[Macdonald has been] hopelessly involved in an infamous and corrupt conspiracy.
The Toronto Globe, July 4, 1873
On New Year’s Eve of 1872, Macdonald was working in his office on Parliament Hill when George McMullen, the one-time Canadian who had become Allan’s principal American partner, arrived unannounced, presented his card and was hurried in for a meeting with the prime minister. They spent two hours discussing the Canadian Pacific project, with McMullen talking at length and often reading from documents he had brought with him detailing his dealings with Sir Hugh Allan.
McMullen was providing Macdonald with answers to some of the questions he had never asked. His revelations were stunning. It was clear that Allan had lied to his American partners, letting them believe they could continue as silent owners of the company long after that possibility was gone. He had also lied repeatedly to Macdonald, concealing his long-standing relationship with the Americans and pretending it hadn’t continued for months after he had promised to end it. Allan had even tried to get McMullen to reimburse him for the $350,000 he had given to the Conservatives as election funds. And as if utterly disconnected from reality, he had told the lobbyist Lycurgus Edgerton that the Canadian Pacific would be “subservient and tributary” to the Northern Pacific just one day before he finally informed McMullen that their deal was over. McMullen went on and on. Allan had told him he had secured the support of MPs in return for campaign payments—some of them “very near to you,” McMullen said, implying that among them were the two most senior members of cabinet, George-Étienne Cartier and Francis Hincks.
When Macdonald denied that any such bargain had been made, McMullen retorted that Allan must have been an outright swindler. Macdonald conceded nothing; the quarrel, he said, was between McMullen and his associates and Allan, not between them and the government. When McMullen insisted that Macdonald either restore the original agreement between the Canadian Pacific and the Americans or withdraw his commitment to make Allan the president, Macdonald retorted that both demands were impossible. At that point, McMullen turned threatening, talking about the political consequences once the public knew the facts. Macdonald ended the discussion by asking for time to talk to Allan and J.J. Abbott, Allan’s lawyer.
Three weeks later, McMullen was back again, accompanied this time by a Chicago banker, Charles Mather Smith. Macdonald expressed his sympathies for the way the Americans had been deceived by Allan, telling them, “If I were in your situation, I would proceed against him.” Again, he made no other concession; he would not, he insisted, break his commitment to Allan. In February, Smith wrote a long angry letter to Macdonald pointing out that it had been Allan, not the Americans, who had first proposed the pact: “We did not go to him,” he said. “The Government alone had the address of our syndicate,” so he and his group could only assume that Allan had “direct authority from the cabinet.” Smith then ratcheted up the pressure, asking whether Macdonald would have any objection to the syndicate petitioning Parliament for compensation.
Macdonald, naturally, had no end of objections to a public airing of such an abundance of soiled linen. One alternative he discerned was for Allan to negotiate a deal with his one-time American associates, thereby securing their silence. (The value of keeping Allan on his side was no doubt the reason Macdonald consistently refused McMullen’s suggestions he remove Allan from the Canadian Pacific presidency.) Macdonald therefore asked Hincks, who was now living in Montreal, to get together with Allan before he left for London to try to secure financial backing for the railway project. A few days later, a letter from Hincks brought the welcome news that the matter had been “quite satisfactorily arranged.”
No record remains of those tense negotiations between McMullen and Abbott, but evidence given later to the Royal Commission on the Canadian Pacific Railway suggests that McMullen originally demanded a payment of $200,000, which Abbott argued down to $37,500 in American funds. Abbott paid $20,000 immediately, with the balance written on a cheque that was to be held in a security deposit box at Allan’s Merchants’ Bank. Also in the box was all the correspondence McMullen had shown Macdonald; once the 1873 parliamentary session had ended, these papers were to be returned to Allan. Effectively, Allan was paying for the chance to destroy all the incriminating documents. Later, rumours circulated, but were never proven, that Macdonald and Allan had each agreed to destroy any revealing memos in their possession.
