Policing the plains

In the report of Superintendent Cotton for the year of the big Yukon stampede there is related one of the many incidents which indicated that on the plains the Mounted Police we...

"The population of the Territories has doubled in ten years and the strength of the Force has been reduced by half. Our detachments have increased from 49 to 79." This was one o...

In the foregoing chapter I have, in order to preserve the continuity of the Police story through the war period, gone a little ahead of the chronological order of general events...

Reference has been made several times to the studied and determined reticence of Mounted Policemen concerning their own achievements. That characteristic is stamped on all their...

Orders from Ottawa had disposed the Mounted Police into four different locations, although, as we have seen, the fourth had become only necessary at Dufferin, because there was...

Some years ago a well-known Senator told me that he was at a dinner party in Sir John Macdonald's house in Ottawa, when a telegram was delivered to the Premier at the table. He...

A few years ago I was away north of Edmonton on the trail of Alexander Mackenzie, fur trader and explorer, who a century and a quarter before had made the amazing journey from t...

Away on the banks of the Red River hard by where the City of Winnipeg with its aggressive business marts and its surging polyglot population now stands, there is the old Kildona...

In writing these chapters it is necessary to throw in a story or incident here and there out of the regular sequence in time, so as to relate cognate subjects to each other. Hen...

The year 1914 gave us in history the spectacle of world-wide sword play, the rattle of machine-guns, and the roar of heavy artillery, along with an unprecedented loss of human l...

Perhaps the startling story of "The Massacre Ground" at Cypress Hills, some 40 miles north of the boundary line, and kindred stories were the last straws which, added to the wei...

Nothing in the history of Western Canada was more charged with dynamitic possibilities of serious trouble than the unexpected influx into our country of thousands of battle-scar...

The White North was taking its toll of the men who were at the outposts of Empire as exponents of British administration. When Fitzgerald left Herschell Island on his last patro...

For some ten stirring and formative years the Mounted Police had been riding their gallant steeds over the virgin sod of the untracked prairie before the iron horses, crossing t...

The decade from 1890 to 1900 witnessed changes and incidents that were fully up to the Police history record for matters of thrilling importance. In 1891 Sir John A. Macdonald,...

In the recent Great War a somewhat casual visitor was present when a vagrant shell smashed the refreshment dug-out where a young Red Cross man was handling some comforts for the...

That thunderstorm, with the resultant stampede at Dufferin, along with some blood-curdling prophecies of attacks by the scalp-gathering Sioux Indians, had the good effect of wee...

Great bodies are proverbially slow in their movements, and in this regard all governments seem to be great bodies. It may be that a healthy difference of opinion within a cabine...

Meanwhile back on the prairie, the Mounted Police were alive to every movement and much was done to save people from their own overweening desire to get into the gold country by...