Mounted police life in Canada : a record of thirty-one years' service

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

12. The Passing of the Calgary Barracks. 1914 126

14. An Unrecorded Incident of Mounted

Chapter I

IT was a glorious morning, in the early part of July, 188.3, when I left the Windsor Hotel in Regina, and started to walk the two and a half miles of rolling prairie that intervened between the hotel and the barracks of the North- West Mounted Police, some of the roofs of which were distinguishable in the distance.

Regina had been selected by Lieutenant-Governor Edgar Dewdney as the capital of the North- West Territories, and had been christened by H.R.H. the Princess Louise, whose husband, the Marquis of Lome, was then Governor-General of Canada.

The Mounted Police had been ordered to make Regina their head-quarters, and the transfer from Port Walsh had not been quite completed at the time of which I write.

In order to facilitate the housing of the police in their new home, a number of so-called "portable " buildings had been shipped in from Eastern Canada. These had been made in sections, and were readily put together on the spot. Needless to say, they were cold habitations, and every room on the ground floor required to have a stove to itself.

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The prairie was carpeted with wild roses, and for a time I tried to avoid stepping on them, but they were so plentiful that the avoidance of them became irksome, and I hardened my heart and walked on.

I found the officer in command to be Superintendent William Herchmer, known all over Prince Rupert's Land as "Colonel Billy." Whence he derived his title of "Colonel" I do not know, but he assumed it and it stuck to him.

I sought him out and reported my arrival, and he took me round and introduced me to the other officers in the Post.

These were Dr. Jukes, the senior surgeon of the Force; Inspector P. R. Neale, the supply officer; and Inspectors A. R. Macdonell, Greisbach and A. B. Perry. The latter had served a short time in the Royal Engineers at Chatham, but the atmosphere of the School of Military Engineering seemed to have proved uncongenial, and he had returned to his native country to accept a commission in the North-West Mounted Police.

The Commissioner of the Force, Colonel A. G. Irvine, was not in Regina at the time of my arrival, and as he had more room in his quarters than he absolutely required for himself, I was installed therein for the time being. Having with me a folding bedstead which I had used in the Ashanti Campaign of 1873-4, and a light kit, I was easily housed until my quarters should be ready for occupation.

Inspector Neale was married and comfortably settled, and he and his wife were kind enough to ask me to take my meals with them, which I was very glad to; do.

The empty shell of a house (a story and a half high) was placed at my disposal, and I was invited to partition it off to suit my convenience, which I did. Carpenters were at once set to work on it, and two rooms were added downstairs, which made it a sufficiently commodious and convenient habitation. Seeing that there was no rent to pay, and that the Government provided stoves, fuel and light, I considered myself supremely fortunate. After a few days the adjutant, Superintendent John Cotton, arrived, and General Orders then announced the appointment, as Inspector, of R. B. Deane, Esq., although my credentials from Ottawa showed that I had been a captain in the Imperial Service.

The Mounted Police Force had been in existence for ten years and had not a standing order or regulation of any kind. I was expected to remedy this defect and, as I had been for five years adjutant of a division of Royal Marines, consisting of 3,500 non-commissioned officers and men, besides officers, and had served afloat and ashore for close on sixteen years, it was child's play to me to draft regulations for a little force of 500 men when once I had become acquainted with the conditions of life and service in the country.

Regulations were needed badly enough, but what was more urgently required than anything else was the driving power to compel the wheels of the machine to turn smoothly. I had been told in Ottawa that I should find the Mounted Police an " armed mob," and I certainly discovered them to be so.

I spent the best part of the months of July and August in Regina trying to teach the "hay-leg "-"strawleg " business to some recruits, and when the Comptroller visited the Post towards the conclusion of that interval, he said that he noticed an improvement in the bearing of the men. At the beginning of September I went to Toronto to fetch my family, who were installed in a house there, and brought them all westward early in the next month — wife, five children, and a domestic servant whom we had found in Winnipeg. A telegram from T. C. Patteson to Mr. George Stephen, president of the Canadian Pacific (now Lord Mount Stephen), expedited the transmission of the car containing our household goods, and we soon settled down in our new home and awaited the advent of our first North- West winter.

