nick of time, Jerry Potts with a group of Peigans and two Blood bands, who were armed with repeating rifles, came to their assistance. In the daylong so-called Battle of the Belly River, on October 25, 1870, near present-day Lethbridge (called by the Blackfoot Assini-etomochi – "where we slaughtered the Cree") the combined Cree-Assiniboine force, who lost over 300 warriors, was defeated. The slaughter was such that Jerry Potts said: "You could fire with your eyes shut and be sure to kill a Cree." The next winter the hunger compelled the Nehiyaw-Pwat to negotiate with the Blackfoot and, in 1873, Crowfoot (Isapo-Muxika) (Issapóómahksika - "Crow-big-foot"), Chief of the Siksika (Siksikáwa - ″Blackfoot People″), adopted Pitikwahanapiwiyin (Poundmaker) a man of mixed Cree and Assiniboine parentage, creating a final peace between the Nehiyaw-Pwat (Cree-Assiniboine) and Blackfoot. The Battle of the Belly River was the last major conflict between the Cree and the Blackfoot Confederacy, and the last major battle between First Nations in Western Canada. In 1871, Potts' mother was murdered by a man drunk on "firewater." So, Potts declared his own personal war on the whiskey runners. By the time Potts was 36, he had killed at least 40 men, mostly whiskey runners. In September 1874, Potts was trading horses in Fort Benton, Montana. He was hired as a guide, interpreter and scout by the North-West Mounted Police. His contract as a guide for the North-West Mounted Police was to last twenty-two years. He was paid $90 per month, which was quite a bit higher than a regular guide, and three times a police constable's salary. He ceased working for the force at age fifty-eight, because the pain of throat cancer made it so that he could no longer ride, and died a year later, on 14 July, 1896, at Fort Macleod. The Macleod Gazette and Alberta Livestock Record paid tribute to the man who “made it possible for a small and utterly insufficient force to occupy and gradually dominate what might so easily, under other circumstances, have been a hostile and difficult country. . . . Had he been other than he was . . . it is not too much to say that the history of the North West would have been vastly different to what it is.” Jerry Potts is buried at Fort Macleod with the rank of Special Constable in the North-West Mounted Police. Recognition The city