08/19/2026
Check out the early history of the RCMP.
The difference between the Canadian and American West is, in part, the difference between the North-West Mounted Police and the US Cavalry. Both were instruments of federal authority sent into Indigenous lands to secure them for settlement. But the manner in which they operated, and the mythology each culture built around them, diverged sharply. The NWMP was created by Act of Parliament in 1873, at the urging of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, who had been horrified by the Cypress Hills Massacre in which American wolf hunters had killed a group of Assiniboine people in what is now Saskatchewan. Macdonald wanted Canadian law established in the West before American-style frontier violence became the norm. The first great test was the March West of 1874: 300 officers, many with no prairie experience, riding from Fort Dufferin in Manitoba westward across an open, unmapped landscape in the summer heat, with horses poorly adapted to the terrain and supply wagons that fell behind schedule. By the time they reached their destination in what is now Alberta, they were in poor condition. The whisky traders at Fort Whoop-Up they had come to confront had already heard they were coming and departed. But the Mounted Police stayed. They built posts. They met with Blackfoot leader Crowfoot and established a relationship based on treaty and mutual respect rather than military subjugation. They maintained order not through force but through presence, consistency, and a reputation for keeping their word. The approach was imperfect and the colonialism it enabled was real. But the mythology it produced, the Mountie as a figure of law, fairness, and determined competence, became one of Canada's most enduring national images. The force was renamed the Royal North-West Mounted Police in 1904 and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1920.
