It was like a scene from the Wild West era of the United States. Something you would have seen in Deadwood, rather than Saskatchewan.
The incident was a gunfight, and by some accounts, it may have been the largest gun fight in the history of Western Canada.
The gunfight didn’t happen in the 19th Century on some dusty road. It all went down outside Tisdale in September 1920.
On Sept. 17, 1920, a group of men were spending some time playing poker at Red Deer Lumber Mills. While they were dealing out the cards, four men burst into the building and robbed the poker players.
After the robbery, the police were called immediately and a short gun fight occurred before the robbers fled.
Two days. Constable Ives and a group he assembled got the drop on two of the robbers who were eating dinner in a section house. The posse arrived thanks to a tip from a telegraph operator.
The two men were taken two Tisdale under guard. Once there, they would go on their way to Prince Albert to stand trial.
As for the other two men, they made their way towards Prince Albert.
Two days later on Sept. 26, police noticed footsteps that led them to a large hay stack. They soon realized that the two robbers were inside that haystack hiding.
And it was at that hay stack that the gun fight occurred. Over the course of the next five hours, the two men and police fired 500 shots at each other.
With no end to the gunfight in sight, the officers brought in 500 metres of binder twine and some waste to create a fireball that was launched at the hay stack at 3 p.m.
As the hay stack burned with the robbers inside, the police approached and told them to get out of the haystack. The two men fired two shots from the hay stack in response to the request to exit the haystack.
One man attempted to pull the two men out of the hay stack as it burned but he was unable to as the fire quickly spread.
The two men fired five more shots, the last bullets to leave the haystack.
The robbers never emerged from the stack.
After the fire was put out, their partially-burned bodies were removed.
Thus ended the Tisdale Gun Fight.