A Tale of Two Massacres

In 1862, a store clerk of Métis and Irish heritage, Thomas Trueman Quinn, crawled into a barrel under his store counter at the Yellow Medicine Agency on the Minnesota River, and thus managed to survive a bloody battle between Dakota warriors and settlers that resulted in large numbers of white and Native American deaths. In 1885, 23 years later, across a porous border in Canada’s Northwest, Thomas Quinn’s luck ran out: he was the first to die in what is known as the Frog Lake Massacre, shot point blank by Cree war chief Wandering Spirit.

Quinn’s uncanny presence at both massacres is just one of several startling parallels between the events of 1862 and 1885 that have drawn me to make connections between them. Popular Canadian opinion takes pride in the notion that “our” western frontier was settled through “peace, order and good government” whereas the American frontier, or “wild west,” was the site of lawless and pitiless violence, especially where relations with...