Allan:
I read an account of one American gunfighter who crossed into Alberta, taking over a small town and terrorizing the population, none of whom would have felt the need to carry a gun for self-defence. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police was relied upon to keep the peace. A telegram was sent to the closest RCMP post and, as was typical, one constable was dispatched to deal with the situation. He arrived in town and was directed to the local hotel, where the gunman was holed up with his girlfriend. The mountie burst into the gunslinger’s room, knocked the cowboy out cold with a single punch and disarmed the woman, who charged at him with a knife. The pair were then handcuffed and taken back to the police barracks for arraignment.
The Northwest Mounted Police, later the RCMP, was formed and sent into western Canada in 1874, just as a large-scale settlement was beginning, so law and order were well established by the time settlers arrived en masse. The physical standards were extraordinary. Recruits were required to be at least six feet, two inches tall and weigh one-hundred and eighty-five pounds or more. This was at a time when the average height was a few inches less than it is today. Criminal perpetrators were known to throw up their hands at the first sight of one of these towering scarlet-clad figures. Only five hundred men were responsible for policing a wild country the size of Europe, meaning constables commonly worked alone and unsupported. The job appealed to a certain kind of man.
After the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes fled to Canada fearing retribution from the US army for the annihilation of Custer’s 7th Cavalry. Ten thousand heavily armed braves, fresh scalps hanging from their belts, were met at the border by a single RCMP officer, who offered them sanctuary if they agreed to obey the law. The Sioux Chief Sitting Bull would later say that the Commissioner of the RCMP was the only white man he ever trusted.
During the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, a detachment of the RCMP was sent to oversee the huge influx of prospectors into the Yukon territory. The route to the goldfields passed through the American port of Skagway, Alaska, where an organized crime gang ran the town and residents slept on the floor in their homes, better to avoid stray bullets coming through the windows.
In Dawson City, on the Canadian side of the border, it was said that you could leave a bag of gold nuggets on the sidewalk and return in a week to find it untouched. Firearms were forbidden within the city limits and violence was rare. Saloons, gambling and prostitution were permitted, as long as the bars refused service to drunks, the games were honest and the girls well treated. And it all came to an abrupt halt at midnight each Saturday, only to start up again in the first minute of Monday morning, the Sabbath having been properly observed. Miscreants were put to work chopping firewood on a giant woodpile that was the common fuel supply for the town. Incorrigibles got an escort to the border.
In one case, following the murder of a prospector, a constable from the Yukon detachment was assigned to track down and arrest the killer, which he did, more than a year later in Juarez, Mexico. The prisoner was then taken back to Canada to stand trial. Such stories spawned the legend that the mounties always get their man.
When the commanding officer of the RCMP detachment, Superintendent Sam Steele, left Dawson City exhausted at the end of the two-year assignment he had planned to go quietly, without fanfare. On the morning of his departure, however, Steele discovered the streets from his cabin all the way to the riverboat dock lined by tens of thousands of people from the town and the surrounding countryside who sent him off with cheers and a sack of gold.
That was the wild west, Canadian style.
John Corrance
