William Winder at Fort Calgary (until May 25, 2012)

The William Winder Collection
The simple folk paintings on these walls are from the collection of Captain William Winder (1844-1885), one of the first members of the North West Mounted Police. Winder was the commanding officer at Fort Macleod from 1875 until he left the Force in 1879, and would have travelled to Calgary many times. It is  possible that Winder painted the images himself, or he may have purchased them from a Montana trader called Andy McGowan. Either way, the real value of the paintings lies in the glimpse they give us of life at Fort Calgary in its infancy.

Elbow Many Houses
The paintings show the original Fort in about 1876, and the very beginnings of the community that sprang up around it. The Blackfoot called Calgary “Elbow Many Houses,” and to them, it must have seemed a busy place. To the south is the I.G. Baker Company, a Montana trading outfit that built the Fort under contract. The other buildings are not identified, but other buildings that existed at the time were the store of T.C. Power & Brother, and a billiard hall operated by a former whiskey trader, Harry “Kamoose” Taylor.  
To the east are the buildings for Hudson’s Bay Company, which located across the Elbow River from Fort Calgary to compete with the I.G. Baker Company.  The house of the Factor (chief trader) still stands. Now known as the Hunt House, you can visit it in the garden behind the Deane House.

Scenes from a Fort
The paintings depict the same basic scene with minor variations, depending on the season or the day’s activities. Here are a few things to look for:  

• A tipi comes and goes, indicating the intermittent presence of Native peoples, or possibly Metis, who were attracted to the trading posts around the Fort. One picture shows a Red River cart beside the tipi. These noisy, all-wood carts were used by the Metis and early settlers to carry buffalo robes and trade goods across the prairie.
• Other scenes show women doing laundry and other chores.  Several of the NWMP and traders had dalliances with local women, who were known as ‘prairie brides.’ While some were legally married, most of the wives were abandoned once European women arrived.
• Not surprisingly, horses formed a big part of life for the mounted police. Today’s famous Musical Ride grew out of cavalry drills performed on horseback. The paintings hint that not all Mountiehorses were always well behaved!
• In one winter scene, horses are pulling sleds. Dog sleds were also sometimes used at the Fort, but were more common further north. Sleds were a risky proposition in southern Alberta, where Chinooks could melt all the snow in a day.

Before the Stampede: Calgary’s Cultural Context: June 1 ‐ October 7, 2012

As a part of Calgary’s Cultural Capital 2012 celebration, Fort Calgary is pleased to present “Before the Stampede: Calgary’s Cultural Context”, a temporary exhibition that tells the story of the early history of the city of Calgary as seen through the lens of a changing relationship with bison.  In partnership with Adrian Stimson, a Blackfoot artist, this exhibit will provide a discussion on the buffalo culture that existed here before 1875. The exhibit examines, through contemporary art and firsthand accounts of the North West Mounted police who were stationed at Fort Calgary, the disappearance of the Plains Bison. A key element of this exhibition is Adrian Stimson’s Re-herd 2 art installation in which visitors to Fort Calgary will be invited to paint one of 4,000 miniature cast bison and place it on a map of Alberta, symbolically re-populating the province with bison.

Adrian Stimson is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta. He is an interdisciplinary artist with a BFA with distinction from the Alberta College of Art & Design and MFA from the University of Saskatchewan.