The Massacre
Against Big Bear's opposition, a band of Cree led by war chief Wandering Spirit took Thomas Quinn hostage in his home in the early morning of 2 April. The Cree then took more white settlers hostage and took control of the village. They gathered the Europeans, including two priests, into the local Catholic church, where mass was in progress. After the mass concluded, around 11:00 a.m., the Cree ordered their prisoners to move to a Cree encampment a couple of kilometres away.
Quinn steadfastly refused to leave the town; in response, Wandering Spirit shot him in the head. In the resulting panic, Wandering Spirit's band killed eight other settlers: the two Catholic priests, Leon Fafard and Felix Marchand, Fafard's lay assistant John Williscroft, as well as John Gowanlock, John Delaney, William Gilchrist, George Dill, and Charles Gouin.
One of the Hudson's Bay Company clerks, William Bleasdell Cameron, one of the men rounded up into the church, went to the Hudson's Bay shop to fill an order made by Quinn for Miserable Man after the mass. When the first shots were fired, he escaped with the help of sympathetic Cree, and made his way to a nearby Wood Cree camp, where the chief pledged to protect him.
Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney, wives of two of the slain men, their families and approximately seventy others from the town were taken captive.
Read more about this topic: Frog Lake Massacre
Famous quotes containing the word massacre:
“The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)