This is the fifth post in a series edited by Blair Stein interrogating the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The Northwest Mounted Police (NWMP) was a police force in motion. They moved across a vast and challenging landscape filled with immense forests, dry badlands, and freezing tundra. The annual update reports of the NWMP to Parliament demonstrate this with stories of everything from harrowing blizzards forcing sled dog cannibalism in the far north, to the necessity for train and boat travel all the way around to the top of Alaska to get into the Canadian-claimed Yukon.1 While the stories told by NWMP officers in the annual reports emphasized the challenges created by the climate, poor decisions including everything from inadequate preparation to lack of knowledge about an area often amplified and even created the environmental dangers that police officers faced.
The story of Superintendent Percy Neale and the H detachment of NWMP appearing in the 1887 annual report of the NWMP to Parliament illustrates how even a short journey could turn into a punishing march when police officers overestimated their geographic knowledge and ability to move cross-country. In December 1886, the H detachment of the NWMP set out to travel from Lethbridge to Fort MacLeod.2 Today, that trip could be completed in 31 minutes by car using Highway 3. This group of NWMP officers totaling 101 men and 57 horses was meant to take over the aging Fort MacLeod to act as the main method of Canadian law enforcement in the area. After arriving in Lethbridge via train from Regina, the H detachment’s journey began inauspiciously: the officers and their horses were forced to huddle in loaned-out railway sheds overnight as the winter weather made the river they needed to cross impassable. This would be the last time any of them were warm until the end of their journey.
The next morning, the detachment set out to cross the Oldman River. Fording this river was trivial in the summer, but in December, the crossing was different. The river had not frozen over enough so the men could not safely walk across it. Getting wet risked hypothermia or death, especially to those unlucky enough to fall in. Fearing the water, the men traveled to cross the river at Slaughterhouse Ford. Even with this slightly less hazardous crossing, a few unlucky officers of the H detachment fell into the icy waters, which Superintendent Neale described as a “cold bath”.3
While the H detachment’s decision to find a proper ford across the river was a good one, their decision to cross over Telegraph Hill was not. Telegraph Hill’s 40-degree angle slope was challenging under good conditions, but when slick with ice and snow, this climb became a grueling task for both man and horse. Undeterred, the detachment, under Neale’s command, began their ascent at 7 am. The hike dragged on and on until, a full 7 hours later, the end of the column reached the top. When the H detachment finally reached the crest of the hill, Superintendent Neale saw they had travelled, including getting to the ford, “about five miles from our starting place.”4
Presumably already tired from their long march, the men of the H detachment marched following Neale the rest of the day into wind described as “very strong and bitterly cold” before hitting a second river. This river proved slightly harder to ford as the winter wind made the horses hesitant to walk straight across, which caused even more men to tumble in. Thankfully the hill on the other side of this river proved easily scalable, but as Neale stated, “both men and horses were covered with ice whe[r]ever the water had touched them”.5
With not much daylight left, the officers and horses pushed on before being forced to stop for the night. Although they had planned to stay in a nearby town, their lack of environmental knowledge became painfully obvious on arrival. They arrived wet and cold to a town that was still under construction, forcing them to sleep outside. The men were not able to put up tents due to the wind and the only comforts offered to the horses and men were “the shelter afforded by some haystacks” and “a cup of tea”.6 Nearby Medicine Hat provides some idea of the temperature in the region at this time: the average monthly temperature in December 1886 was -10 degrees Celsius during the day, a number that was almost certainly affected by windchill and lower at night.7 Waking up frozen, the detachment set off and with a final push arrived at Fort Macleod at 2 pm that afternoon.8 Once they arrived, conditions did not improve; 85 of the men were crammed into the one new barrack designed for just 25. Even once they spread out into the older buildings, the H detachment faced conditions that Superintendent Neale described as “dilapidated” and “anything but comfortable.”9
Superintendent Neale wouldn’t have a much longer tenure with the NWMP. Following the march, Neale became a drunk, fell into debt, and was forced to retire from the force in 1890. He then stole government money from his job, and fled to the United Kingdom before being caught, tried, and sentenced by one of his former colleagues in 1894.10 While the march itself almost certainly wasn’t the cause of Neale’s rapid decline, the difficulty of getting to the post in winter might hint at the isolated nature of some posts and the subsequent mental health impacts this could have on people living in them.
Human choices exacerbated environmental challenges turning even short journeys into life-or-death treks. The decision to move a detachment in the dead of winter and a lack of enough knowledge about an area to avoid sleeping outside in the freezing cold emphasized the ways human choices shaped how the NWMP experienced the natural world. The Canadian environment is not in and of itself a deadly force, but rather becomes such when humans fail to prepare properly. The reports of the NWMP highlight this as they demonstrate both how the deadliest of conditions can be overcome, and how even seasonal weather can prove a massive hurdle without proper planning. It is the need for planning rather than the danger itself then that heightens Canada’s environment to its status as harsh and brutal in the public consciousness.
[1] Canada, Report of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for the Eighteen Months Ended March 31, 1934 (Ottawa: J. O. Patenaude, 1934), 37.; Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 11, Sixth Session of the Seventh Parliament, Annual Report of Commissioner L. W. Herchmer North-West Mounted Police 1895, Yukon Reports, 1896, 7.
[2] Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 6, First Session of the Sixth Parliament, Annual Report of Commissioner L. W. Herchmer North-West Mounted Police 1886, Appendix E, 1887, 35.
[3] Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 6, First Session of the Sixth Parliament, Annual Report of Commissioner L. W. Herchmer North-West Mounted Police 1886, Appendix E, 1887, 35.
[4] Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 6, First Session of the Sixth Parliament, Annual Report of Commissioner L. W. Herchmer North-West Mounted Police 1886, Appendix E, 1887, 35.
[5] Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 6, First Session of the Sixth Parliament, Annual Report of Commissioner L. W. Herchmer North-West Mounted Police 1886, Appendix E, 1887, 35.
[6] Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 6, First Session of the Sixth Parliament, Annual Report of Commissioner L. W. Herchmer North-West Mounted Police 1886, Appendix E, 1887, 35.
[7] Environment and Climate Change Canada, “Monthly Mean Temperature for 1886,” October 31, 2011, https://climate.weather.gc.ca/climate_data/generate_chart_e.html?timeframe=3&Prov=&StationID=2273&Year=1886&Month=8&Day=1&type=line&MeasTypeID=meanmonthtemp&StartYear=1840&EndYear=2016&wbdisable=true.
[8] Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 6, First Session of the Sixth Parliament, Annual Report of Commissioner L. W. Herchmer North-West Mounted Police 1886, Appendix E, 1887, 35.
[9] Canada, Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Volume 6, First Session of the Sixth Parliament, Annual Report of Commissioner L. W. Herchmer North-West Mounted Police 1886, Appendix E, 1887, 35, 40.
[10] William Beahen, “NEALE, PERCY REGINALD,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed May 25, 2023, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/neale_percy_reginald_13E.html.
Alan Wobeser
A tiny bit of history, but revealing and fascinating. Thanks