For Macdonald, this outcome was a considerable coup. Despite the drama and the unrelenting pressure, he had avoided admitting to a single misdeed. Nor had he made any new mistakes, cannily avoiding the temptation to try to bribe McMullen into silence, no doubt because he guessed that McMullen would only ask for additional payments. At the same time, Macdonald had ensured that the government remained completely detached from the negotiations between Allan and McMullen. Against all the odds, there was now a chance that the whole affair might remain a secret. After all, McMullen had to remain silent in order to collect his second cheque.
Two other possibilities did exist: either McMullen might receive a better offer for his papers from someone else, most obviously the Liberals, or other incriminating documents might emerge. Macdonald had surely figured out these possibilities. What he failed to anticipate was that both would become realities.
The first session of the Second Parliament of Canada opened on March 6, 1873, amid a day of bright blue skies. The Foot Guards were out in their full colours, and the Ottawa Field Artillery fired off a salute to Governor General Lord Dufferin as he arrived by state carriage to preside at his first opening of Parliament. While the spectacle scarcely matched those Dufferin had been accustomed to in his earlier postings in St. Petersburg, Rome and Paris, he still thought the weather “quite divine” and, after looking over the dignitaries, and their wives and daughters, admitted he was “rather surprised to see what a high bred and good looking company they formed.” Dufferin read the Throne Speech, which included the confident declaration that the railway company “has given assurance that this great work will be vigorously prosecuted,” and claimed that the favourable state of the money markets in England gave “every hope that satisfactory arrangements will be made for the required capital.”
It was all wishful thinking. Word of an impending scandal had begun to make Ottawa’s rounds, and the Globe showed it possessed some inside knowledge by describing the project as “financially the maddest and politically the most unpatriotic, that could be proposed.” No capital could be raised in London, or anywhere, until such suspicions were disposed of.
Three weeks later, Lucius Seth Huntington, a Montreal Liberal MP, gave notice that he intended to move a motion for a parliamentary committee to inquire into matters relating to the Canadian Pacific. For technical reasons, he had to wait until April 2. On that day, the galleries of the House and the corridors of the Parliament Buildings were crowded to overflowing.
The Liberals had selected the right person to make the accusation. Tall, handsome, a sonorous speaker, a one-time junior minister with a fair knowledge of railways, Huntington had an air of gravitas.* His actual speech was surprisingly short—just seven paragraphs—and contained not a scintilla of evidence to support any of his accusations. He claimed that Allan’s Canadian Pacific was secretly financed by Americans, that the government knew this was so, that Allan had made enormous election contributions to the Conservative Party, and that he had been offered the railway contract in exchange. Having made these devastating charges, Huntington sat down.
Macdonald remained expressionless throughout, occasionally playing with his pencil. When it was finished, he said not a word, waiting for the Speaker to call a vote. The motion was defeated by thirty-one votes, a larger margin than the government usually commanded.
Handsome, gifted with a sonorous voice and married to a rich wife, Lucius Huntington seemed set for a stellar career. He only ever made one mark: his accusations, in the Commons, of massive corruption by Macdonald, set off the Canadian Pacific Scandal. (photo credit 16.1)
Public interest had been stirred, but it couldn’t be sustained until some actual facts were made public. A week later, Macdonald proposed that the House form a five-member special committee to examine Huntington’s charges. He did this, as he told a supporter, because the government’s failure to respond had caused “a great uneasiness among our friends” by seeming to suggest it had something to hide.
Here was the first sign that Macdonald, as he seldom allowed to happen to him, was responding to events rather than getting ahead of them, defending rather than attacking, and seeming to be hanging back as if waiting for some event that would itself decide the outcome—almost as if accepting that the effect of this deus ex machina could as well be unfavourable to him as favourable. And he was drinking heavily. As Dufferin phrased it delicately to the colonial secretary, “For the last few days he has broken through his usual abstemious habits, and been compelled to resort to more stimulants than suit his peculiar temperament. It is really tragical to see so superior a man subject to such a purely physical infirmity, against which he struggles with desperate courage, until fairly prostrated and broken down.”
