Sam Steele Biography

SAM STEELE BIOGRAPHY STEELE, Sir SAMUEL BENFIELD, NWMP officer and army officer; b. 5 Jan. 1849 (some sources give 5 Jan. 1851 and 5 Jan. 1852) in Medonte Township, Upper Canada, son of Elmes Yelverton Steele* and Anne MacIan Macdonald; m. 15 Jan. 1890 Marie Elizabeth Harwood in Vaudreuil, Que., and they had two daughters and a son; d. 30 Jan. 1919 in Putney (London), England. Sam Steele was the quintessential Canadian man of action in the Victorian era. Physically strong and courageous, he personified the heroic qualities of the early North-West Mounted Police. He even looked the part to perfection: tall, barrel-chested, and handsome, inspiring confidence in men and admiration in women. No human, of course, could be as spotless as Steele appeared on the surface. His occasional drinking bouts were well known among his contemporaries, though he was certainly not an alcoholic. Steele was also very ambitious, and he had, in full measure, the prevailing Anglo-Saxon racist views of the period. At the same time Steele had important attributes that he and his contemporaries were inclined to ignore because they were less fashionable than the more obvious virtues. He was intelligent in a non-reflective way, a trait that can be seen in his autobiography, where his devotion to duty, imperial zeal, honesty, and an element of self-centredness tend to dominate. It is even more apparent in the way he approached his work. Although he cultivated the image of the bluff, open frontiersman and had no fondness for barrack-square drill, Steele was a shrewd, meticulous, and diplomatic administrator. He always spent as much time as possible preparing for a new job. Other members of the NWMP may have ridden off with adventurous notions in the Long March west of 1874. Sergeant-Major Steele left Winnipeg armed with the information gathered from six months of systematically interviewing everyone he could find who knew anything about the North-West Territories. Throughout his career Steele would approach each new challenge with the same professional thoroughness. The son of a former naval officer and MLA, Sam Steele had been educated at Purbrook, the family home in Medonte, and then at a private school in Orillia. After the death of his father in 1865, he lived for a time with his eldest half-brother, John Coucher Steele. The Fenian troubles of 1866 drew Sam into the militia, where he quickly discovered his true vocation. He served first with the 35th (Simcoe) Battalion of Infantry. After moving to Clarksburg (near Collingwood) to work as a clerk, he raised and trained a company for the 31st (Grey) Battalion of Infantry. In 1870, when a British-Canadian expedition was formed under Colonel Garnet Joseph Wolseley to maintain order at Red River (Man.), Steele was one of the many eager volunteers. On 1 May 1870 he joined the 1st (Ontario) Battalion of Rifles at Barrie. Although he had held a commission in the 35th and was offered non-commissioned rank in the 1st, Steele chose to serve as a private. “As far as experience went,” he would later write, “I was better off without chevrons and learned how to appreciate the trials of other men to an extent that I should never have been able to do had I been promoted.” The strenuous overland journey from the Lakehead to Red River was the kind of challenge that enabled Steele to demonstrate his exceptional strength and endurance. Shortly after the expedition had settled at Upper Fort Garry (Winnipeg), he was promoted corporal. Steele enjoyed his time at Red River, but he was not tempted to stay when the battalion was disbanded in 1871. Steele made his way instead to Kingston, Ont., where the artillery school of the Canadian Permanent Force had been established. He took a year-long course and then was assigned to Toronto to reorganize the battery there. Typically, he studied in his off hours at the British American Commercial College. After a year he was posted back to Kingston as an artillery instructor. Here in the summer of 1873 he heard that the government intended to create a mounted police force for the North-West Territories. He immediately applied to his commander, Lieutenant-Colonel George Arthur French*, for permission to join and received it, not surprisingly since French probably knew that he was to command the new force. Steele was given the rank of staff constable (the equivalent of divisional sergeant-major) in the NWMP and he made his way westward with the first contingent in October. At Lower Fort Garry he broke horses and rigorously instructed recruits in riding. Steele was in charge of travel arrangements in June 1874 when the time came to meet the second contingent at Pembina (N.Dak.). On the Long March west that summer [see James Farquharson Macleod*], the