The Mounted Police
NO; BUT out in the vast beyond were the makings of trouble enough. From
little Manitoba to the mountains, the thousand miles of plain, then
vaguely known as “The Saskatchewan,” lay unguarded and unwatched. The
old ruling company had given up its power, and no new ruler had
appeared. The throne was empty.
The Company’s authority over most of the tribes had been extraordinary.
By treating the Indians as its children, with a wise mixture of patience
and firmness, by avoiding interference as a rule and acting swiftly and
sharply when action was both necessary and possible, the Hudson’s Bay
men had won both affection and respect. More than once a young clerk had
walked alone into an Indian camp after a murderer, shot the fellow where
he stood, and walked out untouched without a word.
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, 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.
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 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, 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.
With rare exceptions, which were swiftly thrown out on discovery, the
Mounted Police were not only brave but considerate, scrupulously fair,
and neither to be bribed nor wheedled. That is, they upheld the true
British standard of honor. The Indian learnt to trust them because they
proved themselves worthy of trust. I have known tribesmen come to a
police corporal, rather than any one else, for advice in all sorts of
social and domestic difficulties.
Unfortunately, the Indians south of the line had had a very different
experience. There was no great company interested in protecting them,
and no one did protect them, from irresponsible and rascally white men.
Even the Indian Agents appointed by the Government at Washington to
“father” the tribes often proved the worst of step-fathers. The Indians,
swindled and outraged, took vengeance in their primitive way on any one
of the same race as their oppressors. The innocent settler suffered for
the deeds of his guilty fellow-countrymen. Then the army was sent to
punish, not the white criminal, but the red avenger. Long and desperate
“Indian Wars” were the result.
The Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, after wiping out a force sent against him
in one of these wars, fled to Canada. That was in 1877. Already, the
year before, 3,000 Indians had come in from the States, saying they had
not been able to lie down in safety for years, and their grandfathers
had told them they would find peace in the land of the British.
The new incursion was decidedly embarrassing. Even if they behaved
themselves in Canada—as they did, under the watchful eye of the Mounted
Police—the name of Sioux had a terrifying sound, and their presence
wandering over the prairie would hardly encourage farmers to settle
there. Besides, the buffalo were being swept off the prairie, and it
would soon be hard enough to provide for our own buffalo-hunting tribes.
The newcomers, therefore, were not given a Canadian reserve to settle
on, and to our great relief they went back to their own country in 1881,
accepting an offer of peace from the Washington Government.
A few years later, a band of our own Indians fled across the line to
avoid punishment for the unprovoked rebellion which I shall soon have to
narrate. When the trouble had blown over, they decided to come back. A
whole troop of United States cavalry escorted them to the frontier at a
point where they were to be handed over to the Canadian Mounted Police.
There they found a corporal and one constable, with an interpreter. The
United States officer was puzzled. “Who is in command?” he asked.
“Myself,” said the Canadian corporal. “But where’s your troop?” said the
officer. “Here they are,” replied the corporal, pointing to his solitary
constable.
[Illustration]
_Fort Chipewyan_
[Illustration]
_Buffalo Herd and Prairie Fire_
[Illustration]
_Mounted Police Chasing_
_Whiskey Smugglers_
[Illustration]
_A Returned Canadian_
_Home Seeking_
Astonished, the officer asked what the corporal would do if the Indians
turned sulky—there were more than a hundred of them. “They won’t,” said
the corporal promptly; “we shall have no trouble with them.” Nor did
they. The tribesmen went quietly back to their reserves, like lambs.
THE GREAT DIVIDE