The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (36 page)

It was not just the Sun Dance that was proscribed. The more severe and committed Protestant sects on the frontier were opposed to
all
dancing. As Magnus Begg, the agent on the Crooked Lake Reserve near Broadview, Assiniboia, reported triumphantly in 1902: “The Indians, although mostly pagans, are thrifty and good workers; but they are also inclined to dancing. They built a nice dance house for the purpose of holding regular dances. It was necessary for me to have it destroyed, which put a stop to it all.…”

Yet when it came to white festivals, parades, and celebrations, the Western attitude toward the Indians underwent a transformation. The same people who wanted them to abandon their rituals for hard work and to dress and act like white men suddenly wanted them to take time off, don feathered bonnets and buckskin, perform tribal dances, and lead the parade. When, in these instances, the natives threw off the thin veneer of civilization to become noble savages once again, the white men cheered. These attempts “to perpetuate the old order” did not sit well with Commissioner Laird, who in 1908 urged that Indians “cease to be used as painted and bedecked things for the amusement of others.”

Laird’s hope went unfulfilled. The Indians looked back nostalgically on the older order as the Mounties looked back nostalgically on their own golden age. The natives preferred their own religion, which fitted in with their philosophy of living for the day. In the Blackfoot faith, for example, there were no rewards or punishments beyond the grave. These were earned or suffered in everyday life. The Indians did not have what one agent called “the sacred appreciation of virtue.” The white attitude baffled them just as theirs baffled their white protectors. The Inspector of Indian Agencies in Manitoba referred to the Long
Plain Band as “an all round hard lot” because “they cannot understand why the government interferes in what they call their religious worship.” Few became bona fide Christians, although a great many saw the advantages in pretending. One Indian woman at Stony Plain, Alberta, became a Methodist, Roman Catholic, and Presbyterian, and “works the three successfully to the tune of numerous blankets, quilts, clothing and other presents.”

The wonder is that, given the prevailing attitudes, some natives actually did become successful farmers and ranchers – this in spite of strong attempts to persuade them to sell off portions of their reserves under the pressure of advancing white settlement. As the
Edmonton Bulletin
declared: “The Indians make no practical use of the reserves which they hold. Where the land is good and well situated for market, white men can turn it to much better account.… It is a loss to the country to have such lands lying idle in the hands of the Indians when white men want to use them and are willing to pay for them.”

Canada respected the wording of the treaties it made with the Indians, if not the spirit. The government did not actually force any tribe off its reserve, but it offered every inducement to make them give up their lands. The main argument was that the price paid would provide a handsome annuity for the band in question. But the price paid was often scandalously low while the pressures were hard to resist, as we shall see later.

In 1909, to take one example, the Piegans sold a chunk of their land for seventy-one cents an acre after the government forced a vote, which the chief, in an affidavit that was conveniently ignored, insisted was fraudulent. The Sarcees, on the other hand, with a reserve on the very outskirts of Calgary, resisted all pressure from the city to sell. They still occupy the land. Nonetheless, a quarter of a million acres of Indian reserves have in the intervening years reverted to the white man, usually to the detriment of the native people.

By 1909, Frank Oliver was ready to admit that the “Indian problem” had not been satisfactorily solved. Given the lack of money and understanding, it would have been remarkable if it had been. Yet, if it was asking too much of the Indian to comprehend white ways, it was also asking a great deal of the government agents and the new settlers to sympathize with the natives. One such was John Semmens, Inspector of Indian Agencies for the Lake Winnipeg area, who in 1907 in his annual report to Ottawa wrote this defence of his charges:

“The red man must not be judged by standards designed to measure
a white man. He is quite another being.… Our strong points may be his weak ones and we may flatter ourselves and despise him; but this will not prove that he is without virtues or that he cannot rise to the attainment of higher things. Canadians are not likely to forget that the extinguishment of the Indian title in the great Northwest has never cost a drop of blood; or that in every rebellion which has marked our later history, the Indian has been our loyal ally and friend. All that he asks in return is our strong true friendship and wise persistent assistance; and out of conditions which we despise he will yet rise to fuller knowledge and nobler conduct.…”

But even the perceptive and sympathetic Semmens wasn’t prepared to concede that the Indian lifestyle was anything but inferior to that of white Canadians.