So began the long death struggle, which always was about Macdonald rather than about the Canadian Pacific. It could have only one of two possible conclusions: either Huntington, after failing to substantiate his accusations, would have to resign his seat; or Macdonald, having lost the confidence of a majority of the MPs, would have to step down as prime minister and retire ignominiously from public life. Even Allan seemed able at last to comprehend the seriousness of the situation. He wired Macdonald from London to say plaintively that Huntington’s accusation was “in all the papers and is very injurious to us. Could you not stop this?”
Most people assumed that the loser would be Huntington. So far, he had failed to produce one bit of evidence. He was also up against formidable opponents: Canada’s most skilled politician and its most successful businessman. Further, Macdonald could count on the governor general giving him the benefit of almost every doubt. Dufferin would later write to London that Huntington had “got hold of a mare’s nest,” and he told Macdonald that his position was “unassailable.”
Instead, the Canadian Pacific Scandal would soon completely dominate Canadian public life and become the single political subject talked about. In the meantime, two other events of consequence had taken place: Oliver Mowat, the ablest political opponent Macdonald would ever face, had just returned to the arena, and George-Étienne Cartier, his companion-in-arms since 1855, had left it.
Mowat was little known to the public, having been out of politics for almost a decade. That was about to change. He would go on to become premier of Ontario for twenty-three years, a record never since equalled, and, by perspicacity, determination and the deviousness of his dullness, he laid the foundation for modern Ontario. Macdonald thoroughly detested him, but in their increasingly fierce engagements it was the older man who most often emerged the loser.
Mowat had actually begun his career in Macdonald’s office as a junior law clerk. Later, he was recruited by George Brown into the Reform Party. He became a minister in the Great Coalition government that achieved Confederation, but left right after the Quebec Conference to take up the senior judicial post of vice-chancellor of Ontario’s Court of Chancery.*
Macdonald had appointed Mowat to the position, quite likely to rid himself of an able political opponent. When the chancellor died, Macdonald did not promote Mowat to the vacancy. If he had, he might have changed the course of Canada’s political and legal history. Instead, in 1872, Mowat became Ontario’s first Liberal premier. In the years ahead, he would take a string of constitutional cases to Britain’s Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and, by winning most of them, turn the highly centralized federation envisaged in the British North America Act into one of the most decentralized in the world. Macdonald never slackened in his nation-building, but even while he added to the country and filled it out, its fundamental character was being altered radically.
For the present, Macdonald and Mowat merely exchanged pleasantries—the political equivalent of boxers touching gloves before the start of a bout. Macdonald’s letter of welcome to Mowat on his ascent to the premiership began teasingly: “My feelings … are of a composite character … with all your political sins, you will impart a respectability to the local govt. which it much wanted.” He ended by saying he wished “that the relationship between the Dominion Government & that of Ontario will be pleasant” and saw no reason “why they should not be so.” Mowat replied blandly but with a hint of a sharp edge: the success of Confederation, he wrote, depended on “proper relations being maintained between the Dominion and the Local Governments as such, even when these are not in the hands of the same political party.”
Mowat’s return to politics as Ontario premier affected Macdonald immediately in one important respect. The day before the March 6 opening of Parliament, the Liberal MPs in Ottawa had at last made the long-delayed decision of choosing a leader. The Liberals had not had an official leader since Confederation, principally because everyone deferred to George Brown, even though he had no seat in the House of Commons. With the Pacific Scandal brewing, the prospect of power focused their minds. As leader, they chose Alexander Mackenzie, who until then had been, like Edward Blake, a member in both Toronto and Ottawa. Simultaneously, the Quebec rouges, led by Antoine-Aimé Dorion, at last joined the Liberal Party rather than merely maintaining an informal alliance with it. For the first time since 1867, Macdonald faced a single Liberal Party with a single leader.
Far more consequential to Macdonald at the time was the departure from the stage of George-Étienne Cartier. For almost two decades, Macdonald had called him his “sheet anchor” and his “second-self,” the ally without whom Confederation could never have happened and without whose bloc of bleu MPs he would not be prime minister.
