History
The North West Mountain Police were sent to the Wood Mountain area to establish the Queen's Law in the frontier west of early Canada. It was the 1870s, and Sitting Bull had led his large Sioux tribe away from The Little Big Horn after defeating Custer's incursion upon their native land. The Canadian government was concerned that the Sioux would cause problems, and charged Walsh of the NWMP with maintaining control of what amounted to Canada's first attempted peace keeping mission. Walsh succeeded, as he and Sitting Bull became close friends over the years, and there were never any serious problems caused by the American Indian settlers. Members of the tribe remain in the Wood Mountain area to this day, including several families who live on the Wood Mountain First Nation.
In 1890 the Wood Mountain Stampede was established, and it became an annual event held even through the World War years of 1914-1918 and 1939–1945, which has allowed it to attain the title of the longest-running annual rodeo in Canada. It is held each year, the second weekend in July.
Read more about this topic: Wood Mountain Regional Park
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)