One bright morning in April, I embarked on a long day’s drive through the tawny fields of Western Canada, heading for a place I have been wondering about for most of my life.
Steering north and east from Calgary, I passed tall grain silos, swaybacked old sheds and thawing ponds full of migrating ducks. After more than six hours, I reached my destination: a small, fenced patch of mown grass where two dusty country roads meet. In it stood a fieldstone cairn and two short lines of rusting metal crosses. On each of them was a name and the word “massacred.”
It was here, on April 2, 1885, that Cree fighters inspired by the Riel Rebellion shot and killed nine men and took two of their wives captive. One of them was my grandfather’s aunt, Theresa Delaney. The event became known as the Frog Lake Massacre.
Along with her fellow prisoner, Theresa wrote a book about her ordeal: Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear. The palm-sized, leather-bound volume was passed down from generation to generation through my family. We marvelled at this link to a dramatic episode from Canada’s past, while also recoiling at Theresa’s backward attitudes and language.
What we did not know till recently was the other chapter to the tale, an Indigenous story with an enduring legacy. This year, with the help of others in my family, I set out to learn more about that chapter. We pored over birth records, combed through biographies and newspaper clippings, read survivor accounts, talked to others with links to the event and discussed my pilgrimage to Frog Lake. What emerged was a story of dispossession and exploitation, tenacity and survival, in the Canadian West.
The version of Frog Lake that we had told and retold all these years began near the community of Aylmer, just outside Ottawa. Theresa Fulford was raised there, part of a big Roman Catholic family descended from Henry Marshall Fulford, who came to Canada from the United States in 1812. At the age of 33, she married John Delaney, a tall, husky lumberyard foreman. Just days after their wedding on July 27, 1882, they left for Frog Lake, where John worked as a farm instructor.
His job was to teach the Cree to live like white settlers. In the 1880s, the way of life that they had followed for millennia was undergoing a sudden and complete collapse. The vast herds of buffalo that once thundered across the plains had all but disappeared. Hunters armed with breech-loading rifles had been slaughtering them in the tens of thousands for their hides or for sport, leaving the grasslands scattered with their bleached skeletons.
That spelled calamity for the people of the plains. They relied on every part of the great beasts: the flesh for nutrition, the bones for tools and the hides for clothing, lodging and warmth. Desperate, many of them huddled around the forts and budding settlements of the West, relying on the meagre rations apportioned by government agents. A doctor who studied their condition, Augustus Jukes, saw children shivering in the snow with “scarcely rags to cover them.” Many of their parents were suffering from smallpox or alcoholism, imported blights that were devastating Indigenous people all over the continent. American whiskey traders, often rough-edged Civil War veterans, descended on the plains to sell them rotgut booze.
Even the fur trade was dying. The beaver-felt hat had fallen out of fashion in Europe. The pelts that Indigenous trappers had traded for guns, knives, cooking pots and blankets were no longer in demand. What were they to do now? How were they to survive?
Fort Whoop-Up, a trading post near modern-day Lethbridge, Alta., could be a place of misery for Indigenous people of the 1870s. Here, American whiskey traders, barred from selling their wares in Montana, capitalized on communities struggling with poverty.Glenbow Museum
The strategy of the federal government in Ottawa was to herd them onto reserves and turn them into farmers. The farm-instruction program, which Ottawa rolled out across the prairies after famine tore through the North-West, never really worked. The instructors were often poorly trained. Indigenous groups complained that they never got the implements and seed they were promised.
But Ottawa persisted. So the newlywed Theresa loyally headed west with her husband. For an Ottawa Valley girl who had never left home, it was a leap into the unknown. Canada’s North-West was to her almost a foreign country. Only in 1870 had the Hudson’s Bay Company transferred its huge northwestern landholdings to the fledgling government of Canada. The transcontinental railway that John A. Macdonald had promised to unite the new nation was still under construction. To reach Frog Lake, the Delaneys had to go through the United States, then on to Winnipeg and Brandon, completing their journey in a rattling horse-drawn buckboard.
As they travelled, Theresa marvelled at the wild splendour of the land and its potential as a home for “Europe’s millions.” In the future, she wrote in her memoir, it would surely become the breadbasket of North America. Down the mighty Saskatchewan River would flow “the produce of a fresh, a virgin, a teeming soil to supply the markets of the Old World.” The “clang of the mill shall be heard upon every stream.”
