AN UNWITTING AGENT OF WAR
‘Kapwatamut nipahow!’ (‘I killed the Sioux speaker!’)
With those words, recorded by Saskatchewan pioneer and author William Bleasdell Cameron, Plains Cree war chief Wandering Spirit informed fellow Indians gathered at Frog Lake on April 2, 1885, they were at war with the Canadian government. For the previous decade the Crees had cautiously cooperated with the constitutional monarchy, but in a matter of hours that relationship faltered when one man said, “No.”
Kapwatamut—the Sioux speaker—was Thomas Trueman Quinn, the agent employed by Canada’s Indian Department to oversee the Crees on reserves near Frog Lake. His main concern had been to watch over Big Bear and his band, who were staying on Chief Unipouheos’ reserve until Big Bear chose a reserve of his own.
At the time of his death Quinn was 44. He had lived near Indians and dealt with them all his life. His father and the frontier society in which Quinn was reared had strongly informed his attitudes and ideas.
His father, Peter Quinn, was born in Ireland in 1787. Around 1802, while returning home from school in Dublin, Peter was seized by a press gang recruiting for the Royal Navy. After being forced to serve five years on a man-of-war, Peter obtained employment with the British fur trading firm Hudson’s Bay Co. In 1820 the company sent him to its trading post at Fort Garry (on the site of present-day Winnipeg, Manitoba).
By 1823 Peter was living at the Hudson’s Bay trading post in Pembina, just inside the American line 70 miles south of Fort Garry. In that rowdy community he met and married 25-year-old Mary Louise Finley, a Métis from the Red Lake region in what would become Minnesota. In 1824 the couple followed other Métis families to Camp Coldwater, a U.S. Army construction camp for workers building Fort Snelling, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers. Peter landed a