The first line of study that it was incumbent upon me to take up was obviously that of the Criminal Law. I was familiar with Military Law, and it was fortunate that I was so, for there was no one in the country, either at the bar or on the bench, who knew anything about it, and it devolved upon me, a few years later, to teach the Supreme Court of the North- West Territories the true relations between itself and a court constituted by the Mounted Police Act. The particulars of this will be found under the chapter entitled "Mounted Police Law.'*

The study of the Criminal Law that we were to administer in the country was, at that time, a little complicated, for only certain statutes were in force in the North- West Territories ; having ascertained from Colonel Richardson, the senior stipendiary magistrate, which those were, I set to work to epitomise them into the form of a manual which a constable could carry about with him, so as to inform himself as occasion might require.

Colonel Richardson was very kind, and devoted several hours to going over my work wTith me and to making corrections and suggestions.

I studied also all the police manuals which I could procure, the principal ones being those of the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Melbourne Force.

In this manner I spent the winter of 1883, in equipping myself for my future duties, and the time was well spent. So far as any idea of a "Constable's Manual"

was concerned, the Police Department at Ottawa had no interest in, nor any sympathy with, any such project. My manuscript was promptly consigned to a pigeon-hole, where it remained until a sympathetic fire came along some years later and made an end of it and of other records in the departmental building at Ottawa.

I next turned my attention to the problem of "Standing Orders," which were very urgently needed, and with that object in view I studied all the literature that I could procure. I have already remarked that, however desirable regulations might be, it was equally desirable that there should be some driving power which would keep the machine moving, and an illustration of this may be offered. One of the officers stationed at head-quarters had been detailed for railway duty, and in pursuance thereof he used to travel on a pass, and to talk mysteriously about the people with whom he used to come in contact, and so on. After I got to know him better he told me that he did not know what his duties were, and that he had never received any orders on the subject. To my knowledge he never made a report, and his chief object in life seemed to be to buy scrip cheaply from the half-breeds. He had begun to acquire 1,000 acres of land in Manitoba, and thought of little else. I do not know what good the purchase did him, for when he died he did not leave a penny. Presumably he bought more land than he could pay taxes on, with the consequence that in time it was sold to cover the arrears.

This is an apt and true illustration of the go-as-youplease manner in which the Mounted Police Force ran itself in the year of Our Lord 1883.

In April, 1884, the Commissioner appointed a Board of Officers, of which I was one, to formulate a single rank drill for the Force and to draft Standing Orders. The drill was soon disposed of, and then glances of inquiry were cast at me. I asked if there were any means of ascertaining the contents of the Commissioner's office, as there was necessarily therein a certain amount of material which would have to be worked into Standing Orders, and this ought to be at our disposal. It seemed that there was no way by which we could obtain the required information, and I therefore said that I did not see how we could make any progress. The board died a natural death then and there.

The Commissioner, who had been to Ottawa during part of the session, returned on Good Friday and announced that I was to be promoted to superintendent and appointed adjutant from April i. The appointment, however, did not actually reach Regina until May 14, and on that day I took charge of the Commissioner's office.

The staff consisted of Staff-Sergeant W. H. Irwin (now Clerk of the District Court at Lethbridge) and Sergeant (now Superintendent) Routledge.

The care and attention which my predecessor had not bestowed upon his office were evidenced by the fact that there was not even an index to the correspondence, and it was necessary for us to sort and examine the entire contents of the office and to make a correspondence register as we went along. This gave me the opportunity that I was looking for, of finding out what orders there were for incorporation in my new work, and, although the operation exhausted several weeks, the time was not ill-spent.

The lack of a correspondence register explained some funny little dockets, with which the table in the Commissioner's office was covered. These were all neatly folded up, with labels describing their contents, and an indiarubber band round each of them. When the office was properly fitted up I asked the Commissioner if he had any objection to my removing his treasures piecemeal and answering them. There was no very great difficulty in so doing, although I was a stranger to the country. One docket, I remember, related to a claim made by an old widow at Battleford, whose oat crop had been trampled by some police horses which had broken through her fence. I recommended payment of a hundred dollars to settle her claim.

Another prolific source of correspondence were the numerous claims made by men, when taking their discharge from the Force, for compensation on account of having received some injury while in pursuance of duty. One docket related to a claim for 5,000 dollars made by a non-commissioned officer, and it caused us a great deal of trouble to hunt up old ration returns and such-like documents to find out where he was on certain given dates. There was nothing on record to show that the so-called injury had ever been reported at the time, and this obviously called for a remedy in the future. In the Royal Navy I knew that when a man was injured on duty he was given what was known as a "hurt certificate," and I made a provision that, in cases where a man was injured in the Force a board of officers should be immediately convened to take the evidence of the persons cognisant of the facts, and to give an opinion in accordance with that evidence. That settled that question.

