One hundred and twenty-five years ago, an earlier generation created an organization that became essential to the development of Prairie agriculture and rural society.
That organization was the North West Mounted Police, a collection of vagabonds and adventurers who were given quaint pillbox hats and sent to bring law and justice to the vast Canadian plains.
With heroic effort and determination, they succeeded.
That story is well worth recalling as today’s RCMP commemorates its 125th anniversary.
Outraged by atrocities committed against Natives by U.S.-based whiskey traders, Parliament voted in May 1873 to create the NWMP.
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After a rigorous winter of training in Winnipeg, some 275 original recruits headed out the next year on a gruelling march into almost uncharted territory.
Their maps were wildly wrong, their government-supplied equipment was inadequate, and they suffered from lack of water and food. Several men and many horses died. Men wore rags on their feet when their boots fell apart.
Yet they persevered on the thousand-mile trek until they could establish Fort Macleod in Alberta, in the heart of the whiskey traders’ territory. The traders fled without a fight.
Crowfoot, legendary chief of the Blackfoot nation, later declared, in agreeing to a treaty with Canada: “If the Police had not come to this country, where would we all be now? Bad men and whiskey were killing us so fast that very few, indeed, of us would have been left today. The Police have protected us as the feathers of the bird protect it from the frosts of winter.”
Over the ensuing decades, as settlers’ crude farmhouses appeared on the prairie, the RCMP were one of the most prominent symbols of law and civilization.
In all seasons, including bitter cold and blowing snow, lone constables on patrol criss-crossed the plains, dutifully checking isolated settler families. One year, patrols from just the Regina detachment logged 350,000 miles.
To reward this dedication, the national government, which had cut their pay in 1879 to 40 cents a day from 75, finally agreed, about 1900, to provide sensible headgear.
As rural communities flourished across the prairie, the RCMP role changed. In hundreds of small towns, “our Mountie” became a key part of the social fabric – policeman, mediator, legal adviser, and often coach.
Even if they were sometimes obliged to issue speeding tickets or seize homebrew, they were and are valued members of rural society. It’s a 125-year history of which the force can be proud.
