MARY'S GENEALOGY TREASURES
With the arrival of the horse on the prairies in the mid 1700's
and the arrival of the white man with his interest in the fur
trade, routes of travel between trading posts were established
across the prairies. These trails were originally travelled
by pack horses, then by Red River carts and wagon trains.
One such trail, the trunk road winding 210 miles from Fort
Benton on the Missouri River to Fort Whoop Up at the
junction of the St. Mary and Old Man rivers near Lethbridge,
became famous as the Benton Trail and infamous as the
Whoop-Up Trail. Back and forth along the trail mule trains
passed and repassed rolling in the whiskey barrels and
taking back hides and furs.
With the coming of the R.C.M.P. in 1874 and the ending of
the whiskey trade, the bull (oxen) teams continued to ply
their way back and forth over the Whoop Up Trail, bringing
in supplies to the new town of Fort Macleod which had
grown up around the police fort. The merchant princes of
Fort Benton, the I. G. Baker Company and the rival T. C.
Power & Bros. had erected well stocked stores in Fort
Macleod and a two way trade flourished.
From time to time some of the whiskey traders had pried a
few loads of coal out of the southern Alberta riverbanks.
When Nicholas Sheran came to Alberta in 1870 looking
for gold, he hit his own bonanza at the junction of the St.
Mary and Oldman rivers. There he started a coal mine.
In 1872, finding that site unprofitable, he selected a new
one close to the present city of Lethbridge. Before long
he was shipping coal down the Whoop Up Trail to Fort
Benton, and when the police built Fort Macleod he supplied
coal to them. The site of his new mine - the future Lethbridge
- was called Coal Banks.
With every wagonload of coal hauled across from Coalbanks
35 miles away, Fort Macleod's dominating position was
threatened. From its original bearing the Whoop Up Trail
branched east and then north to cross the Six Mile coulee
at the Tiffin farm and then northeast into Coal Banks.
The coming of the railway quickly ended the long established
connection with Fort Benton and from 1883 the Whoop Up Trail
began to decline in importance. The last bull train to pass
through Lethbridge from Fort Benton was in the spring of 1885.
The old Whoop Up Trail assumed a new significance in 1919
during the Prohibition Era when a flow of Canadian liquor
was chugging south in tightly side-curtained McLaughlin
Special, Marmons, & Hudson Super Sixes.
When the land is uncropped traces of the wagon trail can
be seen to this day on the southeast corner of the Tiffin farms,
south of Stan and Ina's residence.
Acknowledgments:Lethbridge - A Centennial History by Alex
Johnston/Andy den Otter, and A History of Alberta by James
G. MacGregor
Miscellaneous Histories