Policing the Plains

Canada took over the North-West from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870 and then left it, for a few years, with almost no law in it at all. Parliament voted a mounted police force in 1873, and the slaughter of an Assiniboine camp in the Cypress Hills by traders up from Montana hurried the recruiting along. MacBeth follows the corps for nearly fifty years: the march west from Dufferin in 1874, Inspector Walsh and Sitting Bull once the Sioux crossed the line, the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Riel rising of 1885, and the Klondike rush, policed from a post on the summit of the Chilkoot Pass. He had served alongside these men in 1885 without ever joining the corps, and he says so on his first pages. The admiration runs warm and he never pretends otherwise.