“Noble, Daring, & Dashing”: The Image of the Mounties

If someone were to tell you that Tyrone Power, Alan Ladd, and Randolph Scott all played Canadians on the silver screen, your first question, being a good Canadian, might be... why? Well, because actors who could play noble, daring, and dashing individuals were needed. But that answer wouldn’t satisfy. Only when you were informed that these icons wore the Stetson of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would this make any sense. Despite various high-profile Mountie stumblings in recent years, and revisionist history that has fingered their forebears as fallible human beings with the prejudices of their time, the heroic image of our mounted men lives on. We believe in it to this day, even when we’re being very modern and trying not to, by making fun of it.

In the 1999 series finale of the international hit television show Due South Constable Benton Fraser commandeers a Lake Superior ship after discovering that dastardly deeds are being perpetrated within its confines; deeds that are about to cause a mutiny. When he boldly confronts the villain in front of a simmering crew, the accused expresses his innocence and turns various charges back on Fraser. Confusion reigns. Then one man turns toward the constable and asks, “How do we know you’re telling the truth?” The ship’s captain, played by veteran Shakespearean actor Douglas Campbell, answers. “Look at him!” he shouts in dulcet tones as he casts a glance up toward the man in scarlet, “He’s a Mountie!”

It’s a joke that makes sense not just at home but pretty well around the world, and not only because Mounties are easy fodder for satire in a somewhat cynical age. Constable Benton Fraser — ridiculously handsome, honourable and effective — is simultaneously believable as a hero. Canadians are nearly genetically unable to celebrate such figures. We have somehow reached a century-and-a-half years old almost bereft of folk heroes, and we are capable of interrogating the image of almost any of our high achievers into shards of broken clay. But we have one hero whom we either cannot or will not fully disrespect. We may laugh at Dave Broadfoot harpooning the image on Air Farce or remember how hilarious brainless Dudley Do-Right was, but bring a full-dress Mountie into a room in 1998 and even the most cynical of our number feels at least a tiny rush of pride. It’s very un-Canadian. This begs a two-part question: Why has the Mountie become almost the ultimate hero in our eternally hero-less land? And how in the world did he get up on that pedestal?

The North-West Mounted Police came into existence with little fanfare in 1873 when Sir John A. Macdonald (nonheroic heavy drinker), responding to problems in the West with Yankee whisky traders, natives, and precious settlers, created a force of mounted men to put things straight. A terse ad in a Montreal paper early the next year required nothing like heroism or square jaws from its respondents, though it did hint at what was to come. “The candidate must have good antecedents,” it proclaimed, “and be a good horseman.”

Keith Walden, whose Visions of Order is perhaps the seminal book about the image of the Mounties, wrote that “Some scholars have pointed to a particular poem or newspaper story as the starting point of the Mounties’ reputation, but beyond this, the process by which their image was formulated and dispersed is largely unknowable.” He also theorizes that “if the police were viewed as being heroic and pure, it was because many people, not just those who wore red coats, wanted to see them that way. The efforts of the Force only coincided with a wide predisposition within Canadian, American and British society.” Walden seems correct, but like most historians he is always trying to put things into historical context. It could be argued that there are such obvious reasons the Force became renowned, even before the “large scale adulation ... in the last decade of the nineteenth century,” that the process is almost irrelevant, and the predisposition he eloquently spoke of is an eternal one, not connected to any time period.

