Frog Lake Massacre

Date	April 2, 1885
Location	53°49′52″N 110°21′31″W / 53.831186°N 110.358696°W / 53.831186; -110.358696Coordinates: 53°49′52″N 110°21′31″W / 53.831186°N 110.358696°W / 53.831186; -110.358696 Frog Lake, Alberta
Result	Cree success

Belligerents

Cree

White settlers of Frog Lake

Commanders and leaders

Wandering Spirit

none

Casualties and losses

none

9 killed

The Frog Lake Massacre was part of the Cree uprising during the North-West Rebellion in western Canada. Led by Wandering Spirit, young Cree warriors attacked the community of Frog Lake in the District of Saskatchewan in the Northwest Territories on 2 April 1885, where they killed nine settlers.

Chief Big Bear and his band had settled near Frog Lake about 55 km (34 miles) northwest of Fort Pitt but had not yet selected a reserve site. He had signed Treaty 6 in 1882. Angered by what seemed to be an unfair treaty and by the dwindling buffalo population, Big Bear began organizing the Cree for resistance.

Learning of the Métis victory at the Battle of Duck Lake a week earlier and of Poundmaker's advance on Battleford, Wandering Spirit, the war chief of Big Bear's band, began a campaign to gather arms, ammunition and food supplies from the surrounding countryside. The nearest source of supplies and the first to be looted were the government stables, the Hudson's Bay Company post and George Dill's store at Frog Lake. Anger among the Cree in the area was directed largely at the representative of the Canadian government, the Indian agent Thomas Quinn, who was the source of the inadequate rations that kept the Cree in a state of near-starvation.

A band of Cree led by the 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 community. They gathered the Europeans, including two priests, in the local Catholic church, where Mass was in progress. After Mass concluded, at around 11:00 a.m., the Cree ordered the prisoners to move to their encampment a couple of kilometres away.

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