When at last they arrived at Frog Lake, Theresa found it “surpassingly beautiful.” Just before he married Theresa, John had built a house, a shed and a garden next to Frog Creek, which ran down from Frog Lake to the North Saskatchewan. Over the next few years, the settlement grew to include a church, a school, a store, a sawmill and a barracks for the North-West Mounted Police, forerunner of the RCMP. Theresa settled into her new life. She gained a companion with the arrival of another Theresa, Theresa Gowanlock, wife of John Gowanlock, who ran the mill.
While John Delaney taught farming, the two wives instructed the local women in cooking, butter-making, laundering and needlework. Their aim, as Theresa Delaney saw it, was to turn the people of the North-West into “a race that can become worthy of the dignity of citizens in a civilized country.” She insisted they had “nothing to complain of” and said it was “a great shame for evil-minded people … to instill into their excitable heads the false idea that they are persecuted by the government.”
The truth was that the people of Frog Lake were starving. The winter of 1884-85 was a harsh one. The tattered tents in the Cree camps near the settlement offered poor shelter against the cold and wind. The man in charge of running the local reserve, Indian agent Thomas Quinn, was stingy with the government rations its people were supposed to get in return for work like cutting firewood.
Louis Riel’s second uprising in defence of Métis rights would inspire some First Nations to fight too in 1885. Riel, executed by Canadian authorities, is now buried in his hometown of St. Boniface, Man.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
Discontent boiled over when Louis Riel and his followers rose up against the young Dominion of Canada. Riel had led an earlier uprising, the Red River Rebellion of 1869-70. Now, after years of exile in the United States, he had been summoned back to lead his people, the Métis, who arose from the unions of Indigenous women and European fur traders in the Red River region of what is now Manitoba. They, too, had seen their way of life threatened by the disappearance of the buffalo and the encroachment of white settlers.
News of the uprising soon reached Frog Lake. Big Bear, or Mistahimaskwa, leader of the 500 people camped there, had been the last of the plains chiefs to negotiate a treaty with the Dominion government. He was a famous warrior who fought many battles with his people’s foes, the Blackfoot, and was believed to possess supernatural powers. Even after he was forced to sign a treaty, he resisted moving his people to the confines of a reserve, instead leading them from place to place in the North-West and Montana until finally fetching up at Frog Lake. In the process he had lost much of his authority to younger, more militant men, who blamed him for the community’s plight.
On April 2 a group led by Wandering Spirit descended on the settlement, their faces painted for war. They shot John Delaney dead by Theresa’s side. When a priest, Adelarde Fafard, leaned over John to deliver the last rites, they shot him, too. The seven others slain included another priest, Felix Marchand; a lay assistant, John Williscraft; the Indian agent Quinn; Theresa Gowanlock’s husband John; Gowanlock’s clerk, William Gilchrist; carpenter Charles Gouin; and trader George Dill.
Indian agent Thomas Quinn, whose picture has been vandalized on one of the Frog Lake signs, died in the Cree assault.
After the killings, Theresa writes, one of the warriors “dragged me through the creek up to my waist in water – then over a path full of thorns and briars and finally flung me down in his tent.”
She spent the following weeks travelling the prairie with Big Bear, Wandering Spirit and their band as they played cat and mouse with Canadian forces sent west to crush the rebellion. Lurid stories in the press suggested that the two Theresas were suffering “a fate worse than death” – rape by their captors. In fact, the Theresas came to no physical harm. A Métis man, John Pritchard, who had worked as an interpreter at Frog Lake, took them under his wing. Eventually, they managed to slip away from the travelling camp and make their way to safety.
Though Theresa Delaney called herself an “unwilling heroine,” she was heralded as one when she returned home. Her book with Theresa Gowanlock on their time in Big Bear’s camp came out just a few months later, when the sensation around their ordeal was still hot news. Both were granted government pensions.
Near John Delaney’s grave, a memorial plaque erected 40 years after the massacre lists the dead and calls the attackers ‘rebel Indians under Big Bear.’ It omits that they had acted under another leader, Wandering Spirit, against Big Bear’s wishes for peace.
