Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 21

The First Contingent:
The North-West Mounted Police, 1873-74

by Philip Goldring

Introduction

In the autumn of 1873, 150 men gathered at Lower Fort Garry to train as the first contingent of Canada's new police force for the Northwest Territories.

They were mostly young, healthy and enthusiastic. Some were veterans of the Red River Expeditionary Force of 1870; a few were professional soldiers; but many more were fresh from the farms and commercial establishments of central and eastern Canada. Many were unprepared for the rigorous training and harsh climate they encountered at the Stone Fort and equally unprepared for the hardships of police life on the western plains.

The recruits were supposed to be good horsemen, but only a few could ride. All were supposed to be fit, but 19 were given medical discharges after two months' training. They were supposed to represent all the provinces, apart from the one in which they were initially stationed, but most of the Quebec recruits deserted or were discharged in the first six months; the recruiters had been hasty and careless. Recruits were supposed to serve for at least three years, but by the autumn of 1876, more than half had gone — quit, discharged or died.

They had come in answer to a hasty call from the Dominion government, which was anxious to defend and promote Canada's peaceful occupation of an immense and remote territory, recently acquired by purchase but still not connected to Canada by sentiment or by trade. The men who arrived at Lower Fort Garry in the last, freezing weeks of 1873 became the nucleus of the early North-West Mounted Police, a tough, disciplined body of police men who vitally assisted the westward expansion of Canada.

The creation of the North-West Mounted Police in 1873 was a logical sequel to the establishment of a Canadian form of government in Manitoba. Canada's possession of the soil had been guaranteed by purchase from the Hudson's Bay Company negotiated in 1869 and by treaties with the Indians in 1871. Administrators in Winnipeg and Ottawa could now turn their attentions beyond the river lots and new settlement grants of the tiny province toward the spacious Northwest Territories.

This was a troubled realm. Traditional warfare persisted among the Indian tribes, particularly the Cree and Blackfoot. The encroachment of settlement, so graphically forecast at Lower Fort Garry by the Dominion's first western Indian treaty, left Métis and Indians apprehensive about their future and hastened the movement of Métis from their farms in Manitoba to the still-unsurveyed upper reaches of the Saskatchewan River. Finally, the deteriorating prospects of the natives were being further undermined by American-based whisky traders who generated unrest and dissipated the tribes of the southwestern part of the territories, nicknamed the "Whoop-Up Country." Politicians in far-off Ottawa found it difficult to envisage the fragility of the situation, but Lieutenant Governor Morris, the head of government both in Manitoba and the Territories, was under no illusions. "The most important matter of the future is the preservation of order in the North West," he wrote in the first days of 1873. "The Dominion will have to maintain both a military & police force for years to come." Then the prosaic Morris drove his point home in a rare flash of imagery: "Little as Canada may like it she has to stable her elephant." [1]

Stable it she did. The major achievement of Sir John A. Macdonald's government during its last months, while it struggled under the shadow of the Pacific Scandal, was to create the North West Mounted Police. This force, hastily recruited from all the provinces, provided stablehands for Canada's first efforts to care for her elephant. Their story is part of the record of Lower Fort Garry, for 150 of these police were sworn in and trained at the Lower Fort before they joined an equal number of their comrades at Dufferin to begin the epic trek westward into the Whoop-Up country. [2]