Another source of acrimonious correspondence was the question of discharge by purchase, which had never been either recognised or in contemplation, for the simple reason that it cost the country so much money to bring men into the West, that the least return 'the Government could expect was that the men should serve the term of five years for which they had engaged. However, so many men claimed that recruiting officers had led them to believe that they could "buy out" if they did not happen to be satisfied, that I introduced a system from my old corps, by which applicants for purchase had their names placed on a list, and were allowed to take their turn at the rate of three per month. Sir John Macdonald was pleased to approve of this suggestion, and it was adopted in the Mounted Police.

The principle involved was all right, but with the accession to power of the Borden Government in 191 1 it laid itself open to abuse.

In the year 19 12 no fewer than fifty men were allowed to purchase their discharge out of a force numbering only 654 men.

An amendment to the Mounted Police Act was made in the following year, increasing the pay of the various ranks and reducing the term of a constable's engagement from five to three years. In view of this reduction, I wrote to Mr. R. B. Bennett, M.P. for Calgary, advising that discharge by purchase should be abolished except in very special cases. He replied saying that he agreed with everything I had written, and would take the matter up with the Comptroller. The vigorous manner in which he did so may be gauged by the fact that in that year, 19 13, out of a total number of 708 non-commissioned officers and constables no fewer than 71 had been permitted to purchase their discharge prior to November 1. Out of the aforesaid total number, 43 men deserted during the same time, and 49 were dismissed for bad conduct.

The figures are significant, as tending to show that, in spite of the shortened term of engagement and the increased pay, the Mounted Police was unable to obtain and retain desirable men. In my opinion a great mistake was made. The engagement should have remained at five years, and additional pay should have been given to bring the total wage up to the market level. As it has turned out, the Government took away with one hand what it gave with the other. That it increased the

I pay is true, but it took away from the issue of kit; and the price of some of the articles of clothing has been raised to a prejudicial extent.

Canadians as a whole are very proud of the worldwide reputation which the Force has made, but they may as well face the unquestionable fact that the Force is now on the down-grade and should be abolished before its reputation is quite gone. Five years were none too long a time to teach a constable the multifarious duties of a mounted policeman ; but when, in addition to the reduced term of three years there is added the pestilential discharge by purchase whenever a man chooses to ask for it, it necessarily follows that the Force is able to render to the public nothing better than a very inferior kind of eye-service.

As an illustration of what I mean, a constable who had joined the Force on August 12, 19 12, was in course of time transferred to my division, and was subsequently detailed for detachment duty at Bankhead, where there is an anthracite mine. He was by way of being a handy-man, and the manager offered him $2.90 per day to run an engine in the mine. He applied to purchase, was given instant permission to do so, and, on December 1, 1913, took his discharge upon payment of $61.50, that is $3 per month for the unexpired portion of his engagement.

Another constable was sent to replace him at Bankhead, and on February 5, 1914, he, too, applied for permission to purchase, which was instantly allowed by the Commissioner, and he took his discharge upon payment of $85.50. It seems that a surveyor had offered him $45 a month to join his survey party.

To an officer in charge of a police district such eccentricities as these are simply maddening and heart-breaking, and the public suffer as a result.

The worst case known to me happened in the early part of 1 914. There was a constable on detached duty

at , but he was so utterly neglectful of his duties

that I was in process of making arrangements to withdraw and replace him. To my intense astonishment I received a telegram from the Commissioner's office at Regina to give him his discharge by purchase. This order had, I subsequently learned, emanated from Ottawa, and, of course, governed both the Commissioner and mysejf ; but any such proceeding cannot fail to be subversive of discipline, and is antagonistic to the best interests of the Force.

The people amongst whom I have lived and worked in the West for over thirty years will concede that I am as competent a judge of disciplinary administration as any person in Canada, and they will understand that I am telling them historical facts which they are likely to learn from no one but me, and which it is time they were told.

This constable was given his discharge, and his successor, quite a competent young man, had hardly been in his place for one calendar month when he, too, applied to purchase, and was allowed to do so.

From all the foregoing it will be seen that the Mounted Police Force has developed into a philanthropic organisation, whose objects are laudable enough, so far as providing young men with means of livelihood is concerned, but hardly so satisfactory to the lonely settler when "constabulary duty's to be done." Nor is it possible to regard the philanthropic provision of openings for young men as the purpose for which a police force exists.

To return, however, to the Commissioner's office in Regina, the muddle that most wanted straightening out was in connection with the medical staff.

