page_title: Iron Confederacy
section_title: Early expansion and the fur trade
hierarchical_section_title: Iron Confederacy / Early expansion and the fur trade
caption_attribution_description: Woman of the Snake tribe and woman of the Cree tribe
context_page_description: The Iron Confederacy was a political and military alliance of Plains Indians of what is now Western Canada and the northern United States. This confederacy included various individual bands that formed political, hunting and military alliances in defense against common enemies. The ethnic groups that made up the Confederacy were the branches of the Cree that moved onto the Great Plains around 1740, the Saulteaux, the Nakoda or Stoney people also called Pwat or Assiniboine, and the Metis and Iroquois. The Confederacy rose to predominance on the northern Plains during the height of the North American fur trade when they operated as middlemen controlling the flow of European goods, particularly guns and ammunition, to other Indigenous nations, and the flow of furs to the Hudson's Bay Company and North West Company trading posts. Its peoples later also played a major part in the bison hunt, and the pemmican trade. The decline of the fur trade and the collapse of the bison herds sapped the power of the Confederacy after the 1860s, and it could no longer act as a barrier to U.S. and Canadian expansion.
context_section_description: American ethnographer and historian Edward S. Curtis wrote about the close but unstable relationship between the Assiniboine and the Plains Cree, and how, after the Plains and Woods Cree territories diverged, the Woods Cree were no longer a part of this military alliance:
  During this early period the north front of expansion is better documented.  By the early 1700s the Cree had come into conflict with the Chipewyan to their northwest.  With help of a Chipewyan interpreter, Thanadelthur (a woman who had learned the Cree language as a captive), the HBC was able to help broker a peace between the Cree and Chipewyan in 1715.  By 1760 the western front of Cree expansion reached the Lesser Slave Lake region of what is now northern Alberta where the Cree eventually pushed out the Beaver (Danezaa) people. The Cree-Beaver conflicts lasted until the smallpox epidemic in 1781 decimated the Cree in the region, leading to a peace treaty ratified by a pipe ceremony at Peace Point, which gave its name to the Peace River.  The river became the boundary with the Beavers on the left bank (to the north and west) and the Cree on the right bank (the south and east).
  In the south little political or economic history is recorded for several decades.  Recounting his story to David Thompson many years later, a Cree man named Saukamappee told of a band of Cree aiding the Piegan (Blackfoot) in their conflict with the Snake near the Eagle Hills around 1723.  The battle was fought on foot with bows-and-arrows tipped with obsidian, and neither guns nor horses were involved at this point. By 1732 the Snakes had horses, which they were using to great effect against the Piegan, and so the Piegan called upon the Cree and Assiniboine for assistance. This time, however, Sukamappee says that Cree and Assiniboine muskets turned the battle in their favour.  By 1750, Legardeur de Saint Pierre noted that the Cree and Assiniboine were successfully raiding the "Hyactljlini" "Brochets" and "Gros Ventres", and despite his peacemaking efforts the Assiniboine massacred a group of the "Hyactljlini" (their identity is a mystery).
  In 1754 Anthony Henday reports that he was able to buy a horse from the Assiniboine camped near present-day Battleford, Saskatchewan and was the first European witness to Cree-Assiniboine trade with the "Archithinue" (Blackfoot Confederacy). From this and later accounts, the content of the trade is well known: the Cree and Assiniboine gave European goods including guns, knives, kettles, hatchets, and gunpowder to the Blackfoot people in exchange for horses, buffalo-skin robes, and wolf, beaver, and fox furs, which they would take to York Factory (the Blackfoot people refused HBC proposals that they go to the Bay directly, as it was too far and, as a plains people, they were not experienced canoeists). A gun was worth roughly fifty beavers, and a horse was worth one gun according to Henday.  In 1772 Mathew Cocking reported that the Cree and Assiniboine with whom he travelled were always alarmed when they saw an unknown horse, fearing that they might belong to the Snakes. Cocking also suggests that at this time the Cree-Assiniboine held an annual gathering with the Blackfoot in March near Saskatchewan River Forks where they would trade and the Blackfoot would ask for volunteers for their wars with the Snakes.
caption: Shoshoni (left) and Cree women, 1840s
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