4
The Imperial Force

There were many in the West who believed that the Mounted Police were all that stood between the peaceful farmers and an armed Indian uprising. If autonomy were granted to the Territories, what would happen? To the Calgary
Herald
it was inconceivable that the government would “leave us in the unprotected state which would be occasioned by the disbandment or removal of the North West Mounted Police.” One of the chief jobs of the Force, the paper insisted, was to keep a close watch on the natives. “The Indians are pacific now, but no one can tell how long they would remain so if the police were withdrawn.”

The Police, of course, were not disbanded; the Force entered into contracts with both the new provinces, but scarcely to protect the farmers from the Indians. Of all the polyglot people on the prairies at that time the natives were the most docile. Nor was there the slightest hint of future trouble, police or no police. In report after report,
NWMP
officers made the point that the Indians were easier to handle than the white man. Lawrence Herchmer, the chief commissioner, reported in 1898 that “infinitely more cattle are killed by whites than by Indians.” Inspector Burton Deane reported from Fort Macleod the following year that the Indians deserved all possible praise for their behaviour and “give less trouble than the white man.” A.B. Perry, the new commissioner, in 1900 said the Indians of the plains “maintain their
reputation for good behaviour.” G.E. Sanders, writing from Calgary in 1902, praised the Blackfoot, Sarcee, and Stoney tribes, adding that “had we to deal with white people under the same conditions, I am afraid they would compare very unfavourably with the Indians.”

It was forgotten by many that the Force had been originally established in 1873 to protect the Plains Indians from the twin ravages of smallpox and Montana whiskey. Those days were long gone. Having succeeded in maintaining peace in the West, the Police had all but done themselves out of a job. Like the Indians, they were victims of the government’s penny pinching, which, in the view of Commissioner Herchmer, left them worse off than the natives, at least in one instance. “While the Indians at the Industrial school have iron beds, this, the finest body of men in the country, still sleeps on boards and trestles,” Herchmer exclaimed.

Gone were the great days when the Force captured the imagination of the nation and the government scrambled to maintain it in dignity and power. In 1885, the year of the driving of the Last Spike and the Saskatchewan rebellion, the Force had numbered one thousand scarlet riders. In 1896, the new Liberal administration reduced it to 750; the following year it was cut again to 500 and the annual budget cut from $530 million to $385 million. The government was intent on investing in the new West, not the old.

Until 1905, the
NWMP
had been considered a temporary force, to be abolished when the West was tamed; as a result, its members received no pensions. Equipment was allowed to run down: Winchester rifles were wearing out; Enfield revolvers had long been obsolete; and the famous buffalo coats were so worn that in 1898 Burton Deane at Fort Macleod claimed they wouldn’t last another year.

Buildings were old and ramshackle. At Fort Saskatchewan, the inspectors’ quarters were in an old ice house, “a wretched hovel quite unfit for habitation”; the kitchen in the officers’ quarters at Calgary leaked like a sieve; the south block in Regina was falling down and by 1904 was described as “uninhabitable,” although it was still in use.

Salaries had not risen in twenty years. Pinkerton detectives were being paid eight dollars a day in 1904; NWMP constables got seventy-five cents for the same work. As a result, the turnover was heavy: the veterans refused to re-enlist, and others bought their way out, attracted by better offers. The Force was so overworked that there was little time for drill, and target practice suffered.

In 1897, when the news of the Klondike gold strike reached the
outside world, the strongest and best men were sent to Yukon service. On the prairies new recruits were so green that each one needed a guide. The Force was spread desperately thin – an average of one constable to every five hundred square miles. Some immigrants, in fact, had never seen a Mounted Policeman, and as late as 1911, one constable whose district covered two thousand square miles reported that a farmer’s wife thought he was a sewing machine salesman.

By 1905, when Saskatchewan and Alberta entered into five-year contracts with the Police, some of these problems abated. Pay was raised to a dollar a day, but only after eight years’ service. Meagre pensions were established. The decision was made to re-arm the Force, and its numbers were increased by one hundred.