Wandering Spirit would be credited as the leader of the Frog Lake massacre in this book from the 1880s, which translated his name as Travelling Spirit.The History of the North-West Rebellion of 1885, Charles Pelham Mulvaney
That is the Frog Lake story as my family has known it for all these years. We often talked, thought and, in a clan of writers and editors, even wrote about it.
In a nod to Theresa, my uncle, Robert Fulford, long-time editor of Saturday Night, used the pen name Marshall Delaney when he reviewed films for the magazine. His father had warm memories of his aunt Theresa, “the family’s celebrity.” Still, Robert found it hard to ignore the things his great-aunt said about the people she was supposed to be teaching. He wrote in 1985 that he wished “she had been more curious, more questioning, more foresighted – an exception to something evil rather than an example of it.”
I turned to the subject myself in 2020, when the country was starting to face up to some of the injustices inflicted on its Indigenous peoples. It had been a long time since I had opened that little book, with its illustration of Theresa in a dark dress and lace collar.
Rereading Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear, I was sickened by the racist language. The book was not just a colourful tale of the Old West. It was a poisonous piece of colonial propaganda that helped Ottawa justify its execution of Riel and its denial of voting rights to the Indigenous peoples of the North-West. Worse was to follow, including the spread of residential schools that tore so many children from their homes and families.
In their book, the Frog Lake survivors described their Cree captors in racist terms, echoing ideas that Canada would use to defend its crackdown on Indigenous resistance in the West.
Soon after my article appeared, I got a note from a reader in Quebec. She had been putting together her family tree and discovered that she, too, had a connection to Frog Lake. John Delaney was the son of her great-great aunt.
There was more. She said John had what was sometimes called a “country wife” in Frog Lake, a local Cree woman, and that the woman had borne his child. That was startling news to me and my family.
We knew that John Delaney had a reputation for exploiting Indigenous women. Controlling food stocks in a time of malnutrition put the handful of male settlers in Frog Lake in a position of great power. According to Big Bear’s biographer Hugh Dempsey, John was among those who “prostituted their authority to the debauchery of young Indian women.” Locals said he had stolen the wife of a man called Sand Fly, arranging to have him jailed for theft.
But that he had fathered a child was a revelation. As far as we were aware, John had no direct descendants. He and Theresa had no offspring together.
What had become of that child? The reader pointed me to a scholarly paper by someone else with a Frog Lake connection, Christine Yvonne Martineau of the University of Alberta. She said her ancestor Genevieve Missinabiskop was the woman who bore Delaney’s child, a girl. Delaney, she wrote, “had a reputation for forcing himself on the Cree women and was rumoured to offer them food in exchange for sex.”
Whether “by force or by consent,” Genevieve was pregnant when she escaped Frog Lake in the aftermath of the killings. The child, Marguerite Delaney, who became known as Maggie, was born in nearby Onion Lake. “No one knows for sure why my great-grandmother was given John Delaney’s name,” Ms. Martineau writes in the paper, “just as no one knows the exact circumstances of her conception; it’s simply a part of our story.”
Genevieve would later marry a man named James McFeeters and have three more children. Records indicate she died in 1923 in Bonnyville, Alta. Her daughter Maggie Delaney went on to become the matriarch of a sprawling clan, with members across the West and beyond.
That was another revelation. In my family, we had never imagined that there was a whole other family with connections to John, Theresa and Frog Lake. Theresa herself went back to live with her mother and brothers in the Ottawa Valley and never remarried. She died of a stroke at 63.
The surprises were not over. Last year another out-of-the-blue e-mail landed in my inbox. It was from Sarah Houle, a Métis artist and musician in Calgary. She had come across my 2020 article on Theresa. “For my next art project,” Sarah wrote to me, “I would like to research the Frog Lake Massacre and the stories of the main people involved on all sides.”
She asked if I could help. I said I would try. I happened to be going to Calgary for work and we arranged to have coffee. What she said amazed me. She, too, was descended from John Delaney. Her grandmother, Norma Houle, was the granddaughter of Maggie Delaney.
Sarah Houle, learning of Marcus Gee’s connection to Frog Lake, reached out to him while working on an art project exploring the events of 1885.