Whether rightly or wrongly, the department at Ottawa had acquired the notion that the medical officers at the various Divisional Head-quarter Posts in different parts of the country were dispensing drugs, &c., supplied by the Government for the use of the non-commissioned officers and men, in their private practice.

Oddly enough, an officer could not get any medicine at the police surgery. In order to remedy this state of affairs, an oldish medical practitioner, at St. Catherine's, in Ontario, was persuaded by Sir John Macdonald to give up his practice there and bring his family to the North- West, in order to take up the appointment of senior surgeon. All sorts of promises had been held out to induce him to take this step, and the old man used to complain bitterly that faith had not been kept with him. However that may have been, and I have no personal knowledge of the matter, the appointment was not in any way acceptable to the various assistant surgeons, who seemed determined to do all they could to make Dr. Jukes's life a burden. Correspondence used to be carried on directly between the medical officers, and if the senior surgeon wanted any information or returns which were not quite palatable, the assistants frankly told him to go to the devil.

As soon as I felt myself securely seated in my chair I issued a General Order to the effect that in future direct correspondence between the senior and assistant surgeons was to cease and was to be carried on through the Commissioner's office and the Officers Commanding Divisions, each of whom would be held responsible that information required by the senior surgeon was promptly and accurately rendered, and that replies to correspondence were couched in proper terms.

As soon as the Order reached Ottawa the Comptroller at once wrote me a private note, saying, " General Order so-and-so settles the medical question," as, of course, it did in a very obvious and simple manner, and there was no more trouble.

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Dr. Jukes became a great friend of mine, and was a very fine old gentleman, and also a very competent practitioner.

The Conservative party treated him abominably. When, in course of time, his memory failed and he became past work, they laid him on the shelf with a paltry superannuation of about twenty-five dollars per month. There was a clause in the Act whereby he could have been allowed to count ten more years than he had actually served, but therein lies the difference between the two political parties. The Liberals look after their friends, while the Conservatives do not.

Take my own case. When Sir John Macdonald's party met disaster at the polls in 1896, I was not mean enough to leave it at a time when it most needed loyalty and service, as so many of the old chieftain's appointees did, but remained in its ranks until the Liberals went out of power in September, 191 1, over the reciprocity question. At that time both the Commissioner and the Assistant Commissioner were men who had been appointed by Sir John, but, after the fateful 1895 election they had turned their coats and had thus secured promotion over the heads of their seniors. In 1913 a new appointment was made, that of an Assistant Commissioner for the Province of Alberta, and as I was by eight years the senior superintendent of the Force I naturally expected to obtain the appointment. The whole Western country had the same expectation, but I reckoned without my host.

One of the superintendents had a brother in the Dominion Parliament, representing an Ontario constituency, and conceived the brilliant idea of obtaining promotion for himself over the heads of his seniors and betters. His amiable design in some way became known to another superintendent, senior to himself, and a scion of an old Quebec family. In self-protection, for

I do the man the justice to believe that he would never have done so otherwise, he set to work to pull political strings, with the result that he got the appointment. All such trickery as this is quite comme il faut in Canada. No one thinks any worse of a man for trying to supersede his superior, and it is this spirit which accounts for the numerous changes which have taken place in the past thirty years in the general officers sent to Canada from England to command the Militia. The two officers at the head of the Mounted Police of whom I have spoken are graduates of the Royal Military College at Kingston, Ontario; and Britishers do not sufficiently assimilate the principle that "Canada is for the Canadians," and, that when a Canadian wants a job no Englishman need apply. When General Colin McKenzie could not "get on" with the impossible Minister of Militia, whom most of his party take as a joke, nothing more needs to be said. Sir George French brought the Mounted Police into the West in 1873, and his treatment by the Canadian Government of the day is a matter of history. As a comment on the injustice with which he was treated by the Canadians, the Home Government gave him the Queensland Command.

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Chapter II

The year of Our Lord 1884 was a very busy year for me. In addition to the work in the Commissioner's and Adjutant's offices, I had the work in the Post and its interior economy to look after, and the training of men and horses to supervise. My outside staff consisted of Sergt.-Major Robert Belcher (now Lieut.- Colonel Strathcona's Horse) and Staff-Sergeant Walter Simpson (ex-Staff-Sergeant Royal Artillery) ; and two old-fashioned soldiers such as these could be trusted to render good and loyal service without having to be watched. For the horses I employed Constable Montague Baker, who was probably the best rider in the Post, and for the clerical work of the division I had a smart young corporal named S. G. Mills, who subsequently obtained a commission, and after his retirement was visited by a terrible affliction — the loss of his sight. I am glad to know that, in spite of his trouble, he is to-day a happy and prosperous citizen of Hamilton, Ontario.

