Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 21

Whisky, Horses and Death:
The Cypress Hills Massacre and its Sequel

by Philip Goldring

Appendix A. Abel Farwell and the Cypress Hills Massacre Story

The preceding pages have established a fairly clear pattern of events, a comprehensive tale to which virtually every witness, regardless of bias, added an element of truth. The whites — Hammond, the Benton gang and one or two others — went to the Indian camp determined to get Hammond's missing horse or a replacement for it. The Indians saw this hostile party approaching and, already alarmed by reports that the whites had come to kill, either fled, slipped away armed, or danced around, drunk and provocative. All these movements and gestures were interpreted by the whites as the start of a fight from which they had no thought of retreating. The battle was one-sided and decisive.

The only substantial body of discordant evidence is that of Abel Farwell. This is most perplexing for Farwell is the man who did most to raise the massacre from a sordid frontier incident to a cause célèbre, provoking intense local excitements and political headaches in two capitals. Farwell, alone among the witnesses to the massacre, challenged the picture of a drunken affray with his grim portrait of deliberate and unprovoked murder. His unique tale held him up to enormous opprobrium during his lifetime and makes him a subject for intense scrutiny even now.

There is every reason to believe that Farwell lied in at least one part of his testimony before Chief Justice Wood and the jury in the Cypress Hills case in Winnipeg three years after the massacre. The testimony which sheds the most important light on that of Farwell is, of course, that given by his interpreter Lebombard. The latter's testimony, like Farwell's, ruined his status among the men whom he had traditionally relied upon for his living, the Benton-based traders. Yet the story he told was nowhere near complete enough to put a rope around anybody's neck. He swore that he had been unable to see either the Indian camp or the men in the coulee when fighting first broke out and he refused to attempt to identify the men firing from the roof of Fort Soloman. He must therefore be excused from any suspicion of bias or deliberate perjury. At the same time, no effort was ever made to implicate him in the shooting, so he had no need to exaggerate the crimes of others to expiate some personal guilt. Lebombard's testimony, then, rests on solid ground.

On this basis, what Lebombard had to say about Farwell's evidence is revealing, even crucial. Lebombard was the trader's interpreter and consequently must have known what he was saying when he said Farwell and the Indians had only a few words in common. Farwell must therefore have been prevaricating when he described the deal he had worked out with the Indian chief to hold two of the Assiniboines horses until Hammond's should be returned. The curious part of this story is that it is by no means central to Farwell's story that Hammond fired first, without provocation. According to Lebombard, Farwell tried to make himself understood to the Indians, then turned and talked to the men in the coulee before returning toward his tort, shouting for the interpreter. Why did Farwell not relate these facts in the same simple fashion?

The quick, coarse answer came from the Benton gang and their apologists, that the trader was a bought witness, a perjurer. But if so, who bought him? Two answers may be offered — the obvious one, the Canadian government. and a more fantastic one, the T.C. Power Company. (The latter is suggested by Paul F. Sharp in Whoop-Up Country. [1]) On the proposition that the government might have bribed Farwell, there seems to be little evidence either way except that the government's records of payment of witnesses are still available in the unsorted records of the deputy minister of justice in the Public Archives of Canada and show no unusual payments to Farwell. Moreover, if Farwell was bribed to testify against the Benton gang, he was evidently underpaid for his evidence was insufficient to produce a conviction. He repeatedly maintained that he did not think there would have been firing if the Indians had been able to return Hammond's horse immediately and when he positively identified the killers of specific Indians, he named men not on trial.

Nonetheless, Sharp's contention that Farwell was part of a conspiracy by the T.C. Power Company to blacken their rivals, the I.G. Baker concern, by incriminating some of Baker's supposed associates, is put forward as a serious hypothesis and deserves to be examined as such. But it falls down on one of its most important points — the story that Farwell altered his version of the massacre story after he had consulted with his "employers," the T.C. Power Company. The supposed evidence for this change of story turns out to be the deposition which John Wells, a plains trader, gave to the Canadian government early in 1874. [2] The crux of Wells's tale is that Farwell came to his camp to trade and to hire carts a few days after the fight and said that the Assiniboine had started it in a dispute over liquor. but later testimony makes this appear absurd and Wells's affidavit is obviously wrong in many other respects. Farwell, of course, had hired his transport a few days before the massacre. Thus Sharp's evidence that Farwell changed his story after returning to Fort Benton proves unacceptable.

So far as the general hypothesis of a commercial conspiracy goes, it is highly doubtful whether the ties between wholesale houses and individual traders were strong enough to fit the theory — even the hanging of a notorious horse thief like Evans would hardly have cast much disgrace upon the wealthy Baker, for whom Evans had once allegedly worked. There is another strong indication that Farwell did not try to entangle Baker by falsely accusing the Benton gang. This evidence is in the account books of the T.C. Power Company [3] which show that Farwell's relation to the T.C. Power Company was more that of a client than that of an agent or employee. Other facts suggest the same conclusions — Farwell sheltered independent traders within his fort and had to hire his own transport to take out his returns at the end of the season. Moreover, these account books also suggest that Moses Soloman stood in roughly the same relation to the T.C. Power Company as did Farwell — in other words, they were both independent traders who happened to draw their goods from the same wholesale house. It is not altogether likely that Power would have continued to supply Soloman if Farwell, Soloman's most immediate competitor, had been an agent of the Power concern. But what is crucially important is that, if commercial connections really were as close as Sharp supposes, then Farwell's testimony, implicating as it did the Soloman party as well as the Hardwick gang, would have tarred Power and Baker with the same brush.

To dismiss Sharp's conspiracy theory makes it no easier to assess Farwell's true motives. It can be argued that no two witnesses see an incident in the same fashion; that Farwell really was what he purported to be, an honest man appalled by the horror of what he had witnessed, a man willing to sacrifice his standing in the frontier community to see justice done. The defendants at the Helena extradition hearing did their best to destroy this image, but the witnesses they invoked are equally suspect.

In one respect, this is less important now than it was at the time, for a comprehensive story of the massacre can be pieced together without reference to Farwell's account for any but non-essential details. But in studying the conflicting interpretations presented to the extradition hearing, the preliminary hearing for George Bell and the Winnipeg trial, it would be useful to know Farwell's inner thoughts.

Indeed, we know very little about the man. We do not know how intelligent he was; was he, perhaps, too simple to distinguish fact from fiction? Did he unwittingly believe that it was proper to let imagination fill the gaps created by a faulty memory? We know that he was sober enough to realize that somebody had to mediate between the angry whites and the unsteady Assiniboine, but was it drink that prompted him to attempt the mediation himself, without his interpreter?

Sharp has failed to present a plausible case for a commercial conspiracy using the courts for private advantage, yet there remain myriad possibilities that Farwell was consciously lying. Perhaps, for instance, he bore a deep personal grudge against Hammond, who had shared his roof for a season and whom he repeatedly accused of firing the shot which precipitated the whole massacre. This is speculation, but the evidence of Farwell's untruthfulness or carelessness over details is not. Lebombard's disclosure must be noted and there were some discrepancies in the evolution of Farwell's testimony over the years — in 1873, for example, he had spoken to Little Soldier moments before the massacre began; two years later, he claimed it was a minor chief, not Little Soldier at all. There is also the mystery of Garry Bourke who, from a documentary point of view, appeared out of nowhere to accompany Farwell to Major Simmons's office at Fort Peck, then vanished from the record altogether. Thus, although the major incidents of the massacre are now laid bare, Farwell remains the only piece of the puzzle which seemingly does not fit.