When Cartier left Canada in September 1872, in the hope of curing his Bright’s disease, Macdonald knew that he would never return. Most of the time he was in London, Cartier lived at the Westminster Palace Hotel, later moving to an apartment. His mistress, Luce Cuvillier, crossed the Atlantic to be with him. His estranged wife, Hortense, followed with their two daughters, who took each parent out in turn for walks and carriage rides. His specialist, Dr. George Johnston, prescribed a diet of eggs and milk and a strict regime of “hot-air sweating,” in which the patient was covered with flannel blankets while hot air was pumped in underneath, all in the hope of reducing the inflammation in the kidneys.
Cartier and Macdonald wrote to each other constantly. Macdonald reported consistently good news and often remarked that some Canadian just back from London had told him how Cartier’s condition had improved, even though the visitor had said nothing of the kind. Cartier’s news was equally cheerful and inaccurate. He showed little awareness of what ailed him, and even less that it was incurable. “My illness must have originated in the cold I caught in December last on my way from Quebec to Ottawa,” he wrote, and, on another occasion, “I wish so much to be cured so as to be able to return to assist you.” By mid-May, Cartier’s condition had deteriorated to the point that his letter began, “I am so weak I cannot hold a pen.”
The end came quickly. On May 20, 1873, Cartier’s daughter Rose telegraphed the news to Macdonald. He opened the envelope in the Commons, read out its contents, stopped and said in a low voice, “I feel myself quite unable to say more at this moment.” Back in his seat, he stretched out an arm over Cartier’s empty desk and broke down in tears. The other daughter, Josephine, added details of the end: two days before his death, her father had “bade us to read even to minute details the contents of the Canadian newspapers, as if to surmise upon the doings of that Country he beloved, before undertaking his final journey.”
The funeral service was in the French Chapel in London’s Portman Square. Luce Cuvillier attended, but not Hortense. The body was put into a sealed coffin and placed on board the Allan liner Prussian. After a stop at Quebec City, the coffin was transferred to the government boat, Druid, which took it up the river to Montreal. The state funeral in the cathedral was preceded by a viewing at the Palais de Justice, where an estimated seventy thousand people passed by the casket. Cartier was buried in the Notre Dame des Neiges cemetery on Mount Royal. The funeral and burial service were hard on Macdonald: Dufferin reported home, “He was in a very bad way … indeed quite prostrate.”
Macdonald provided his best accounting of his relationship with Cartier long afterwards, at the unveiling of a statue of his friend on Parliament Hill in 1885. He said then of Cartier: “Brave as a lion, he was afraid of nothing.… I loved him when he was living; I regretted and wept for him when he died.” According to Joseph Pope, during their drive back from the funeral, Macdonald repeated that Cartier was “as bold as a lion,” adding, “But for him, confederation could not have carried.” The two musketeers were now just one.
Cartier’s near-to-last words, according to Josephine, had referred to the “good tidings” from Prince Edward Island, which had at last decided to join Confederation. Again, the decisive factor was a railway, only this time the line had already been built and the consequence was near bankruptcy, of both company and province. The terms of entering Confederation were readily agreed on, with two special provisions: Ottawa would provide an annual subsidy of $45,000 to enable the provincial government to buy up absentee landowners (most of them British) who were retarding the island’s agricultural development, and the federal government would commit to maintain “continuous communication … winter and summer” with the mainland. The union took place on Dominion Day, 1873. Dufferin attended the ceremonies in Charlottetown and recorded that most islanders were “under the impression that it is the Dominion that has been annexed to Prince Edward Island.”*
The five-member special committee Macdonald had proposed to look into Huntington’s accusations never got down to work, a victim of his tactic of delaying in the hope that good fortune might burst spontaneously from the inertia. He argued that the committee should begin by questioning the best-informed witnesses, Allan and Abbott. Since both were in England, he suggested that the committee postpone its work until July 2, when they would have returned. The committee’s Conservative majority agreed. A new opportunity for delay then presented itself. To get at the real truth, Macdonald suggested that the committee should be able to take evidence under oath. For technical reasons, the Canadian Parliament lacked that authority, so Westminster would have to give its consent. Time passed while British parliamentary experts considered the request. Finally, the answer came that granting a colonial parliament such authority would take a lot of time.
