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

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

by Philip Goldring

A Transition

The connection between Lower Fort Garry and the North-West Mounted Police lasted for less than a year, but that short term, the winter of 1873 and spring of 1874, is a watershed in the history of the Canadian West. The fort, graceful, immovable and explicitly commercial, represented the previous half-century of history at Red River. It was first built to serve George Simpson, lord of a vast trading empire, at a time when the fur trade fixed the pattern of nearly every human life in the Northwest. That day was gone; by 1873 the Lower Fort had become mainly a retail centre for a sedentary agricultural community and a workshop for a mechanized age. Its usefulness had shrunk until the grounds and buildings best served their owners when they were rented to the keepers of the new order.

The Mounted Police were, preeminently, the vanguard of that new order. As Lower Fort Garry stood for the old trade, the police stepped forward on behalf of a new empire of settlement, tangible in terms of farms and railways, wheat and minerals, but insubstantial, coloured and brought to life by dreams of Canadian greatness, of personal greatness. There was little work for the new Mounted Police in the shadow of the old fort; their business was elsewhere, to push forward, to make the queen's writ run far to the west. Her subjects soon could settle there in peace, some to make their homes with their hands, some to make their fortunes by their ingenuity and their capital, and all to build, sometimes unconsciously, a new nation.

So the fort and the police parted company. The yellowed limestone walls, witness to a brief and important period in the force's history, would not see the parade of the whole force at Dufferin, rows of red coats and white hats marshalled on horseback over the plain and then dispersed across a thousand miles of trackless territory. The force was born at Lower Fort Garry; its infancy ended there on the seventh of June as the jingling of harness and the last hoof beats faded down the road which led to Winnipeg, to Dufferin and to an indelible place in the romantic traditions of a nation.