The Book of the West / The story of western Canada, its birth and early adventures, its youthful combats, its peaceful settlement, its great transformation, and its present ways

by Howard Angus Kennedy

What was to happen now?

It was the dangerous age of the West. Along the frontier in the south the risk was great. Over the Blackfeet, in their pride and power, even the Company had never gained as much influence as it had with the rest. And now a new danger appeared in that quarter. The neighboring territory of the United States had been allowed to become the happy hunting ground of rascals. They snapped their fingers at the law of their own land; they thought nothing of killing their fellow-whites, [a]Ruffians on the Border] and less than nothing of killing an Indian. What was a frontier to them? Laughing at the weakness of their own government, they thought they could defy the British Government too. They did not know our way.

One day a band of these ruffians crossed the line from Montana with a cargo of smuggled whiskey. Coming to a camp of Assiniboines, they first got possession of everything the Indians could be persuaded to barter for the fiery spirit. At night, when most of the unsuspicious red men were indulging in a drunken dance, the “traders” suddenly poured volleys of lead into the defenceless crowd. Forty Indians were shot dead and many others wounded; only a remnant escaped to the neighboring Cypress Hills.

The liquor was murderous enough, without such massacres. The smugglers plied their devilish trade unceasingly; who was there to hinder? The Indians, poisoned and demoralized, fought each other worse than ever. If this thing had gone on, white settlement would have been impossible.

The story of the swift restoration of peace and order is one of the finest in Canadian history. It is the story of the North West Mounted Police.

Rudely awakened by the Red River outbreak, and warned by the Imperial authorities—who had persuaded the Company to surrender the West to Canada, and were therefore peculiarly responsible for the welfare of its inhabitants—the Federal Government took action. A little force of three hundred red-coats was organized in 1873 and told to keep order in a territory of two and a half million square miles. Impossible, it sounds. Yet the thing was done. [a]“It is Like a Miracle”]

The frontier campaign against the whiskey runners in the south-west was undertaken by half the force, 150 men. In 1874 prohibition was established for the whole territory, with severe penalties for selling or giving liquor to Indians. At the end of one year Colonel MacLeod, the commander, was able to report a “complete stoppage of the whiskey trade throughout the whole of this section”—which was the worst in the country. The drunken riots, which had been almost a daily occurrence, were entirely at an end. In fact, “a more peaceable community than this, with a very large number of Indians camped along the river, could not be found anywhere. Everyone united in saying how wonderful the change is. People never lock their doors at night, and have no fear of anything being stolen which is left outside; whereas, just before our arrival, gates and doors were all fastened at night, and nothing could be left out of one’s sight.” “It is like a miracle wrought before our eyes,” said the veteran missionary John McDougall, whom I met years afterwards riding as a volunteer scout in the Saskatchewan campaign. It was chiefly owing to MacLeod that the Blackfoot tribes in 1877 signed a treaty by which certain lands were set apart for ever as their Reserves, the Government agreeing to pay them a yearly subsidy of $5 a head. Such treaties had already been made with Indians farther east. At a great gathering of the Blackfoot and kindred tribes, the Governor of the Territory, David Laird, told them that the Queen was much pleased by the way they had helped the Police and obeyed the law. “The Great Spirit,” he said, “has made the white man and the red man brothers, and we should take each other by the hand. The Great Mother loves all her children, white men and red men [a]Blackfoot and Blood Make Treaty] alike. You will always find the Mounted Police on your side if you keep the Queen’s laws.”

The head Chief, Crowfoot, coming forward to sign the treaty, declared that the advice given to his people had proved to be good. “If the Police had not come,” said he, “where would we all be now? Bad men and whiskey were killing us so fast that very few of us indeed would have been left to-day. The Mounted Police have protected us as the feathers of the bird protect it from the frosts of winter.” And Red Crow, Chief of the Bloods, who signed with Crowfoot, added that MacLeod had made many promises to him and kept them all; not one of them was broken. The town that grew up beside MacLeod’s old fort preserves his memory in its name; and Calgary, where he built a fort in 1875, was called after his birthplace on the west coast of Scotland. A French trading post had been established near the same spot on the Bow River as far back as 1752, by Niverville, a kinsman of the great explorer Vérendrye.

The most romantic tales are told of the Mounted Police and their unbeatable pluck. Too romantic to be true, perhaps you think. No; I might have thought so once. But after seeing these men at work, in peace and war, I can imagine no duty so hard, so long or so dangerous that they would shrink from shouldering it or fail to carry it through at any cost. A single trooper would think no more of walking into the strongest camp, arresting an Indian and bringing him out, than I would think of riding into a herd of cattle and cutting out a steer. Next day, with an equally light heart, he would start off on a six months’ hunt for some desperate criminal in the ends of the earth, travelling summer and winter, [a]Achievements of the Mounted Police] over land and water and snow and ice, and bringing back his man or perishing in the attempt.

The Indians quickly learnt that the man in the red coat was “he who must be obeyed.” They were impressed by the fact that the Police, whether one or many, had the authority of the “Great White Mother,” the Queen. That by itself, however, might have forced only a grudging obedience. It was the character of the police themselves that won for them an authority over the tribes as remarkable as the Hudson’s Bay factor ever possessed.