One problem, however, did not go away – that of political patronage. Like the Indians and the settlers, the police were its victims. Herchmer, the blunt, red-bearded commissioner appointed under the Tories, soon made way for Perry, an ambitious closet Liberal during the old regime whose promotion under the new was swift. The redoubtable Sam Steele, a strong Conservative, was personally removed from his Yukon post by Sifton for refusing to go along with a political appointment: Sifton’s former campaign manager, J.D. McGregor, wanted the lucrative patronage job of liquor licensing commissioner. Steele left for South Africa and never rejoined the Force.

New recruits were selected not on the basis of ability but from a list of politically acceptable candidates. Some arrived in Regina deaf, one-eyed, or, more usually, several inches below the regulation height of five feet eight. As Fred White, the comptroller in Ottawa, said, “the most generally undesirable candidate has the strongest influence.” White, himself a staunch Conservative, did not care for Perry and even less for Sifton.

Behind the stern façade of the officer class, petty jealousies simmered. Deane and Herchmer were such bitter enemies that when the commissioner visited Fort Macleod, Deane made it a point to be away; they communicated only by written note. Deane insisted he was transferred to a less attractive post as the result of the capture of 596 cattle smuggled into Canada by friends of Clifford Sifton. When Sanders, a veteran officer, was promoted to superintendent at Calgary, it was expected he would lead the Mounted Police contingent to Queen Victoria’s jubilee. At the last moment, however, the job was given to a young inspector who just happened to be the son of Sir Richard Cartwright, one of the oldest and most prominent front-bench Liberals.

Again like the Indians, the Police were viewed in the context of Western settlement. Their tasks became more mundane: they acted as land agents, welfare officials, immigration officers, agricultural experts, customs collectors, game, timber, and fire wardens, magistrates, and seed distributors. They continued to patrol the North West from the American border to the Arctic’s rim, from the shores of Hudson Bay to Alaska, but they were rarely called upon to perform any feat more glamorous than hoisting a naked Doukhobor woman aboard a train. It was a far cry from the image that the new Hollywood films were beginning to invent.

They were an Imperial force, implicitly charged with maintaining a British-Canadian West (as opposed to a European or American West). Their numbers were largely elitist. Eighty per cent of the officers came from upper-rank Eastern Canadian families, members of the governing class. Half the rankers and
NCO
s were born in Britain. They understood their role: to mould the West to their own ideals. “Our mission, I take it,” Superintendent Sanders wrote from Regina in 1907, “is to firmly established the fundamental principles of British law and order amongst the different nationalities.…”

The Canadian West was as much an outpost of Empire in 1905 as the South African veld or the tea plantations of Ceylon. The emphasis was on “British order.” “It is claimed,” Perry wrote proudly in 1904, urging the government to maintain the Force, “…  that no country was ever settled up with such an entire absence of lawlessness.… The North West Mounted Police were the pioneers of settlement. They carried into the Territories the world-wide maxim that where the British flag flies, peace and order prevail.”

Without the Police, the inference was, the West would be a lawless region because it was peopled by socially inferior classes. The Mounted Police subscribed to the commonly held belief that criminality was a phenomenon largely confined to inferior people at the lowest stratum of the social order. This isn’t surprising. Even J.S. Woodsworth, the leading social reformer in the West, held similar views. The officers were treated as members of the upper class in the so-called classless West; their quasi-military balls were the social events of the season. In Calgary they tended to identify with the ranchers, who were seen as several rungs above the new Canadians grubbing in the dirt with hoe and mattock. Thus, Commissioner Herchmer felt that the Galicians were “a very undesirable class…[who] generally arrive here with very little money and are very ignorant,” while the settlers at Red Deer, Innisfail, and along the Calgary-Strathcona railway line, who came
largely from Ontario and England, “were a good class.” Actually, the Galicians and other Europeans were remarkably law abiding, but Herchmer explained that away by insisting that only “constant patrols … convince these foreigners that law and order must be respected in this country.…”