Macdonald now proposed replacing the committee with a Royal Commission, which would have an unquestioned right to compel witnesses to give testimony under oath. Edward Blake spotted what Macdonald was up to and protested forcefully that it would be quite improper for the government to set up a commission to inquire into “matters of charge against itself.” More time passed, with the accusations against Macdonald remaining just that—accusations, unsupported by any evidence. Steadily, public interest dwindled.
For Macdonald, this advance was offset by a setback. Allan’s mission to London to raise capital for the railway had ended in complete failure, with all of the major financial houses—Glyn’s, Baring’s, Rothschilds—refusing to have anything to do with the scheme. The reason, as John Rose reported to Macdonald, was the constant press reports of accusations of a vast scandal impending.
Suddenly, the first concrete evidence of what might have happened was made public. Its source was George McMullen, who was at last acting on the threats he had made to Macdonald during their meetings at the start of the year. On July 4, both the Toronto Globe and the Montreal Herald published an extensive selection of Allan’s private correspondence with his secret American backers—seventeen letters in all. Readers could learn about Allan’s list of prominent Canadians given free shares, many of them Conservative MPs; about his deal with Cartier and his massive disbursement of election funds to the Conservatives; and about his continuing reassurance to his American partners, long after he had committed to dissolving the relationship, that all would be well for their agreement. The Globe claimed that the mass of material showed that Macdonald had been “hopelessly involved in an infamous and corrupt conspiracy.”
Conservative newspapers promptly counterattacked, pointing out that the Globe and the Herald had deliberately failed to print two of Allan’s letters, of October 1872, in which he had finally broken off his negotiations with the Americans.
In fact, Macdonald’s name appeared only three times in the letters and in no instance was it in connection with any nefarious act. Faced with a specific accusation for the first time since Huntington made his general charges almost four months earlier, Macdonald responded specifically. He insisted that Allan write a long public letter to explain his behaviour. This affidavit, compiled by Abbott, was a masterpiece, interspersing spasms of self-justification amid confessions and admissions. He had contributed election funds, as everyone had the right to do, wrote Allan, but not in exchange for any government commitment other than of the presidency. He had maintained contact with his American backers because of commitments he had made to them, but he had broken away as soon as the government specifically directed him to do so. Most lamely, he argued that his letters had been “written in the confidence of private intercourse in the midst of many matters” and so had been written “with less care and circumspection than might have been bestowed on them had they been intended for publication.”
The Canadian Pacific Scandal began on July 18, 1873, when the Globe and two other papers printed records stolen from the office of Allan’s lawyer, among them Canada’s best-known telegram, sent by Macdonald during the 1872 election: “I must have another ten thousand.” (photo credit 16.2)
This artfully composed confession made Allan the principal villain in the public’s eyes, and for the first time Macdonald allowed himself the luxury of relief: Abbott “has made the old gentleman acknowledge on oath that his letters were untrue,” he wrote to Dufferin. To a friend, he wrote triumphantly, “The Huntington matter has ended in a fizzle, as I knew it would.” And from Dufferin came the sweet sound of support: “Nothing can be more satisfactory than the way in which your own position and that of your colleagues remains unassailed in the midst of all these disreputable proceedings.”*
In the summer of 1873, Macdonald retreated to a cottage in the resort of Rivière-du-Loup. According to some newspapers, he once stole away to attempt suicide, but in fact he only drank himself into insensibility. (photo credit 16.3)
The odds that Macdonald might survive were at least promising now. He felt free to leave Ottawa and holiday in his summer villa overlooking the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence near Rivière-du-Loup.
