n 1899, residents of Canada’s most northerly town could set their watches by Sam Steele as he made his rounds of Dawson City in the dim winter light. Steele, the North-West Mounted Police superintendent, described his rigid routine in a letter dated February 25 to his wife, Marie, in Montreal: “Up at 7, walk one mile to the town station, enquire if anything had transpired in the night. Sign the book, walk up the long hill and then down the steep one, then breakfast 9 am. Then inspect the cells and prisoners, sign the book; Then office, and busy seeing people on business of all sorts until one o’clock. Then lunch… Then three miles up the Klondike on the ice.”This was the height of the Yukon gold rush, when Dawson City had a worldwide reputation for whisky, women, and wealth. But since his arrival the previous fall, the burly man in scarlet serge had by sheer force of will imposed law and order on this squalid, frantic frontier town. When the young Mounties at the police station near the Front Street saloons saw their walrus-moustached boss stomping toward them in the early-morning darkness, they jumped to attention. When Steele tramped along the frozen Klondike River on crisp, twilit winter afternoons, looking like a dangerous predator in his raccoon coat, cabin dwellers along the riverbank waved politely. On the rare occasions when he stepped into a smoky saloon like the Monte Carlo or the Dominion, a hush spread through the gambling tables as card sharps and hookers melted into the background.
It was a demanding schedule, but Steele was in his element. A man of action, he made up for his apparent lack of imagination and humour with the qualities of a military hero: integrity, devotion to duty, attention to detail, and leadership. He was known throughout North America as a tough and fearless campaigner, a reputation forged across three decades spent laying down the law in the West. An admiring profile in Chicago’s Sunday Chronicle in May 1899 stated, “Colonel S. B. Steele… is a whole army unto himself. He was born to rule in a country where he must become dictator for he is… far away from assistance, from advice and from supplies.” Two months later, a feature on Dawson City in New York’s Success magazine included the line “Under Steele’s management and guiding care, the gold district has grown from being a rough camping country to be a built-up, civilized section, where the wife and mother, the peaceful citizen, the timid and the law-abiding are as safe as if living in the centre of a large eastern city.”
After his service in the Klondike, Samuel Benfield Steele fought in the Second Boer War in South Africa, and later took command of Canadian troops stationed in England during World War I. He was knighted by George V in 1918. His public career coincided almost exactly with the first forty years of Canada as a self-governing country. “During that time,” says Rod Macleod, a history professor at the University of Alberta, “he was seen by most of his fellow countrymen and many outside Canada as standing for what was new and uniquely Canadian.”
And yet within a few years of his death in 1919, most Canadians had only the vaguest notion of why Steele had ever been famous — a situation that persists today. He ranked a distant ninety-ninth on cbc’s 2004 survey of the greatest Canadians, well after such luminaries as Avril Lavigne, William Shatner, and Patrick Roy. There is no public monument to him, other than an inconspicuous plaque near his birthplace.
In 2006, though, Christie’s auction house in London, England, acquired a huge collection of Steele’s papers and artifacts. The contents revealed an unexpected side of this Mountie hero: he was a more complex, emotional man than he was prepared to admit, and than his colleagues suspected. The papers also gave hitherto unknown details about Canada’s western expansion during the most formative years of nation building. Yet the collection was nearly lost to Canadians. On the market for several months, it might well have been snapped up by a British institution or a private collector of military memorabilia. Only thanks to the University of Alberta’s furious efforts to raise the $1.8-million asking price was this unique piece of Canadian history successfully repatriated for public viewing.
The story of Sam Steele and the race to secure his record raise two difficult questions: How was he forgotten so quickly? And why does Canada do such a poor job of securing its history? Both questions cause Dr. Merrill Distad — the associate university librarian at the University of Alberta who threw his considerable energies into the Steele papers acquisition — to roll his eyes with frustration. “If this were an American hero,” he insists, “every schoolchild would have heard of him, and there would already be a television series and several movies about him. He is our Wyatt Earp.”
art of Steele’s attraction for his contemporaries was that he embodied the values of the day: Victorian ideals, imperial zeal, and selfless patriotism. Born in Ontario in 1848 or 1849 (he deliberately obscured his own birthdate), he came from a long line of defenders of the Union Jack. His British-born forebears had fought on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Steele was still a teenager in 1866 when he joined a militia formed to fight raids onto Canadian soil by Irish American Fenians. The youngster quickly realized that military life in the rough British colony offered adventures impossible to experience on a pioneer farm. In 1870, he volunteered to help suppress the Red River Rebellion in present-day Manitoba, then made his way back to Ontario to become an artillery instructor in Kingston. He was a big, brawny man’s man: barrel chested, good looking, and inclined to hit the bottle too hard when bored.In 1867, the British colony became the Dominion of Canada, and Sir John A. Macdonald committed his government to pushing a railroad over the vast lands that separated Ontario and British Columbia. It would be a monumental effort of engineering, to lay 4,000 kilometres of steel track; of human settlement, to people the prairies; and of law enforcement, to manage relations with First Nations and to beat back American whisky traders. The prime minister knew his young nation could not afford an army to support these ambitious plans. In 1870, Washington spent $19 million, more than the entire Canadian government budget, on its army — an army notorious out west for massacring Indians. The shrewd Macdonald devised a different kind of militia, a body that would enforce the law with more restraint than the US Army, but more firepower than the constabulary in Britain, which famously did not carry guns. The North-West Mounted Police was to be, in Macdonald’s words, “a civil, not a military body, with as little gold lace, fuss and fine feathers as possible; not a crack cavalry regiment, but an efficient police force for the rough and ready — particularly ready — enforcement of law and justice.” Its distinctive uniform reflected its purpose: a Mountie wore the red jacket of a traditional British regiment and the breeches and boots of a frontier ranger. In 1873, the third man to be sworn in to this uniquely Canadian force was twenty-four-year-old Samuel Benfield Steele. He began his career as a constable, and started moving up the ranks.
The North-West Mounted Police soon came to symbolize Ottawa’s authority west of Ontario. And there wasn’t an early Mountie triumph in which Sam Steele didn’t star. He marched west in 1877 to negotiate with Sitting Bull, who had fled north after the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana. He supervised construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway across present-day Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, keeping peace on the prairies as immigrants swarmed in. After the 1885 North-West Rebellion, he pursued Big Bear until the Cree chief surrendered. A few months later, he was present at Craigellachie when the last spike was driven, completing the cpr’s great steel spine from Central Canada to the Pacific. For the next decade, he criss-crossed the Rockies on horseback, becoming a familiar figure to First Nations and settlers in British Columbia and Alberta.
Steele’s men respected him for his work ethic, and feared him because he was a bully. “Gruff and bluff, and absolutely fearless of everybody,” as a colleague put it. His official diary captures his unbending military demeanour. On January 11, 1888, while stationed at British Columbia’s Kootenay Ferry, he jotted this terse note: “Annual flogging administered to whores, adulterers, drunkards and gamblers.”
