Fort Whoop-Up

The whisky post that brought the Mounties west, and had nothing on it when they arrived

In 1869 two Montana traders, John J. Healy and Alfred B. Hamilton, put up a post they called Fort Hamilton on the Oldman: eleven cabins, burned out within a year, rebuilt properly for 25,000 dollars. Everybody called it Whoop-Up. They traded blankets, food, guns and ammunition, and they traded whisky, the local version being Whoop-Up Bug Juice, spiked with ginger, molasses and red pepper and coloured with chewing tobacco. Six months of the first post took in 50,000 dollars of buffalo robes. The trade, plus reports of an American flag flying over Canadian ground, is what brought the North-West Mounted Police into existence and marched them west. They arrived in October 1874, found no whisky on the premises and a trade banner rather than a flag, and carried on. A flood took the original in 1915; the reconstruction, built in 1967 downstream in Indian Battle Park, is a museum.