The Frog Lake Massacre was a Cree uprising during the North-West Rebellion. Led by Wandering Spirit, young Cree warriors attacked the small town near Frog Lake, Alberta on April 2, 1885.
Angered by what seemed to be unfair treaties by the Canadian government and the dwindling buffalo population, their main source of food, Big Bear and his Cree decided to rebel after the successful Métis victory at Duck Lake. They gathered all the white settlers in the area into the local church. Thomas Quinn, the town's Indian Agent, was killed after a disagreement broke out. The Cree then shot at the settlers. Nine people were killed and three were taken as captives.
The massacre prompted the Canadian government to take notice of the growing unrest in Western Canada. The rebellion was eventually put down, and Wandering Spirit, the war chief responsible for the Frog Lake Massacre, was hanged.
Read more about this topic: Wandering Spirit (chief)
Famous quotes containing the words frog, lake and/or massacre:
“Squats on a toad-stool under a tree
A bodiless childfull of life in the gloom,
Crying with frog voice, “What shall I be?
Poor unborn ghost, for my mother killed me
Scarcely alive in her wicked womb.”
—Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849)
“The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.”
—Lu Yu (d. 804)
“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)