The story of the family’s origins in the ruins of Frog Lake had been passed down through their family, just as Theresa’s story had been passed down through mine.
The way she understood it, Genevieve had been sent off from Frog Lake after the uprising to get help. The men stayed behind to stand guard.
She went on foot, headed for Onion Lake, a journey that today takes half an hour by car but for her would have been a tough overland journey. A daughter, aged about 12, walked by her side. Another, Maggie, was growing inside her.
The snow was still on the ground. They slept under a tree. Genevieve caught and cooked a rabbit, then kept a campfire going all night. They had only a single blanket against the cold. A man on horseback came across them. He rode ahead to tell Onion Lake they were coming. Someone sent a horse and cart to pick them up.
After fulfilling her mission to raise the alert about how bad things were back in Frog Lake, Genevieve took shelter at a convent. Her new daughter Maggie was raised by the nuns there.
When I told my family all this on a group chat, they were as astonished as me. One cousin, the family historian, soon found Maggie’s baptismal certificate online. Written by hand in French, it states that “On the twentieth of May, one thousand eight hundred and eighty-six, we, the undersigned priest, have solemnly baptized Marguerite … the illegitimate child of Genevieve Missinabiskop and John Delaney.”
Maggie grew up and married a Métis man, Adrian Martineau. They had 13 children together and adopted four more.
Ms. Houle showed me a picture of a faded newspaper clipping dated Nov. 13, 1968. The headline was “A Visit with a Grand Lady.” A black-and-white picture depicts a snowy-haired woman with her wrinkled hands folded on her lap. This was Maggie, then aged 83 and living in Cold Lake, an hour’s drive north of the settlement her mother fled in 1885.
The daughter of a Frog Lake refugee had become a pillar of her community. Her husband ran a Hudson’s Bay Company post and served as a local Indian agent, in charge of managing reserves. A local river was named after him because he once ran supplies to a surveying team that ran out of food and came close to starving. The couple were known for their good deeds. Adrian and Maggie, took in the four extra kids to “save them from the orphanage” (as the clipping puts it) after their parents died.
At the time the article appeared, Maggie had 59 grandchildren, 68 great-grandchildren and two great-great grandchildren. Imagine how many more descendants she must have now, 57 years later – all of them, in a way, connected to that dark day in Frog Lake nearly a century and a half ago.
Ms. Houle’s branch of the family ended up in Paddle Prairie, a Métis settlement near High Level in northern Alberta. She spent parts of her youth there, learning to tan moose hides and barrel race on horseback.
Her grandmother, just turned 93, still lives in the family’s big log house, her .22 at the ready to pick off any squirrels that dare to invade her yard. One wall is completely covered in pictures of grandchildren and other kin. The family came together this summer for the wedding of Ms. Houle’s sister. Ms. Houle’s son Finn, aged five, the younger of her two boys, was the ring bearer.
Along with working on her art, Ms. Houle is part of an experimental-rock band with her partner Shane Ghostkeeper. Since she first wrote to me, we have been in touch regularly to talk about Frog Lake. This summer, in a museum’s archives, she came across an audio clip of an old interview with a Frog Lake survivor who remembered the sound of shots as the uprising began.
Her art project is well under way. It will use animation, poetry and music. She wants it to be more than an anti-colonial statement. Those caught up in the events of April 2, 1885, were real people, not cartoon villains or heroes, she says. Good or bad, “they all had stories.”
So she hopes the piece will have a quality of lightness and beauty, despite the grim subject. “I’ve been drawing a lot of frogs,” she told me with a smile.
Yes, the people of Frog Lake endured terrible hardships and it is right to grieve for them, she says, but somehow the survivors carried on. While remembering how they suffered, it is also important to honour “that strength, that resilience.”
Ms. Houle’s Calgary mural Creature Medicine features spirit beings offering teachings about living in balance with the Earth. Her project on Frog Lake will also aim to strike a balance between the perspectives of everyone affected by the massacre.
For what it’s worth, I feel the same way. The things I have learned from Ms. Houle and others about the epilogue to Frog Lake haven’t changed my feelings about what happened there. It is still a terrible episode in Canadian history.