police quickly ran into shortages of feed for their horses and cattle. The situation became so serious that a party from A Division, including Steele, had to be detached with the weakest animals and sent north along the Carlton Trail to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Edmonton (Edmonton). Getting the ailing livestock to Fort Edmonton before winter was a gruelling job but one at which Steele excelled. His commanding officer, Inspector William Dummer Jarvis, noted in his report in November that Steele had done the “manual labour of at least two men” on the journey. With the rest of A Division, Steele spent the winter at Fort Edmonton, making occasional journeys outward to gather information and to clear the area of whisky traders. When spring came the police moved down river and built their own post, Fort Saskatchewan (Alta). In July 1875 the steamer Northcote brought orders promoting Steele to chief constable, effective in August, and transferring him to headquarters at Swan River Barracks (Livingstone, Sask.). In the summer of 1876 he was put in charge of moving the headquarters to Fort Macleod (Alta) and, along the way, making arrangements for the large police contingent at the Treaty No.6 negotiations with the Cree at forts Carlton and Pitt (Sask.). At Fort Macleod Steele continued his administrative duties, trained horses, and acted as clerk for the busy criminal sessions conducted by the officers in their capacity as justices of the peace. In October 1877 he was one of the party of Commissioner J. F. Macleod that went to Fort Walsh (Sask.) to conduct negotiations between Sitting Bull [Ta-tanka I-yotank*] and General Alfred Howe Terry of the United States army. After the talks failed to persuade Sitting Bull to return to American territory, a failure Steele regarded as inevitable, he returned to Fort Macleod. The following year headquarters was moved to Fort Walsh because of the concentration of Indians in the Cypress Hills. Promoted sub-inspector in 1878, Steele remained there until 1880, when he was made an inspector and assigned to his first independent command, Fort Qu’Appelle (Sask.). The duties of the NWMP, hitherto focused on the native population, began to change rapidly with the coming of the transcontinental railway. The main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway bisected Steele’s district and he found himself occupied with disputes generated by settlement and construction. As the railway advanced west in the summer of 1882, he was put in charge of policing the line. Moving with the construction camps, he laid out the NWMP post at Regina, to which the force’s main headquarters was transferred in December. Most of his work was in his capacity as a magistrate. Settling labour disputes and keeping gamblers and whisky sellers within limits was just the kind of job that Steele’s forceful personality, sense of humour, and boundless energy were suited to. When construction reached Fort Calgary (Calgary) in the fall of 1883, he stayed there as commanding officer. In April 1884 Steele was assigned to accompany the CPR into British Columbia. He had no doubt that the completion of the railway was a work of national importance and that his job was to further that work by any means at his disposal. He increased his power by having Ottawa double the area of federal jurisdiction over the construction route, from 20 miles on each side of the track to 40. In the spring of 1885, at Beaver (Beavermouth), B.C., in the Selkirk Mountains, a serious labour dispute developed over non-payment of wages by subcontractors. Gravely ill with fever, Steele rose from his sickbed to read the Riot Act to an angry mob of strikers and, though he was armed, he dispersed them through sheer force of personality. The action was pure Sam Steele, though it should be noted that major discrepancies exist between the official reports he wrote at the time of the strike and his published reminiscences many years later. The strike had escalated to the point of violence in part because Steele’s detachment had been stripped of men to respond to the crisis on the prairies created by Louis Riel*’s proclamation of a provisional government in March. As soon as the strike was over, on 7 April, Steele and the rest of his men also headed eastward. On arrival in Calgary, Steele was appointed to command the mounted troops and scouts of Major-General Thomas Bland Strange*’s Alberta Field Force. They consisted of some 110 ranchers and cowboys along with 25 policemen. Steele’s Scouts led the way north to Edmonton and then down the North Saskatchewan River in pursuit of Cree chief Big Bear [Mistahimaskwa*], whose band had killed a number of people at Frog Lake (Alta).

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