“In early June 1874,” David Cruise and Alison Griffiths wrote in their book The Great Adventure, “a letter arrived at the Montreal offices of the Canadian Illustrated News. Addressed to the manager, the letter, penned by Colonel French, invited a reporter/artist to accompany the Mounted Police expedition, which would travel through some of the wildest terrain known to mankind to the foot of the Rocky Mountains.” It was an invitation that was hard to resist, both from the point of view of the magazine, and the 21-year-old illustrator, Henri Julien, who was soon excitedly on his way. That historic trip, from Manitoba to Fort Whoop-up in southern Alberta, was not entirely the noble venture Victorian history recorded, but the drawings that Julien sent out to the nation beginning on June 27, with a full page depicting the commissioner, the surgeon, and a gathering of six upright, smartly uniformed individuals, had to have captured the imaginations of many readers. Illustrations continued into October, once on the front page, another time in a two-page spread. Mounties were shown on horseback in gorgeous prairie backdrops, apparently noble adventurers in the huge, wide-open frontier of a growing nation. (Readers likely didn’t think about the fact that this nation belonged to someone else.) Not all reports from within the Force were positive: “The Manitoba mounted police are a disgusted lot,” read one. “They complain that they were shamefully sold. The old story-hard work and small pay.” But the images were seductive, the settings made for heroes.

In 1877 Sitting Bull came north, and in 1885 the Mounties were involved in the North-West Rebellion. To this day, despite some qualifications (Walden speaks of Sitting Bull’s political need to be peaceful and project near subservience), their calm interaction with the legendary chief is praised, especially when contrasted with American troubles; their actions during the Rebellion, however, are not universally admired. By the end of the century the Mounties had experienced more than two decades of relatively peaceful policing in the West (though part of their mandate was to pressure natives onto reservations) and entered a new period of glory in the Yukon. Their legend began to grow, both at home and abroad. With such a background, flawed in reality or not, it isn’t surprising.

Though the first books and novels about the Mounties appeared in the 1880s and ‘90s, the source of one of their greatest myths came even earlier. On April 12, 1877 the Fort Benton (Montana) Record printed an admiring report about “the vigilance of Major Irving and the energy of Captain Windsor of the NW Mounted Police” in hunting down and prosecuting evil whisky traders. “The MPs are worse than bloodhounds when they scent the track of a smuggler, and they fetch their man every time.”

The image of the Mountie who always got his man began appearing sporadically in the 1880s, in such things as Trooper and Redskin in the Far Northwest, the memoirs of John G. Donkin, a former member from Great Britain. Then it entered the world of novels, and began exploding into stardom.

Though they can be found in many countries, most novels originated in Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. British authors were most prolific at first. It wasn’t that Canadians and Americans weren’t producing this genre in those early years (for example, Toronto journalist Edmund Collins wrote Annette, the Métis Spy in 1886) but Brits like Roger Pocock, who wrote Tales of the Western Life in 1888, and John Mackie, who published The Devil’s Playground in 1894, seemed to set the pace. They would be followed by Ridgwell Cullum and his six Mountie novels, the first appearing in 1903, and Harold Bindloss whose Winston of the Prairies and Delilah of the Snows (both 1907) are often cited as among the most typical of Mountie-glorifying novels.

The British, as Walden has pointed out, saw the Mounties as bold individuals who reflected Anglo greatness, agents of order on the exciting, outlying frontiers of the Empire. Imperialistic books, like those written by Rudyard Kipling, became very popular shortly after the Force was formed, another reason the Mounties were revered so quickly in the old country. The fact that they wore the red coats of the Empire and reputedly deported themselves like frontier British gentlemen also couldn't have hurt.

But the Mounties were made for Americans. Obsessed by their own western frontier and enamoured of the deeds of their cowboys, they found in Mountie stories a sort of upscale cowboy on a frontier that, unlike their own, was still mostly untamed. “Part cowboy with his horse and his hat,” commented Walden, “part detective in his efforts to solve mysterious crimes, ... part loner who reaffirmed the virtues of individual courage and initiative, ... he was a perfect dime-novel hybrid.” The Mountie began slowly in American fiction, appearing in bit parts in Jack London’s A Daughter of the Snows (1902), but then becoming very popular in the work of James Oliver Curwood (Steele of the Royal Mounted 1911) and James B. Hendryx (Snowdrift 1922). Americans tended to turn Mounties into their sort of hero, paying little attention to realistic Canadian settings or attitudes, often placing their stories in the North the scene, in their minds, of the last frontier.

