The Truth about the RCMP

NWMP constables, Ft. Walsh, 1878.

Sadly, like everything else in our history deserving of honour, the Mounties have recently been the victim of some revisionist history. 

Steve Hewitt, history lecturer at the University of Birmingham and author of three books about the RCMP’s history, recently wrote that the job of the Mounties “was to clear the plains, the Prairies, of Indigenous people…to move them onto reserves whether they were willing to go or not.”

This statement is wrong on several fronts. To begin with, it was the indigenous people, not the Canadian government, who pressed for treaties and reserves. They faced starvation, because of the over-hunting of buffalo and of fur-bearing animals. They wanted government help. They needed some new means of subsistence.

If the Canadian government had wanted to clear the plains of indigenous people, their best option would have been to do nothing.

The indigenous people also wanted the government to send in some force to keep the peace. In the minds of the aboriginal leaders of the time, the treaties were peace treaties, ending a state of more or less constant war, not between aboriginals and whites, but among the various tribes, who often killed each other on sight. Governments are good at ending that sort of gang warfare.

This was probably not the Canadian government’s main reason for creating the force. Their biggest concern was to establish national sovereignty and avoid giving the Americans any justification for moving in. Sitting Bull and other Indians in rebellion against the US government had begun using the North West as a refuge, frustrating American authorities in the same way the Ho Chi Minh Trail once did in Southeast Asia. Worse if these tribes then might launch attacks south. And, of course, they were coming into conflict with local Canadian tribes.

But the immediate impetus for forming the force was the Cypress Hills Massacre, and the public outcry that it provoked. This was a public outcry of sympathy with the Indians. It was to protect Indians from whites, not vice versa. 

Mounties leaving Ft. Dufferin, 1874.

The piece of evidence on which historians like Hewitt can hang their case is the pass system that was imposed by federal bureaucrats, especially after the North West Rebellion, forcing Indians to stay on their reserves for fear of mayhem. This was in violation of treaty and of existing Canadian law. But it was hardly the reason for the existence of the force. A larger force might have removed the need for it; but the government was not prepared to make the expenditure. And it was perhaps understandable in the historical circumstances. Rather like the War Measures Act. 

New uniform, 1900.

Hewitt offers another bit of evidence: the fact that Sir John A Macdonald openly based his concept of the NWMP on the model of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Supposedly, the RIC was “a paramilitary police force created by the British to keep the Irish under control.” So, by association, the Mounties were there to rough up the Indians.

Something should immediately smell fishy here. The Macdonald government relied heavily on Irish Catholic support, with prominent Tory Irish Canadian leaders like D’Arcy McGee and Nicholas Flood Davin. If the RIC were generally seen at the time as an instrument of oppression of the Irish, Macdonald wound never have dared point to them as his model.

No, the RIC was the model because it was an armed force, as the Mounties were intended to be, and because it was considered the best police force in the world at the time.

The RIC was then recruited locally, and was 75% to 80% Catholic. The pay was low: the government found they could count on constables being supported by local donations of food. In other words, it was generally supported by the local populace.

They of course enforced the existing laws, and the laws themselves were discriminatory. But that was not their business. There is something to be said for maintaining social order and preventing thefts and murders, after all.

Some Irish nationalist groups like the Ribbonmen and White Boys were always in conflict with them. But then, so were the Orangemen. The RIC was probably seen by most as politically neutral.

In the 20th century, the reputation of the RIC went downhill fast, as it was packed with English recruits and indeed used to ruthlessly impose foreign government control. This was the era of the “black and tans.” But it is a distortion to project this backwards.

Since Irish independence, there has been a lot of revisionist history in Ireland. One Irish friend of mine, product of the local schools, was shocked to hear me point out that, at the time, the Easter Rebellion was not supported by the majority of the Irish population. Another Irish friend was shocked to be told that the colours of the Irish flag was green, white, and orange. He had apparently always been taught that they were green, white, and gold. And he was yet more shocked to be told the orange was indeed there to represent the Protestant Irish. 

We do not need the same sort of politicized, falsified history in Canada.

Especially we Irish-Canadians. Our ancestors came here in good part to escape that sort of thing.

My proudly Canadian Irish grandmother, for example, explained that she would never read a history of Ireland written by an Irishman. Because she assumed he would not be neutral.