Fort Pitt | The Canadian Encyclopedia

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Fort Pitt

Founded in 1830, Fort Pitt was the major Hudson's Bay Company trading post between Forts Edmonton and Carlton (Saskatchewan), located at a large bend in the North Saskatchewan River just east of the modern Alberta-Saskatchewan border.
At Fort Pitt
Mistahi maskwa (Big Bear, centre) trading at Fort Pitt, 1884 (photo by O.B. Buell, courtesy Library and Archives Canada/PA-118768).

Founded in 1830, Fort Pitt was the major Hudson's Bay Company trading post between Forts Edmonton and Carlton (Saskatchewan), located at a large bend in the North Saskatchewan River just east of the modern Alberta-Saskatchewan border. It was one of two principal points for signing Treaty 6 in 1876. On 14 and 15 April 1885, during the North-West Resistance, Chief Big Bear's Cree band besieged the fort. After a skirmish in which a policeman was killed, the Indigenous people permitted the fort's North-West Mounted Police detachment to flee downriver and then took the civilian occupants prisoner and looted the post.