Though Canadians began writing stories about their heroic mounted men early on (Ralph Con nor, one of the most popular novelists in our history, wrote several, including Corporal Cameron of the Mounties in 1912), we warmed to our task in a typically Canadian way, becoming truly excited once others, including Americans no less, began finding them fascinating. Though the likes of Pauline Johnson and Robert Service had mentioned them, it was when boys’ books about Mounties, like those by Samuel Alexander White and William Amy Lacey, began to proliferate that they really seized the public imagination Canadians saw Mounties as frontiersmen, but also as policemen sent to bring civilization and order to their frontier. Our authors also tended to situate their heroes in the midst of actual historical events, a favourite being the Riel Rebellion. Their Mounties weren’t emotional cowboys, but policemen driven by duty.

Walden points out that, despite the differences in these three views, there were many ways in which they were similar. All depicted the Mountie as a romantic character concerned with bringing justice to a young and essentially lawless land.

Mountie novels became less popular as the first half of the twentieth century wore on and by the end of the 1950s had almost disappeared, though books like the Dale of the Mounties series, written by Canadian author Joe Holliday, continued into the ‘60s. By the ‘70s almost no one wrote fiction in which Mounties appeared, except Canadians. With others having cast aside the now untenable, dated image and moved on to other, more modern adventure heroes, it was left to us to deconstruct them in novels that often portrayed them in more minor roles and in less flattering light. Witness James McNamee’s Them Damn Canadians Hanged Louis Riel and Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear.

Nonfiction books followed similar lines, with early ones like T. Morris Longstreth’s The Silent Force (1927) portraying them as inimitable, taciturn heroes while more contemporary works like Michael Dawson’s hot-off-the-press The Mountie From Dime Novel to Disney (1998) presented a much more fallible and relentlessly image-conscious institution. Radio leapt onto the Mountie bandwagon from its early days, and soon two prominent national programs were airing in the United States. Renfrew of the Mounted, based on the stories of Laurie York Erskine, began in 1936. It told of the noble Douglas Renfrew confronting desperadoes in the far north. He was on CBS at first and lasted for four seasons. By then Sergeant Preston of the Yukon (originally Challenge of the Yukon) was winding its way up from local radio toward a starring national 30-minute spot with ABC. Created by the same people who gave America The Lone Ranger, it was a big-time show that lasted until 1955. Its opening was this shy and retiring little pitch:

(Gunshot, ricochet)

ANNOUNCER: Now, as gunshots echo across the windswept, snowcovered reaches of the wild Northwest, Quaker Puffed Wheat...

(Gunshot, ricochet)

ANNOUNCER: the breakfast cereal shot from guns ...

(Two gunshots)

ANNOUNCER: presents, The Challenge of the Yukon!

YUKON KING: (Bark)

ANNOUNCER (overwind): It’s Yukon King, swiftest and strongest lead dog in the Northwest, blazing the trail for Sergeant Preston of the North-West Mounted Police, in his relentless pursuit of lawbreakers!

PRESTON: On King! On, you huskies!

Preston even made it to television, with trusty Yukon King still by his side. Starring the pencil-thin-mustached Richard Simmons (no, not that Richard Simmons), the program lasted from 1955 to 1958 on CBS. National U.S. television would not see another Mountie until Benton Fraser in the 1990s. At home they occasionally popped up on the tube, in such roles as Gordon Pinsent’s tough-but-fair Sergeant Brian Scott on The Forest Rangers in the 1960s.

But it was in the movies, in Hollywood’s movies, that the Mounties really hit their stride, rendered so matchlessly mythic that we still cannot knock them off that pedestal. As Pierre Berton asserted in Hollywood’s Canada,it was actually a strange, Americanized Mountie who towered above us on the screen.

