Between Borders:

The Métis–Cree Roundup and the Return to Canada from North-Central Montana

The story of the Métis and Cree who hunted, wintered, hid, and sometimes were rounded up in the soft loam of north-central Montana reads like a borderland elegy — part migration, part exile, part stubborn insistence on a way of life that the maps refused to hold. In the late nineteenth century, as the buffalo thinned and governments hardened, people who called themselves Métis, and Cree who had long moved between territories, found themselves negotiated over by militaries and bureaucracies; some crossed into the United States for refuge and then, under pressure and patrol, were returned or compelled to move back into Canada. This paper traces that movement: the causes that drove people south, the manner in which U.S. forts and Canadian authorities intercepted them, and the slow, wrenching return to the Canadian plains. Sources from regional histories, university theses, and museum collections illuminate a story at once intimate and geopolitical.

The Push and Pull of the Plains

To understand why Métis and Cree families threaded themselves across the 49th parallel, we must begin with the rhythms of the buffalo hunt and the collapse of that economy. The Métis were born of the fur trade and the prairie hunt; their communities were organized around seasonal bison hunts that could involve hundreds or thousands of people. As the century progressed, market forces, commercial hunters, and railroads decimated the herds — the foundation of a way of life — and placed immense pressure on Indigenous and Métis mobility. Seeking remaining herds and the security of fertile valleys, many Métis and Cree drifted across what later became Montana in search of sustenance and sanctuary.

When armed conflict flared in Canada in 1885 — the North-West Rebellion led by Louis Riel and supported by leaders such as Gabriel Dumont — the consequences were immediate and fracturing. The military response from Ottawa, and punitive sentiment in many settler communities, made life perilous for Métis and for Cree bands associated with the unrest. For some, flight southward into Montana was both practical and ancestral; families that had long moved fluidly across the plains now relied on the United States as a place of temporary refuge.

Arrival and Encampment in Montana

Accounts from Montana repositories and local historians show waves of arrival in the late 1870s through the 1880s. Central Montana — the Milk River and Front Range areas — became loci for camps and small settlements of Métis families, some arriving with the detritus of rebellion and others simply following the buffalo. Local newspapers, county histories, and later museum collections record the emergence of Metis camps near forts, ranches, and river valleys, where seasonal work, hides, and the remaining herds could be found. ([MT Memory][4])

Yet refuge in Montana was precarious. The United States Army, living up to its role in a post–Little Bighorn military footprint, operated forts such as Fort Assinniboine to assert order on the northern plains. Forts were complex actors: they sometimes protected refugees, sometimes enforced border discipline, and at times collaborated — tacitly or explicitly — with Canadian officials who sought the return of particular groups. The presence of mounted troops, cavalry patrols, and a watchful, often suspicious settler population meant that staying invisible was a constant strain.

Roundups, Arrests, and Diplomacy

The term “roundup” is freighted. For settlers and soldiers it meant enforcement of law; for the people corralled it meant humiliation, separation, and the risk of forced removal. There are documented episodes where U.S. troops, responding to complaints — of raids, of violence linked to the 1885 disturbances, or of cross-border crimes such as the Frog Lake killings — detained Cree and Métis bands. Leaders such as Little Bear (a Cree leader) and others who had participated in or been accused of complicity in uprisings sometimes slipped into Montana; they were frequently pursued by Canadian officers and sometimes detained at posts such as Fort Assiniboine before diplomatic adjudication.

Scholarship on transborder diplomacy reveals an uneasy cooperation between Washington and Ottawa. U.S. officials were mindful of domestic law and international courtesy; Canadian authorities were intent on repressing the rebellion’s aftermath. The result was a patchwork of arrests, releases, and repatriations. Some Cree and Métis were handed over; others were released back into the United States upon orders from Washington — a tacit recognition, in select cases, that mass removals could inflame tensions or contravene American interests.

Stories of Return

The returns to Canada were not a single event but a mosaic of expulsions, voluntary movements, and quiet trickles. Some groups, worn by exile and pressure, chose to cross back — whether coerced by military escorts or persuaded by offers (or threats) from Canadian agents. Others, like families decimated by the collapse of the bison economy, returned when notes of relative safety or renewed access to land presented themselves, or when the U.S. presence made continued refuge untenable. Oral histories collected by regional museums and the Métis national repositories recall the wrench of these returns: leaving a place where children had been born; returning to burnt or claimed homelands; rebuilding community in the shadow of surveillance.

It is important to emphasize that not all movements were legalistic deportations; many were negotiated outcomes of survival politics. A Fort Assiniboine record may show detentions, but beneath the ledger lies a human geography of kinship ties, seasonal labor, and families who chose between two imperilled futures. The metaphoric “medicine line” that separates Canada and the United States often did not mean much to those whose languages, marriages, and economies traversed it freely. Yet by the late 1880s and into the 1890s, increased border enforcement, dwindling buffalo, and the consolidation of reservations and homesteads made transnational mobility harder and less tenable.

Memory and Aftermath

What remains today is a layered memory: the watercolor camps preserved in the collections of the Gabriel Dumont Institute, the county histories that mention Métis settlers along the Front Range, and the museum panels that speak in understated captions of displacement and resilience. Contemporary Métis communities in Montana and adjacent Canadian provinces carry this legacy in family stories and land claims, in oral histories that connect a child born in a Montana camp to a grandparent who hunted near Batoche. Modern scholarship — theses and articles from universities in Montana, Saskatchewan, and Nebraska — has deepened this record, emphasizing transborder perspectives and the agency of Métis and Cree peoples in shaping their own movements rather than being merely objects of state policy. ([Harvest][7])

Conclusion: The Border as Palimpsest

If the border is a line on a map, the lived border is a palimpsest: the printed ink of treaties and troopers overlies, but cannot entirely erase, the lighter, older script of kinship and hunt. The Métis and Cree movement through north-central Montana and back into Canada in the latter nineteenth century was driven by hunger, fear, and the stubborn human capacity to seek sanctuary. It was mediated by forts and diplomats, but animated by people who remembered how to travel the plains, read weather and trail, and forge communities out of uncertainty. Today, when one stands on the Milk River and listens to the wind, the traces of cartography and the memory of buffalo hunts both whisper. The roundups and returns were neither tidy nor ethically simple, but they are part of a continuity — a history of borderlands where identities were not created by lines but by motion across them. ([Montana Historical Society][1])

Selected Bibliography

Arnette, Travis. *Migration of the French Red River Metis*. Montana State University, Department of History. Accessed via Montana State history repository.

Foster, Michael H. “ ‘Just Following the Buffalo’: Origins of a Montana Métis.” *Great Plains Quarterly* 26, no. 2 (2006).

Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research. *Timeline of Métis History* and “Métis Bison Hunting Camp” image. Gabriel Dumont Institute Virtual Museum.

Montana Historical Society. *Who Are the Métis?* educational materials. Montana Historical Society, 2024.

Betke, Thomas. *US Borderlands, 1885–1917* (thesis). University of Saskatchewan, 2019. (Examines Little Bear’s Cree and the diplomacy after 1885.)

Burt, L. “Nowhere Left to Go: Montana’s Crees, Métis, and Chippewas” *Journal/Article* (1987). JSTOR.

Montana State University / Fort Assinniboine historical pages. “Fort Assinniboine: Brick Stronghold of the Border, 1879–1911.” Northern Agricultural Research Center (NARC), Montana State University.