Two weeks later, there came a second eruption in the press—in the Globe, the Herald, and L’Événement in Quebec City. The Globe’s headline read, “The Pacific Scandal: Astounding Revelations.” Once again, the newspaper reports ran to multiple columns. McMullen gave a long recounting of his version of events, much of it familiar but with a few new revelations—such as that Hincks, the former finance minister, had asked Allan for fifty thousand dollars in election funds and for a job for his son in the company. Damningly, Asa Foster, a Conservative senator, declared that to his knowledge McMullen’s version of events was accurate and that “large sums of money were actually expended for election purposes under the arrangement.” Between them, McMullen and Foster created a clear impression of a government prepared to do just about anything to win the election.
The real damage was caused by what appeared farther down in the lengthy newspaper reports. There, for all Canadians to read in amazement and disbelief, was a series of short telegrams and memorandums. One telegram from Cartier to Abbott asked for “a further sum of twenty thousand dollars upon the same conditions as the amount written by me at the foot of my letter to Sir Hugh Allan of the 30th ult.” A memorandum from three members of the Conservative central committee confirmed, “Received from Sir Hugh Allan by the hands of J.J. Abbott twenty thousand dollars for General Election purposes.” By far the most damaging, because it carried Macdonald’s signature, was his August 26, 1872, telegram to Abbott—“I must have another ten thousand”—and Abbott’s affirmative reply.
In these the most desperate moments of Macdonald’s career, Alexander Campbell, the prime minister’s Mr. Fix-It, recognized immediately that the very survival of the government and Macdonald was now at stake. He insisted that Macdonald immediately set up a Royal Commission to investigate the matter, but with “safe” judges. Abbott came up with a list of names and, in addition, dictated a series of editorials in the Montreal Gazette making the best possible interpretations of the disclosures. Abbott also tried to figure out how all this material had got into the hands of Liberal editors. He concluded that George Norris, one of his confidential clerks, and Alfred Cooper, a junior clerk, had entered his own office at night and rifled his files. Norris had gone into hiding, but Abbott managed to persuade Cooper to sign an affidavit that the Liberals had paid Norris five thousand dollars to steal the material. Conservative newspapers had great fun pointing out that the virtuous Liberals had abetted a theft.
“It is one of those overwhelming misfortunes that they say every man must meet once in his life,” Macdonald wrote to Dufferin after this second round. For weeks now, he had been drinking heavily. On August 3, at Rivière-du-Loup, he broke.
Sometime early that Sunday morning, taking care not to wake Agnes, Macdonald stole quietly out of their house and disappeared. Where he went and what he did over the next two days, nobody knows for sure. The following day, the Montreal Witness carried a report that “yesterday afternoon Sir John attempted to commit suicide by jumping from the wharf in the water. He was rescued but now lies … in a precarious condition.” The Globe reprinted this report, adding that he might have suffered some misfortune “accidentally by bathing.” The best account of what may have happened was provided months later by Dufferin: “I could get neither an answer to my letter, even to my telegrams,” he wrote in a report to London. “No one—not even his wife—knew where he was. He had stolen away, as I subsequently heard, from his seaside villa and was lying perdu with a friend in the neighbourhood of Quebec.” The least credible account came from Macdonald in a telegram sent to friends and relatives after the suicide story had appeared. “It is an infamous falsehood,” he declared. “I was never better in my life.”*
In practical terms, Macdonald was far too drunk to carry out so demanding a task as killing himself. The likeliest explanation is that he crawled away from his family, like a wounded animal, in search of some place where no one could see his shame as he drank himself into oblivion.
On the third day, Macdonald emerged from hiding. Soon after, he took the train back to Ottawa. A reporter for Le Canadien who spotted him at the station in Montreal wrote that he “appeared in excellent health.” By then, though, Macdonald must have known that in the dark days ahead there could be but one likely outcome.
This period of some six months, from mid to late 1873, would be the most painful in all Macdonald’s political life. He was fighting not just to survive, but for the sake of his honour, his reputation, his place in history. It is somehow fitting that, as nation-builder, he should have accomplished one of the best of all his projects during this most difficult time.