Writing in 1975, Berton pointed out that Hollywood had made 256 movies about the Mounties, almost half of all the films they had generated about Canada up until that time. Beginning in the earliest days of the silent screen, with such titles as The Darling of the Mounties in 1912 to John Ford’s North of Hudson Bay with Tom Mix in 1923, Americans put some of their biggest box-office people into scarlet and gold. Mix was a cowboy hero, and it was assumed that he could move seamlessly into a Mountie movie. In 1928 the first Rose Marie was made, with Joan Crawford; eight years later the second and most celebrated was released, with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in starring roles and James Stewart supporting. Other prominent films were Renfrew of the Royal Mounted in 1937, Susannah of the Mounties in 1939 with Shirley Temple and Randolph Scott, Cecil B. DeMille’s North West Mounted Police in 1940 with Gary Cooper, Gene Autry and the Mounties in 1951, and Saskatchewan in 1954 with Alan Ladd. By the ‘60s, Hollywood had begun to lose interest.

Almost every one of these films was witheringly bad. And not just in terms of their dramatic qualities. Hollywood got everything wrong about the Mounties, or almost everything. The uniforms were often wrong, the chevrons upside down, the men were called Trooper or Private instead of Constable; they were pictured riding off to nab their villains while singing at the top of their lungs or graced by a backdrop of Rocky Mountains... in Saskatchewan. And, much to the disgust of the RCMP, they were often portrayed as a force that loved gunplay and often opposed an enemy distinctly French Canadian (Cecil B. DeMille’s grotesque of Louis Riel was something to behold). And melodramatic formulas were constantly repeated. For example, Berton found more than 30 incidences of a Mountie being forced by duty to bring in someone associated with his sweetheart, all the way from her father, her brother, “the man his sweetheart really loves,” the poor sweetheart herself, to even her twin brother. This was part of a common theme that dealt with the Mounties’ supposedly eternal though achingly difficult commitment to choosing duty over love. It isn’t surprising that the RCMP often tried to disassociate itself from Hollywood. But the use of such themes as duty over love touches upon something that American filmmakers invariably did for (or to) our Mounties. It solidified their reputation as heroes unlike anything had done before. That image of matinee idols dressed in scarlet has stayed with us.

Since the death of the Mountie movie, the Force’s image has been brought down to earth, and sometimes even lower. A character by the name of Dudley Do-Right began appearing on The Bullwinkle Show during that cartoon’s 1959 to 1973 stint on American television. Dudley was a square-jawed Mountie of unerring stupidity and self-righteous moral fibre, who spent his time ineptly pursuing the nefarious Snidely Whiplash and annoying his sweetheart Nell, the daughter of his boss Inspector Fenwick. The beautiful Nell loved someone else ... Dudley’s horse. Dudley’s existence reflected not only the modem age’s desire to deconstruct heroes, but how ridiculously high on the pedestal Mounties had ascended. They were an irresistible target.

From about 1960 forward it became difficult to depict a Mountie without at least a little satire, or gritty realism. From Broadfoot’s unheroic Renfrew and his dog, Cuddles, to clueless Mounties Ed Codner and Ed Cochrane (“We’re the special Eds!”) on CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, we enjoy poking fun at them. On North of 60, the RCMP officers shed the scarlet, the manliness, and the heroism.

It seems obvious we can no longer look upon the Mounties as perfect beings. They are the daily police force in all of our provinces but two (Ontario and Quebec), ordinary-looking cops who give you speeding tickets or bother you in some other way. In Quebec, they tend to be seen as very Anglo police anyway, and historically their role in the Riel situation and pursuit of French-Canadian villains in the movies does little to help their image there. Add to this the whole nation’s awakening to their less-than-perfect record in the opening of the West and recent revelations about wrongdoing in Quebec, bungling in the Airbus scandal, and the fact that they are today that perpetually questioned, undemocratic institution — a secret service — and you have a Mountie thrown from his horse, as it were.

