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

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

by Philip Goldring

Appendix C. Notes on the Cypress Hills Massacre and the Formation of the North-West Mounted Police

A perennial traditon surrounding the origin of the North-West Mounted Police is that the force's creation was deferred indefinitely by Sir John A. Macdonald until the Cypress Hills massacre of 1 June 1873 became known in Ottawa, whereupon public opinion forced the government to act. I have published elsewhere some facts which undermine this theory [1] and will examine here two particular facets of the case. One is a modern, conflicting interpretation and the other is a source from which the dubious legends may have sprung. The subject can best be explained after a brief chronological summary of the important documents and dates from the spring to the autumn of 1873. After a scrutiny of these dates, one may more easily assess the importance of the two most challenging efforts to link the massacre to the formation of the Mounted Police.

3 May

Macdonald told the House of Commons that he would move on the sixth the resolutions for the mounted police in the Northwest. He stated, "It was not probable that it would comprise 300 men at first or for a long time yet" (300 was the number stipulated in the Bill). Macdonald reassured the parsimonious opposition leader, Alexander Mackenzie, that the government intended "to reduce the military force in Manitoba by degrees." [2]

23 May

Royal assent was given to "An Act respecting the Administration of Justice, and for the establishment of a Police Force in the North-West Territories." [3] The Act attracted little attention in the press, but a stream of letters came in from men applying for positions in the force. A commission was promised as early as 28 May to James Morrow Walsh. [4]

1 June

Twenty or more Assiniboine Indians were killed in the Cypress Hills in a fight with white men from the United States.

2 June

Lieutenant Governor Morris of the Northwest Territories wrote to Macdonald urging him to raise the force to its full complement of 300 men. [5] Macdonald did not refuse, but spent a dilatory summer anticipating the disgrace of the Pacific Scandal.

11 June

Word of the Cypress Hills massacre was first published in Montana. [6]

27 June

A report of the massacre reached the American Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. [7]

12 July

Morris sent a lengthy dispatch to the Department of the Interior, outlining the state of lawlessness in the southwestern part of the territories and indicating that in addition to the proposed police force, the government would probably have to maintain 500 soldiers in the Northwest. [8]

9 August

Alexander Campbell, minister of the interior, misunderstood Morris's dispatch and proposed to the cabinet that a military force should be sent immediately to the vicinity of Fort Whoop-Up at the junction of the St. Mary and Oldman rivers. The cabinet discussed this plan, but turned it down. There is no evidence that this meeting discussed the mounted police or the problem of law enforcement generally, but the order in council constituting the force was fully prepared less than three weeks later. [9]

20 August

Word of the Cypress Hills massacre reached Winnipeg in the form of a clipping from the Helena Daily Herald, 11 June 1873, which Morris immediately forwarded in a dispatch to Campbell. [10]

24 August

Edward MacKay arrived in Winnipeg and confirmed, independently of the newspaper account, the report of the massacre. Morris interviewed him and forwarded his account to Ottawa on 26 August. [11]

The dispatches of 20 and 26 August were not acknowledged until 8 September although they may have reached Ottawa as early as the fourth. Campbell's letters to Morris of 28 August and 3 September, however, made no mention of the massacre or of Morris's dispatches about it. [12]

27 August

Macdonald presented to the cabinet a recommendation for organizing the North-West Mounted Police.

28 August

Macdonald's submission to council was succinctly remarked upon by the government's organ in the capital, the Ottawa Daily Citizen: "The Mounted Police Force for Manitoba is to be organized immediately."

29 August

The Citizen printed news of the massacre which it had received from Winnipeg and commented that "the organizing of the Mounted Police Force, which, as we announced yesterday, will be commenced at once, may prevent a repetition of the disgraceful scene to which our despatch from Fort Garry refers."

30 August

The order in council passed in the form in which it was introduced. The force would be constituted basically as outlined in the Act though with minor variations. Only enough horses would be bought "at once" to mount the officers and half the men, and no surgeon was to be appointed "for the present." [13]

4 September

Gilbert McMicken wrote to Macdonald asking permission to start purchasing horses for the force. "I hear thru' Morris that you have taken up the work of organizing the Mounted Police Force. I wish you would give me the order to purchase the Horses for the Force." [14]

6 September

The cabinet discussed the culprits in the Cypress Hills case and referred the matter to the justice department to "take such steps as would enable us to ask for their arrest and extradition." [15]

8 September

Macdonald reverted to the problem of organizing the police force; he informed the acting adjutant general that he would shortly be called upon to collaborate with Captain Charles F. Young to recruit men for the force. Ultimate responsibility would fall on the justice department, but the militia would be expected to lend funds and whatever other facilities the recruiters might want. [16]

9 September

Macdonald sought to persuade the imperial government to lend him a British officer for the command of the new force; "This Indian massacre at Fort Benton," he wrote to the governor general, "shows the necessity of our losing no time in organizing the Mounted Police for the North West. May I ask you if you thought of writing to the Horse Guards to get the service of the Commissioner of Police recognized as military service."? [17]

18 September

Acting Adjutant General Powell gave Captain Young $450 to facilitate recruiting efforts in the Maritimes. [18]

19 September

Young received instructions for Jacob Carvell in Saint John and set out himself for the Maritimes. [19]

20 September

Morris, embroiled in political crises and rumours of Indian troubles, wired Macdonald a desperate plea to send the mounted police to Manitoba for training before the winter. The previous plan had been to train them. in Ontario and to send them up in the spring. [20]

24 September

The justice department capitulated to pressure from Morris and informed recruiters that they had not a moment to lose. [21]

25 September

Macdonald turned again to the Cypress Hills massacre, appointing McMicken to take the investigation in hand from Winnipeg.