Montague Baker was a very useful man, and I finally appointed him to be sergeant-major of the newlyformed division " K," in the autumn of the rebellion year, when the strength of the Force had been increased to 1,000 men. I was sorry to learn the other day that he had recently "joined the majority."

In the summer of 1884 I made two notable engagements. Two men named Charles Ross and G. P. Arnold presented themselves, saying that they had crossed the line to homestead near Moose Jaw, but had come to the conclusion that farming conditions were hardly favourable, and that they proposed to join the Mounted Police. I sent them to Dr. Jukes for medical examination, and presently the old gentleman came across the square.

"Do you know that those men you sent to me for examination are very fine specimens of muscular manhood, but that they bear the scars of bullet wounds ? "

" How do you account for them, Doctor ? " I queried.

"Oh ! well, they say that they have worked as scouts for the United States troops and have been wounded in ' scraps ' with the Indians and so on.'*

*A11 right, Doctor," I replied, "if they have seen shots fired in anger they are the men for my money, and if you say they are sound I shall engage them and take chances on their respectability."

I had no occasion to regret doing so, and did not bother my head about their past history. They were dead shots; they could ride anything with hair on ; they did not drink; and they were not afraid of work. What more did man want ? Ross was, after a time, sent to Calgary and Arnold to Prince Albert, in the north. Arnold was killed at Duck Lake, at the outbreak skirmish of the rebellion. He received one bullet wound in the neck, but paid no attention to it, and continued to "peg away" at the enemy until he was shot through the lungs, and that was conclusive. He and Ross were great friends. The latter, early in the rebellion days in the north, whither he was sent, became known as "Charlie Ross, the famous scout," and stories were told of him during the fight at Cut Knife Creek how, whenever he had sent an Indian or half-breed to the happy hunting grounds, he would mutter to himself, " Another for Arnold." With a man who habitually shot wild rabbits with a bullet through the head, in order to avoid spoiling the meat, a poor Indian or "Breed" did not stand much chance so long as there was enough of his dusky carcass visible for Charlie Ross to draw a bead upon. In my company, he followed a horse's trail across the prairie for about fifteen miles at a gallop, and it was none too plain a trail either.

Another valuable recruit who offered himself for acceptance during the same year was T. J. Kempster, an upstanding specimen of a man who had served as a trooper in the 2nd Life Guards, and proved to be a very capable riding instructor. The wild eccentricities of the prairie-bred horse astonished him at the outset, but I induced him to undertake the training of them upon the principles of M. Baucher, of the French army. Montague Baker and he used to work together.

Baker, by the way, had a very narrow escape on one occasion. A broncho (i.e. an unbroken horse) from the wild and woolly West — a savage brute who was rather more intractable than his compeers — succeeded in planting a hind foot fairly and squarely in Baker's face, but under Dr. Jukes's care he recovered perfectly.

In the course of the same year, in company with the Lieutenant-Governor, I visited the famous Bell Farm at Indian Head, which consisted of I forget how many thousand acres. The climate and the country were not, at that time, conducive to any such experiment, and when the rebellion of 1885 broke out the management were only too glad to hire out their teams and men to the Militia Department for the transport of stores, etc., at the rate of ten dollars a day.

They had, I thought at the time, only one useful practice, which was a regulation requiring all their stables to be locked and the keys returned by nine o'clock every evening to the time-keeper of the establishment, who lived at the head-quarter farm. I thought that the principle was so good that I immediately adopted it. Our four stables stood east and west with doors at each end, the eastern end facing the barrack square. I secured the western end with Yale padlocks on the inside, and the eastern end with similar contrivances on the outside, and the stable picket had the keys strapped on to his belt.

On September 15, 1884, I received a telegram from Major Bell, that in the course of the previous night fifteen horses had been stolen from the Bell Farm and driven rapidly southwards towards the line. Sergeant Blight and a couple of men from Regina succeeded in recovering seven of the horses in Montana, and as the tracks of only nine animals could be found on the south side of the Missouri River it was conjectured that the others had been driven to exhaustion, and some of them possibly drowned in attempting to cross. I asked Major Bell afterwards how it was that the thieves managed to get the horses out of locked -stables, and he replied, "Oh, we gave up that practice ; it became too tiresome ! "