Sam Steele: An Officer and a Gentleman

Norman S. Leach

 — Posted January 16, 2016

Had there been no Sam Steele, it has been observed, Hollywood would have had to invent him. Born into the comparative stability of the Victorian era’s Pax Britannica, Steele lived to witness the postwar turmoil of the Lost Generation. From humble beginnings in what is now Bracebridge, Ontario, to his knighthood in England two years before his death in 1919, Steele’s life epitomized the themes of personal adventure, service to crown and country, and the zeal for modernization and social order that characterized nineteenth-century Canada within the British Empire. His long and storied career threaded through many pivotal moments in Canada's settlement and development history.

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