In June 1972, when research for this paper was well advanced, an article appeared which admirably demonstrated that the cabinet's plans for the force were not as hasty nor as impromptu as previous writers suggested. This article, S.W. Horrall's "Sir John A. Macdonald and the Mounted Police Force for the Northwest Territories," [22] also stated that the cabinet learned of the massacre only after the order in council creating the force had been introduced in cabinet. But Horrall continued to find a connection between the massacre and the police force, for he believed that Macdonald had introduced the order in council tentatively, without any immediate plans for carrying it into effect. Macdonald, he maintained, "was still in no hurry to proceed with its actual organization." The government was too deeply preoccupied with surviving the Pacific Scandal to deal with any but the most essential measures; since the ministry did actually fall early in November 1873, Horrall believed that news of the Cypress Hills massacre saved the force from dying on the drawing board.

This interpretation fails to convince. In the first place, the two material events happened at least a week earlier than Horrall claimed; the massacre was reported to Ottawa at least as early as 29 August and not early in September as he stated, and the government was definitely committed to organizing the force long before 9 September. The order in council itself, prepared on 27 August, contains phrases like "at once" and "for the present," and in other respects seems attuned to immediate rather than long-range purposes. The Ottawa Daily Citizen stated unequivocally on 28 August that "The Mounted Police Force . . . is to be organized immediately" and other papers reported that Captain W.F. Butler would soon be appointed commander of the new force. A further hint is found in McMicken's letter from Winnipeg, dated 4 September, indicating that Morris knew the force was about to be organized. Seemingly, Macdonald was committed to the speedy organization of the force before 6 September, the date on which Morris's dispatches about the massacre were referred to the cabinet. [23]

Another part of Horrall's analysis is also open to debate. He was undoubtedly right to argue that the government was distracted by inquiries into corruption in the election of 1872, but the conclusions he has drawn from this fact seem improbable. Surely in these conditions Macdonald would spend valuable hours only on the administrative measure he fully intended to use in the immediate future; he was hardly likely to enact and then pigeonhole orders which he was in no hurry to proceed with. It is also worth noting that creation of the force put 300 jobs at Macdonald's disposal, a very useful asset to a prime minister whose faithful following showed signs of crumbling. So the existence of the Pacific Scandal gives a great deal more weight, not less, to the introduction of the order in council on 27 August.

Very little is proved by the often-quoted remark in Macdonald's letter to Lord Dufferin on 9 September: "The Indian massacre . . . shows the necessity of our losing no time in organizing the Mounted Police." Macdonald nowhere actually said that he would have proceeded differently without news of the massacre and as the letter in question went on to ask a favour of the British government, [24] it was natural to put his case in the strongest terms possible, even if they had been developed as an afterthought, not as grounds for the original decision.

Of course, Horrall is right to point to Mackenzie's scepticism about the value of the police force and to the possibility that he might have been more strongly tempted to dissolve it if it had been less nearly organized, or barracked in Toronto, when the Conservative government fell in November 1873. To this extent the massacre, which prompted Macdonald to send the force west ahead of schedule, no doubt contributed to the fact that the Liberals did not smother the North-West Mounted Police at birth. But beyond this, analysis is "counterfactual" and therefore conjectural, and Horrall's approach demands that certain pieces of unequivocal evidence should be dismissed as unreliable. Notwithstanding his doubts, there seems adequate reason to suppose that all the steps taken up to 24 September would have been taken regardless of the news of the massacre. Macdonald's interest in the question in the spring of 1873, the mounting pressure from Morris and Campbell to quell the whisky trade, the fruitful source of entirely new patronage which the Mounted Police gave a faltering ministry, and the reasonably good evidence of the government's intentions promulgated on 27 August, all suggest that the massacre was perhaps a contributing factor but by no means the indispensable factor underlying the efforts which were made by Macdonald, his staff, and the Militia and Defence department in September 1873.

It is hazardous to trace the precise origins of an erroneous tradition. There is evidence, however, that confusion of dates and causes existed from the earliest times. [25] A memorandum was drawn up by the Department of Justice to chronicle the pursuit of the Cypress Hills murderers up to May 1875; this paper contains one statement which might be regarded as the ancestor of all efforts to link the massacre to the origins of the police. The memorandum referred to information on the massacre supplied to Ottawa early in September 1873 by the British embassy in Washington and added;

On the 25th August 1873 Lieutenant Governor Morris enclosed Copy of the same extract from the Montana Herald, and this letter having been referred to the Minister of the Interior, he reported recommending the establishment of a Mounted Police Force with out loss of time. [26]

This remark, though it came from a civil servant in the Department of Justice, cannot be wholly true. It carried the decision to organize the force well into the first week of September when the government had already been publicly committed on the question a week earlier. Moreover, the recommendation did not come from the minister of the interior, Campbell, but from the more appropriate minister, Macdonald himself. The submission to council of 27 August was signed by Macdonald; Campbell was apparently not even present. If any firm recommendation did come from Campbell, it came informally on 9 August after cabinet had rejected his proposal to send troops to Fort Whoop-Up. But if this is the recommendation alluded to by the memorandum of 1875, then neither the massacre nor the despatch of 25 August could have played any part in it.

The question may not seem to deserve all the attention given to it here and elsewhere in print, but it does raise some interesting questions about proceedings in cabinet in the last days of the first Macdonald ministry. And when a tradition like this has gained general circulation, one's reasons for dissenting from it should be as clear as possible.