Terrible for Theresa Delaney, that faded figure from my family’s past. She saw her husband gunned down before her eyes. Did she know when she was taken captive that a local woman was carrying a child by her late husband? Had it been whispered about in that tiny, isolated community?
Terrible, of course, for those who were left behind at Frog Lake when Big Bear and his band fled. The small settlement on which they had come to depend for food and trading goods was destroyed in the uprising, its buildings burned to their foundations. Most would end up on reserves, the fate Big Bear had resisted to the end.
Big Bear himself was hunted down and clapped in irons. A famous photo shows him holding a striped blanket around his lean frame as he stares with narrowed eyes into the distance.
Big Bear had an unhappy and short life after a Regina court convicted him.O.B. Buell / Library and Archives Canada
A court sentenced him to jail for treason. He was released after 18 months and died a year later, “a broken and sick man,” as the Canadian Encyclopedia puts it. Eight others, including Wandering Spirit, were put to death by hanging, the largest mass execution in Canadian history.
Terrible, too, for Canada’s Indigenous peoples as a whole. Frog Lake put an end to any notion that the future of the Canadian West might be shared between the newcomers and the original inhabitants. It confirmed many Canadians in their view that those inhabitants were dangerous and inferior. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald said in Parliament that “we must vindicate the position of the white man; we must teach the Indians what law is.”
University of Calgary historian Sarah Carter wrote in 1997 that the story Theresa Delaney told in her book served not only to justify the hangings, but “to sanction the series of repressive measures that were adopted after 1885 and were aimed at monitoring, controlling and limiting the activities of Aboriginal people in the West.”
The book, Prof. Carter said, fit into the category of “captivity narratives” – often exaggerated, sometimes wholly fabricated stories of captured and abused white women that were used to justify the cruelties visited on Indigenous peoples in North America, Australia and other colonial settings.
Nothing I have learned about the aftermath of Frog Lake alters any of that. If the times call for truth and reconciliation, this is an ugly truth that those of us with links to the colonial experience cannot avoid.
The story of Genevieve, Maggie and their family fills me with wonder all the same. I shake my head when I think of the courage it took for Genevieve to set off across the snowy plains to seek help for her people. I smile when I think of how her daughter became the admired head of a sprawling Western clan. I feel a surge of hope when I think of the warm community that helped raise a remarkable person like Sarah Houle. I can’t wait to see what emerges from her studio.
In one way, Frog Lake was an ending. It helped bring down the curtain on thousands of years of native independence and freedom. The defeat and capture of Big Bear, Wandering Spirit and their followers by Canadian forces at Loon Lake on June 3, 1885, was the final act in Ottawa’s suppression of the Northwest Rebellion, or Northwest Resistance as modern historians often call it.
In another, it was a beginning. The clan that Genevieve and Marguerite founded grew and flourished, as others did, too. Today, 140 years after Frog Lake, Canada is home to about 1.8 million Indigenous people from more than 600 First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities.
Two communities, one Cree, one Métis, still exist at Frog Lake, flanking the lake on opposite sides. It is still, as Theresa found it, a beautiful place. A line of slender aspens stands on a ridge next to the memorial site. A carpet of tall grass rolls down and away into the distance. When I visited in April, a daylight moon hung like a picture in the milky blue sky.
Many locals are rediscovering and reclaiming their heritage. On the day of my visit, I met a young Cree woman in a pickup truck who is doing a deep dive into the history and hopes to see a new interpretative centre rise nearby.
That would be a welcome evolution. For years the commemoration of Frog Lake was one-sided. The cairn marking the spot was dedicated in 1925. A plaque affixed to it says that this is the place where “rebel Indians under Big Bear massacred” the nine men and “took prisoners Mrs. Theresa Delaney and Mrs. Theresa Gowanlock.”
A modern walking trail across the road gives a more balanced view. Mounted displays describe the growing anger and frustration of the local Cree that spilled over at Frog Lake. But the words have grown weathered and faded. Some are now illegible.
Frog Lake deserves better. A more complete accounting would go deeper into the dire condition of the Cree before the attack. It would describe how the authorities used the event to justify the system of repression and assimilation that followed. It would say how the little book by the two Theresas inflamed public opinion.
But it would also tell the after-story: How a brave woman, alone except for an adolescent child, would tramp pregnant through the bush and start over.
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