go to the Cypress Hills to camp and hunt. Of course there were no roads, they had to ride on horseback to get there (about 30 miles west from Eastend)...in fact Eastend was a back water for many years, roads were slow to be built and electric power only arrived in the town in 1954. So we have to imagine how life was in those days and marvel at our history and how it developed. In the early days, the Hudsons Bay Co established a post here but it was very short lived as the bison was being eliminated along with most of the other fur bearing wildlife. The border between the US and Canada in the west had been set in 1818 at the 49th parallel but it was formally surveyed in 1872-1876 by one of our great Canadian explorers and scientists, George Mercer Dawson . Huge piles of stones were built every mile or so along the route. However, the border was undefended and porous, and the Canadian NW Territory (as it was then known) was virtually unpopulated, inviting the intrusion northward of some of the more violent and unwelcome residents of places like Montana (we are excluding all residents of the US prairie provinces and definitely those from Missouri from any responsibility for this). They set themselves up in places like Lethbridge, Alberta and ran guns and whisky to the natives, and generally caused all sorts of havoc. The bison hunters known as "wolfers" (known by that name because they salted the carcasses of bison with poison to kill wolves, coyotes and other mammals for their hides) also set themselves up in the Cypress Hills just west of Eastend. There were several Indian camps nearby. In June 1873, the stage was set for a defining moment in Canadian and local history with the advent of the Cypress Hills Massacre .
This event shocked the rest of Canada, and triggered the sending westward of the newly formed NW Mounted Police to establish peace and protect Canadian sovereignty. Just to get to the area, since there were no trains yet on the Canadian side of the line, they had to take the train through the US to Manitoba and march from there to the Cypress Hills, where they established the first outpost, called Fort Walsh, It only operated for a short time, to eliminate the threat of American intruders, and to establish peaceful relations with the indigenous natives, and to establish the Queen's Law in an otherwise lawless area. Afterwards it became the headquarters for the training of the black horses so renowned for their use by the Force. It remained as such until the 1940s when the headquarters was moved to Ontario.
The Cypress Hills area is also unique. While the rest of the entire area was heavily glaciated, the top of the hills were not. And they remained the highest point of land between the Rocky mountains and the east coast of Labrador. After the demise of the buffalo, all of the original plants and trees returned and the area looks more like British Columbia than prairie Saskatchewan. It is an inter-provincial park, maybe the only one of its kind in Canada.
(I have to stop my history tale here, as it is 7:40 AM and a pickup truck with a loudspeaker mounted on the back has just cruised through the town waking everyone up for the pancake breakfast)...NO KIDDING...he is saying "wake up Eastend, its time for the pancake breakfast)...
So, to rejoin the story,we went over to the Cypress Hills to explore. We were VERY disappointed by the performance of both our cameras. So I apologize for the poor results in that department. The day was an amazing prairie day, with dramatic cumulus clouds forming huge thunderheads ahead of us and drenching local areas off to one side. And yet we could not capture any of it on the cameras, which kept shooting out of focus, dark, with lots of unwelcome reflections...it was pretty much a disaster. But nonetheless we hope you can get some feel for the special nature of this place...
The approach over prairie from Maple Creek, Sask.
The arrival at the hills....
The forested part of the hills...
The highland areas...
The whole park is free range, so we stopped to photograph this delightful pair of mother and daughter nibbling the dirt (for minerals?) in the middle of the road. We thought the foal was probably 2-3 days old and still unsteady, no fear of us at all.
Next came Fort Walsh (a reconstruction) which is a National Historic Site. As you can see, it was snuggled into a valley on a spacious meadow suitable for the horses and for defence.
The fort gives tours and explains the history and the lifestyle of the time period. I don't usually have the patience to take these kinds of tours, but we did and I was glad.
The way home was 60 miles on unpaved road like this.....at least the traffic was light!
So the next day is the main event of the weekend with pancake breakfast, parade, and rodeo events in the afternoon, so stay tuned!!
Great pictures!
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