Two weeks later, on April 19, the Fort Benton Record reported that residents of the Canadian settlement of Battleford, on the North Saskatchewan River, were ‘greatly excited’ over an account that Sitting Bull had formed an alliance of Sioux, Blackfoot and Stoney tribes and had made overtures to the Cree. The alliance’s apparent intentions were to carry out widespread raiding. ‘A camp of seven hundred lodges of Sioux at the Sand Hills, sixty-five miles from Fort Walsh, [was] growing with new arrivals hourly…’four wagon loads of cartridges arrived at camp’ [in one day]….The Nez Perce [and] the Blackfeet have all formed a treaty with Sitting Bull [and] the Blackfeet are on the Belly River [near Fort Macleod] in force….It is supposed that the attack is to be made on the Cypress Hills [Fort Walsh] and Fort Macleod.’

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The Mounties investigated these stories but found they had little real substance. Powerful Blackfoot Chief Crow Foot confirmed that Sitting Bull had made overtures to him. Crow Foot said that in the spring of 1876, before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had asked him to join the Sioux in a mighty war against the Americans, but he had refused. Sitting Bull had been in contact with him again in the summer of 1877, when they met during a buffalo hunt, but the subject of an alliance had not been mentioned.

When Walsh traveled to and from Ottawa by rail via the northern United States in early 1878 and in the latter part of May (Canada’s nation-spanning railroad–the Canadian Pacific–wasn’t completed until November 1885), he often was questioned by journalists. The man the American press dubbed ‘Sitting Bull’s Boss’ dismissed rumors of a grand alliance under Sitting Bull. He stated emphatically that Sitting Bull’s Sioux–now numbering about 5,000, including some of the followers of Oglala Sioux Chief Crazy Horse, who had been killed by a soldier’s bayonet on September 5, 1877–were not part of any such plan. In his opinion, traders often passed on such stories to Army scouts hungry for news to report to their superiors. When, in May 1878, Walsh was asked by a journalist of the Chicago Times about the possibility of a confederation of all the tribes north of the border, he answered, ‘It is not natural to suppose that the Sioux and the Blackfoot could become allies.’ As for stories of the Sioux having ample supplies of ammunition, Walsh pointed out that his men rigidly enforced government restrictions allowing the Sioux only enough bullets for hunting. He added that the Mounties regularly patrolled all smugglers’ routes into the country occupied by the Sioux.

Rumors that Louis Riel, exiled leader of a Métis insurrection in Manitoba in 1869-70, was attempting to form an Indian-Métis alliance were, however, another matter. Riel, living in Montana, tried throughout 1878 to form an alliance of all the ‘Indian blood…between the Saskatchewan and the Missouri’ to rise up against the whites and reclaim the prairies, which he maintained rightly belonged to them. His actual objectives were vaguely stated. He was capitalizing on Indian unrest over their changing way of life, especially the growing shortage of buffalo, but he was really more concerned with seizing control of Canada’s North-West Territories than he was with the American side of the border, as was evidenced by his part in the abortive North-West Rebellion of Métis and some Indians in 1885.

The Assiniboines of northern Montana were the first to join Riel. As soon as Walsh learned of Riel’s activities, he rode down to Wolf Point, along the Missouri River, where the Assiniboine camp was located, and talked them out of Riel’s alliance. Then he rode back north across the border and into the camps of Sitting Bull and the other Sioux chiefs, reminding them of their promises to obey the Queen’s law and to keep the peace. Walsh placed great store in a man’s word, as did Sitting Bull and the Sioux. He sent word to the Indian agents in Montana on whose agencies Riel and his Métis agitators and allies camped. The agents, in turn, informed the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Army was ordered to take action. Before winter snows swept across the northern Plains in 1878, soldiers, U.S. marshals and customs officers swooped onto the reserves and dispersed the Métis, seizing their weapons and ammunition, moving those who admitted to being Canadian back across the border and the others to more southerly regions of Montana. This action effectively broke up Riel’s alliance.

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