Home >> The People and Their Communities >> Métis Communities >> Historic Communities >> Lac Ste. Anne >> 1844 Mission

In 1841, a local Métis man named Piche, travelled to St. Boniface to ask that a priest be sent to live among them. The next spring, Bishop Provencher sent Father Jean-Baptiste Thibault, who spoke Cree, to check things out. Father Thibault was very active and had visited or assisted in establishing many of the Métis communities in the West.

By 1844, a mission was set up and a shack was built to house Father Thibault and young priest Joseph Bourassa. Father Thibault blessed the lake renaming it Lac Ste Anne, fulfilling a promise he had made to give her name to the first mission he would 'father'. The Catholic missionaries hoped a community would grow there, where the Métis could settle and take up an agrarian lifestyle. While the lake offered a plentiful supply of whitefish, the soil was not very good quality, and the growing season was shorter than at Fort Edmonton.

By sending lay brothers and nuns to assist the priests, the Catholic Church multiplied their effectiveness many times. Lay brothers provided the labour and skills to construct more elaborate missions and to provide for the people who lived in them, while the nuns came to teach, and run the infirmaries and orphanages. The priests were left free to celebrate mass and catechize in the various Aboriginal camps.

The mission took a long stride forward when on 21 September 1859, Father Remas reached Fort Edmonton after his 51-day one-way trip from St. Boniface. That day his small train of carts drew up to the fort—12 horses, six carts, and a wild dog. Stiff and bruised from the long trek from St. Boniface, three Grey Nuns climbed down from a cart. Three days later, these Sisters of Charity, Sister Emory, the superior, Sister Lemay and Sister Marie Alfonse, reached Lac Ste Anne and immediately started tidying up what had, up until then, been an all-male establishment.

With the arrival of all this help, the mission progressed rapidly. Noting its increased stability, Chief Factor William Christie decided to upgrade the Company’s outpost, thereby replacing a shack he had rented from John Cunningham, an enterprising Métis, with a new log building 8 metres by 10 metres. Unfortunately, this new structure was destroyed by fire a day or so after being completed, so the Company had to build another. Nevertheless, this new post at the lake was a sign that lay civilization was sending out tentacles to embrace it.

Cree was the common language in the area at the time, so the nuns began to study the language out of necessity. They opened a school for girls and 20 students attended during the winter. However, in the spring of 1860, food was scarce and most of the Métis left in its pursuit. The St. Albert mission was created in the 1860s, and was well set up by 1868. The Grey Nuns soon moved over to the new mission.

In the 1860s, the Métis still living at Lac Ste Anne, and following the yearly schedule of moving according to the season and what resource they were gathering, began having to go further and further south, risking encounters with the Blackfoot, to hunt buffalo. Métis hunters began to make use of Tail Creek as a gathering place. In 1870, the smallpox epidemic killed many of the Blackfoot, and the Métis from Lac Ste Anne began to stay at Buffalo Lake and Tail Creek over winter. Some of them assimilated into the settlers’ communities and are represented to this day by their descendants.

[Top] [Back]

1844 Mission

Modern Population