It also seems that a favourite preoccupation of writers in this postmodernist age has become the examination of a perceived duality in the Mounties: their image versus their reality. It’s becoming nearly as talked about as the old heroism. Walden does this as well as anyone, theorizing that the Mounties appeared at a perfect time. Just as society was undergoing a change to a more complicated, urban, and secularized state, they came along representing the comforting, older way of individualism and firmly held beliefs. He also discusses concepts of heroes and myths and explains how the Mounties fit into those roles. Their apparent character, sense of duty, social responsibility, good breeding, well-roundedness, and birth in the wide-open, unspoiled space of the West all fit them to their mythic role.

Dawson, in his book, agrees with much of what Walden says, but takes a slightly more critical stance, stressing the phoniness of their image and putting a great deal of focus on how the RCMP reworked it into a politically correct one during their 1973 centennial year, retaining bravery and decency but incorporating a fabricated concept of historical Mounties as non-imperialistic, friends of natives, nonracist and nonsexist. He argues that this paved the way for the 1995 purchase of the marketing rights to their image by the Disney Corporation. This monster-sized, so-called “family-oriented” company would likely not have wanted to be associated with the questionable image that grew after midcentury, but this cleaned-up one, Dawson says, is more attractive. He discusses how the RCMP now uses their old uniform to promote their image worldwide and concludes by arguing that today the Mountie image is barely more than a marketing tool. “Unhindered by the Force’s past role in many of the most controversial events in Canada’s history, the Mountie is now consumed with the same lack of historical contemplation that greets a cup of coffee or a bag of potato chips.” He feels that Canadians need to “interrogate” the myth of the Mountie more, and that doing so would be the sign of a “healthy” nation.

But something about that analysis seems off the mark. Canadians are expert at tearing apart any prospective hero who dares to pop his/her head above the snow. The Mounties have survived this. We still feel some pride in them, but not because of blind acceptance. Only the most naive of us would assume that they have done no wrong and that they do not try to project to us the best possible image of themselves, even a somewhat fabricated, corporate one. Most of us understand, for example, that their role as the police force of earlier governments made them party to pushing natives onto reservations; but we also know that our western and gold-rush history was indeed less bloody than that of our neighbour’s, who used an army to deal with the same situations and apparent “enemies.” The Mounties, however flawed, deserve some credit for that.

More important, most of us see the image for what it is: a reflection of a reality, not reality itself. Setting aside the cops and the secret service we have to deal with today, we still admire the historical image of the Mounties and see in their relative sense of decency and their relatively bloodless approach something that was, and is, distinctly Canadian. We see something to strive toward. Perhaps even something noble in us, dare we say. Myths, understood as myths, are not necessarily, or completely, bad.

Whatever Disney may or may not do to the Mounties, sanitize them, or Americanize them (as if that’s something new), or make them just another corporate symbol, it is doubtful that they can ever affect the essence of what a man dressed in scarlet and gold and a Stetson means to a Canadian. When a ship captain on Due South, responds to questions about who is the most believable man onboard by turning an upward glance and exclaiming, “Look at him! He’s a Mountie!” we laugh at ourselves, but we feel good about it too.

Shane Peacock is a Toronto-based freelance writer.

This article originally appeared in June-July 1998 issue of The Beaver magazine.

Redcoats — from the bargain bin?

Bill Mackay, curator of the RCMP Museum in Regina, reveals an interesting fact about the Mounties’ famous scarlet tunic. Official word has always been that the governor general, Lord Dufferin, wanted the police to wear the imperial red of the Empire; this way the NWMP would be easily distinguishable from the U.S. Cavalry, who wore a more traditional police blue. But Mackay thinks there may be more to the story: “I ran across a little document. It just so happened that Osborne Smith, the district commander of the province of Manitoba, had 700-plus unwanted red Norfolk jackets. ... What a great opportunity to dump them off to the new boys on the block and to meet the needs of a governor general who wanted red uniforms.” And they probably got a deal.

To this day, RCMP headquarters receives letters from children in Great Britain and elsewhere saying they want to come to Canada and become red-jacketed Mounties. Others write to complain that they visited Canada and didn’t see a single Mountie, not knowing that the famous red uniforms haven’t been worn in action since the 1930s.