Colonel Robertson-Ross also urgently recommended that a chain of military posts should be established from Manitoba to the Rocky Mountains; that a stipendiary magistrate for the Saskatchewan should be appointed, who should also act as an Indian Commissioner and who should fix his residence in Edmonton. "The individual to fill this post," he said, "should be one, if possible, already known to the Indians, and one in whom they have confidence." He also pointed out that this Indian Commissioner should always be accompanied by a military force. "A large force is not necessary," he said; "but the presence of a certain force will, I believe, be found indispensable for the security of the country, to prevent bloodshed and preserve peace."
This is the story of the way in which the Royal North-West Mounted Police of Canada came into being. These "Riders of the Plains" stand alone and unparalleled in the world in their organisation, their peculiar field of work, and the nature of their control over the vast region entrusted to their care. This Mounted Police Force comprises about six hundred officers and men, whose territory is an area as extensive as all Central Europe, or a region five times as large as Great Britain; extending for two thousand miles from east to west, and a thousand miles from north to south. In this great area are twelve divisional posts and one hundred and fifty detachments. The organisation of this body was carried out in the autumn of 1873. The first one hundred and fifty of the Mounted Police were stationed at Lower Fort Garry in Manitoba. They were under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel George A. French, an officer of the Royal Artillery who had been the Inspector of Artillery at the School of Gunnery in Kingston, Ontario. Colonel French at once, on arriving in Manitoba, urged upon the Government the need of strengthening the force by at least doubling the number of men. Two hundred more were enlisted in Toronto, and the expedition to the Far West was fixed for an early date in the spring.
The picturesque aspect of the Royal North-West Mounted Police is notable. It was Sir John Macdonald's idea that the dominant note in their uniform should be scarlet as "this colour conveys the strongest impression to the mind of the Indian, through his respect for 'the Queen's soldiers.'" To accentuate the military character of the force and to distinguish them from the blue-coated soldiers of the States was a point of real importance.
This first detachment of the Royal Mounted Police made an expedition in the summer of 1874 into the very heart of the Blackfeet country, and returned to Dufferin in November, having made an effective campaign in the interests of law and order, from which very important and momentous results have ensued since that time. That the small body of less than seven hundred men should exercise such control, not only over so vast an area of almost unknown wilderness, inhabited by such a diversity of human beings scattered widely apart, is practically an isolated fact in all history. To this magnificent Force is largely due, to-day, the conditions that invest the North-West with such promise and prosperity.
"The Force may be said to have largely completed the work it originally set out to do," writes Frank Yeigh[[1]]; "so far as the frontier provinces are concerned, a work that is worth many times its cost, as an object-lesson of the power and authority of government existing behind all real civilisation."
[[1]] Through the Heart of Canada. T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1910.
Still, the task of the mounted patroller is by no means yet completed. The present force costs the country nearly three-quarters of a million dollars a year. Their outposts are being set farther and farther afield. Thus, from the promontory of Cape Chidley, at almost the most northerly point of Labrador, the barracks overlook Hudson Straits; another guards Hudson Bay, while a third protects the Arctic seaboard, and the most western post serves to protect the gold land of the Yukon. It is a fact, and a striking one, that on the three-hundred-mile road from White Horse to Dawson the traveller is as safe as in any part of Canada. Of the life of this Royal Force Mr. Haydon says:
"The stories of the daily life of these rough-riders of the plains are the very essence of romance, of high courage, of Herculean tasks performed and great difficulties overcome. The Mounted Police kept down lawlessness when the Canadian Pacific Railway was being built, they fought bravely during the Riel Rebellion of 1885, they kept well in hand the gold rush to the Klondyke in 1889-90, and not a few served in South Africa during the Boer War. But the deeds of the individual men call for high praise. Their qualities of fidelity, devotion to duty, and their fearlessness are constantly being exemplified. A thousand miles on the ice, 'mushing' by dog-team and komatik, through unexplored haunts of bear and wolf, is a common marching order for these splendid pioneers."
One individual instance among the many that might well be related to add to the annals of human heroism is the remarkable journey made in 1906 by Constable Sellers, who, with an interpreter and an Eskimo, drawn by a dog-team, left the west coast of Hudson Bay in February of that year to discover the locality of a Scottish ship in the Arctic waters, to collect the customs due, and to inspect the conditions of this region. The trip lasted two months, and before his return in April Constable Sellers had experienced all the hardships of an Arctic winter. Many pages might be filled with the thrilling accounts of the adventures and the noble and self-effacing sacrifices of these brave defenders of the law, these magnificent protectors of human life and property, the very guardians of all that makes for civilisation and lends value and significance to life. Mr. Yeigh's description of the conditions of life of the force on Herschell Island is extremely graphic. He says:
"The life of the Mounted Policeman on Herschell Island presents many features of interest. Stranded in this far-off corner of the Dominion in the Canadian 'Land of the Midnight Sun,' he lives as near the North Pole as possible. It is a circumscribed island home, moreover, with a shoreline of only twenty-three miles, and with cliffs rising five hundred feet from the Arctic Sea. Though so far north, in latitude 69°, Herschell Island is covered with a luxuriant growth of grass and carpeted with innumerable wild flowers. The island possesses the one safe harbour in all these northern waters—a harbour in which fifty ships could safely winter."