During these months, Macdonald pulled off three nation-building projects: the entry of Prince Edward Island into Confederation as its seventh province; the creation of a new Department of the Interior responsible for western development and the vital land survey; and above all the North-West Mounted Police. With astonishing speed, the Mounted Police became highly regarded by all those they dealt with directly—the Plains Indians, the white settlers and the general public. They changed their name to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1920, and became one of Canada’s best-known and most respected institutions (if less so in recent years).* For decades, to people everywhere, the Mounties were Canada.
Macdonald was the Mounted Police’s father and godfather. The original idea was his; he played a major part in its design; he created it; and all his life he supported it unstintingly. Moreover, it was at his insistence that the NWMP was distinctively Canadian. Its purpose, as defined in the act that established it in 1873, was “the preservation of the peace, the prevention of crime.” Its objective was not to punish crime, although its members, as magistrates, possessed that authority and exercised it. It was, rather, to prevent crime from happening in the first place. The NWMP didn’t so much police the community as become part of it; each year its members would ride horseback over hundreds of miles, getting to know the settlers and the Indians, passing on gossip, weather information, medical advice, delivering and picking up mail or just chatting to the occupants of lonely homesteads.
Macdonald took his time making all this possible, and almost left it too late.* Had he delayed much longer, it’s likely that the Liberals, who originally opposed the force on the grounds of cost and later twice tried to abolish the NWMP, would never have set it up. His first description of the force he had in mind was in a letter at the end of 1869 to Captain D.R. Cameron, then accompanying William McDougall on his way to Red River, to whom he wrote “the best Force would be Mounted Riflemen, trained to act as cavalry … [and] styled Police.” He never altered that basic concept. He was also consistent about its purpose: it was to extinguish the liquor trade, by driving out the American traders who were then moving freely across the border, and to keep the peace between the Indians and the steadily increasing numbers of settlers. As he wrote in a letter in 1871, “With emigrants of all Nations flowing into that Country we are in constant danger of an Indian war.… This may be prevented only by an early organization of a mounted police.”
Not until late in 1872 did Macdonald act. He promised Alexander Morris, the lieutenant-governor of the North-West, that he would introduce enabling legislation the following year. He instructed his deputy minister, Hewitt Bernard, to draft a plan for the force and directed Colonel Robertson-Ross, the head of the militia, to compose a report to be submitted to Parliament.
When the legislation came before the Commons in March 1873 (the same month that Lucius Huntington first spoke out), Macdonald, introducing it as minister of justice, explained that the Mounted Police would be “somewhat similar to the Irish Mounted Constabulary … would use the hardy horse of the country, and by being police would be a civil force, each member of which would be a police constable, and therefore a preventive officer.” The bill provided for the engagement of three hundred men; all had to be fit, of good character, able to ride, and able to read and write either English or French.
In one respect, Macdonald got it wrong. In the debate, he said the uniform of the force should have “as little gold lace, fuss and feathers as possible.” Luckily, Morris, the man on the spot, got it right. He urged that the policemen “be red-coated—as 50 men in red coats are better than 100 in other colours.” The change was made, and thereafter everyone in the West knew these men were the Queen’s police and not blue-jacketed American cavalry.
The legislation was only enabling. Macdonald still delayed implementing it, rejecting Morris’s frantic requests for police to halt the liquor trade that was causing such devastation among the Indians. Then, in August, reports came east of a massacre of several dozen Assiniboine Indians by American traders from Montana. Macdonald approved a start on recruitment, followed by training in Toronto and Kingston, with the force going west the next spring. As his position became more precarious, he changed his mind. On September 24, he wrote to Dufferin, “We find it necessary that the force should be sent up before the close of navigation.… If anything went wrong, the blame would lay at our door.” Recruitment was undertaken hastily, and a young Irishman, Colonel George Arthur French, who had experience with the Irish Constabulary, was appointed commissioner. On November 1, the force, then of just 150 men, paraded for the first time outside Fort Garry, and the oath of office was administered to officers and men. Four days later, Macdonald was no longer prime minister.
Just before he went down, Macdonald created the North-West Mounted Police, the first-ever distinctly Canadian institution. Its first uniforms were of scarlet Norfolk jackets and pillbox hats. The bearded officer is F. J. Dickens, son of the famous novelist.
In his absence, the force did him proud. Its first venture, the legendary Great March, right across the prairies from Winnipeg to Fort Whoop-Up, a base for the liquor traders in present-day Alberta, was in fact a near disaster: the contingent lost its way and almost perished for lack of water. Yet the march became an instant epic, gaining the force a reputation for determination and high-mindedness that it retained for decades. In London, the Times praised the NWMP as “a corps d’élite.” Americans were awed by its laid-back effectiveness; the Fort Benton Record coined what would become the Mounted Police’s signature phrase, “They always get their man”—its original version being “They fetched their man every time.” The highest praise of all came from Blackfoot chief Crowfoot, who explained as his reason for signing a treaty in 1877, “The Mounted Police protected us as the feathers of the bird protect it from the frosts of winter.”
The NWMP was never perfect, but it was extraordinary. Because of it, law and order prevailed in Canada’s West, while below the border the gun ruled, wielded either by the army or by vigilante squads. Above the border, most of those hauled into the courts by the policemen were whites accused of crimes against Indians; below it, few whites were ever tried, because the all-white juries refused to find them guilty. The Mounted Police did all this with a few hundred men in an area half the size of Europe. Some of this success was circumstance: most of its first recruits came from Ontario and brought with them Upper Canadian deep respect for law and order and, more important, no ingrained hostility to Indians. But still, they did it.
The NWMP didn’t just help to build Canada by establishing peace, order and good government in an untamed frontier; rather, it actually helped to build Canada itself. It was in the West that Canada became most distinctive as a nation, developing in a way quite different from the U.S. West, although the two regions were identical and the border between them invisible. In the Canadian West, the prevailing order became community order first, individual interest second. It was the first realization of the “new nationality” that Macdonald’s government had once enunciated and then abandoned as impossible. More than a century would have to pass before Canadians came to realize that a “new nationality” could be political rather than ethnic, or one composed of values and attitudes rather than of race. Macdonald himself never had any such goal in mind, but in his pragmatic way he took the first step along that elongated, irregular path.
For the present, however, Macdonald had just one goal in his sights: to survive.
* During the Liberal government that followed, Huntington got involved in a railway scandal in which he, although a cabinet minister, joined a syndicate seeking to buy the Canadian Pacific charter. Other controversies followed, and his political career petered out. His one real accomplishment was to marry a well-off New Yorker and move to her house in that city.
* Strictly speaking, Ontario was still Canada West at that time.
* The pledge of “continuous communication” with the mainland was not fulfilled in its literal sense until 1997, when an eight-mile bridge was built across the Northumberland Strait. As far back as 1886, though, PEI Senator George Howlan formed a company to build a tunnel to the island, arguing that recent expansions of the London Underground and the Gotthard rail tunnel through the Swiss Alps showed this was possible.
* The principal sources for this material are Berton’s The National Dream and Creighton’s The Old Chieftain.
* Much of the material in this section is taken from the article “Sir John’s Lost Weekend” by Peter Black in The Beaver. Later, two Quebec historians wrote that Macdonald most likely spent the time in Lévis in a house rented by his cousin, a Mr. Young, from the poet Louis-Honoré Fréchette.
* The RCMP actually inherited its honorific of “Royal” from its predecessor, the NWMP, which gained the Royal status in 1904.
* One of the oddities of Canadian historiography is that this story, well known at the time, was later forgotten. Even Donald Creighton, in his two-volume biography published in the 1950s, makes no mention of Macdonald’s role and refers only briefly to the NWMP. The story remained virtually unknown until the publication in 1972 of S.W. Horall’s article “Sir John Macdonald and the Mounted Police Force for the Northwest Territories” in the Canadian Historical Review.