When Samuel Benfield Steele became the third man to enlist in the North-West Mounted Police (N.W.M.P.) in 1873, he wrote, “Now I had the Great Lone Land before me where it is a man’s own fault if he fails while he has health and strength.” Steele, who had an abundance of both, became in time one of the most famous officers of the N.W.M.P., Colonel of Strathcona’s Horse in the Boer War, and Canada’s first major general in World War I.

Born in 1849 near Orillia, Ontario, Samuel was the fourth son of the second wife of Elmes Steele, who had been a captain in the Royal Navy before settling on crown lands in Ontario. As a youngster, Samuel learned to ride and “make gun powder and ball, using the heavy rifle or fowling piece as soon as we could carry them.” When the Fenians invaded Canada in 1866, he won a commission and, while working as a clerk in Clarksburg, raised and trained the Clarksburg Company of the 31st Regiment so effectively that he was asked to take command of it even though he was just 17.

In 1870 he joined General Wolseley’s Red River Expedition to Western Canada and demonstrated his amazing strength at a number of the portages by hoisting 300-pound barrels of flour onto his shoulders. He enlisted in Canada’s first permanent force in 1871 but left it to become sergeant major of the North-West Mounted Police.

For the next 24 years he served the N.W.M.P. in numerous capacities and at numerous forts. Steele helped form the first N.W.M.P. band – the men paid for their instruments – and it was enthusiastically received by the pageantry-loving peoples of the first nations when they attended ceremonies to sign Treaty No. 7 at Fort Carleton in 1876. He served at Fort Macleod and moved to Fort Walsh in 1878 at the arrival of Chief Sitting Bull and thousands of Sioux Indians following the defeat of Custer at Little Bighorn, Montana.

In 1882, while CPR construction crews crossed the Canadian prairies, Steele was in charge of a small force sent to maintain order. He dealt with strikes, gunslingers, bootleggers, barroom brawlers, card sharks, and prostitutes, sometimes using the back of a Red River wagon to serve as a courtroom bench. He meted out stiff penalties on those who fleeced the workers but was known to lock up drunks overnight to protect them from being robbed.

During the Riel Rebellion of 1885, he headed a group known as the Steele Scouts who eventually tracked down Chief Big Bear at Loon Lake, Saskatchewan, and, with just 40 men, attacked 500 Cree who refused to surrender. Later, he faced a different kind of confrontation when he and a newly appointed Commissioner tangled: Steele was shuffled off to Battleford and, later, Lethbridge. He also established Fort Steele in British Columbia. In January 1890 at Vaudreuil, Quebec, he married the daughter of a Conservative M.P.

Returning to Fort Macleod, Steele played host at musical soirees and other entertainments while carrying out his duties. He introduced the wearing of the Stetson, still worn today, to replace what had become a growing assortment of head gear that ranged from the original pillboxes to cowboy hats. He appeared to be quietly completing his career until retirement when the Klondike Gold Rush changed all that.

In 1894 the N.W.M.P., who had established small posts in the Yukon, were the first to alert the Canadian government to the strike at Bonanza Creek near Dawson City. Since the boundary line with Alaska was still in dispute, the N.W.M.P. were ordered to establish border posts at the peaks of both the White and Chilkoot passes. Log cabins were erected at the top of each pass to serve as a customhouse and officers’ quarters. Steele arrived in mid-February “to maintain order on the Canadian side of the trail of ’98.”
 

Born at Purbrook, near Orillia, in 1849, Sam Steele was a man of enormous strength and endurance. Highly decorated as this photograph of him in late life demonstrates, he was enlisted in the militia during the Fenian Raids of 1866, he was a private in the Red River Expedition of 1870, he served in the Riel Rebellion of 1885, he was Colonel of Strathcona’s Horse during the Boer War in South Africa and was a major general during World War I. [Photo, courtesy Western Canada Pictorial Index]

While disorder and violence ruled supreme at Skagway where “Soapy” Smith and his gang of hoodlums ran the town, Steele established his office at Lake Bennett and policed the camps as he saw fit. No guns were allowed. He ordered the registration of the hundreds of boats that had been built on the ice-bound lake and were awaiting spring breakup, and of every man, woman, and child sailing in them, a move that enabled him to identify the nearly 150 boats lost and five people drowned on the first day’s encounter with rapids on the Yukon River. Steele then made another law: boats had to be approved by one of his own corporals, “an experienced white water man,” and the police would provide a list of experienced pilots to take the boats through at $5 per vessel. Those not complying would be fined $100. No further boats were lost.

In July Steele became head of the N.W.M.P. for both Yukon and British Columbia with the military rank of colonel. That September he visited what he called a “city of chaos” – Dawson. Built on a muskeg swamp two years earlier, this boom city, mainly American in population, had become “home” for some 20,000 stampeders. Saloons, gambling dens, dance halls, and brothels operated freely, some run by members of Soapy Smith’s old gang after Smith was killed by vigilantes at Skagway in July.

Steele secured 70 army personnel serving at Fort Selkirk to act as guards at banks and perform routine duties while his own group of 13 men “policed” the community. Those arrested were forced to leave or fined or put to work collecting refuse, washing dishes, shovelling snow, or – the most dreaded sentence of all – cutting wood for the Mounted Police command post and other government buildings. “That wood pile was the talk of the town and kept 50 or more toughs of Dawson busy every day,” he wrote, calculating that the work of each prisoner “saved the government at least $5 a day.”

Steele, as chairman of the local Health Board and Licensing Commission, imposed heavy fees before he permitted the operation of a drinking place of any kind and used the funds to prop up the revenues of the territorial government. He let the gambling and the dance halls and even a red-light district operate so long as they abided by laws he established, one of which – Sunday closing – earned him a sort of affectionate respect in the community. “Big Sam was regarded as the stern paterfamilias of Dawson City, doing what was right for everybody,” a later biographer wrote.

Steele, however, ran afoul of some of his fellow Yukon Territory council members who were receiving kickbacks, accepting bribes, and “fixing” cases through political influence. When one man was recommended as “issuer of liquor licenses,” Steele, with the backing of Dawson’s influential citizens, had the appointment quashed and this resulted in Steele’s removal despite a public and press outcry. Protests were also expressed by the gamblers, dance hall girls, grizzled prospectors, ragtime piano players, and prostitutes who crowded the dock to give him, as the Yukon Sun reported, such a send-off “as no man has ever received from the Klondike gold seekers.”

Steele had barely reached Montreal where his wife and family had gone during his Yukon service when the Boer War broke out in October 1899. He helped recruit a regiment to be known as the Canadian Mounted Rifles and was then asked to form a special corps of roughly 500 mounted riflemen being sponsored by his old friend from CPR days, Donald Smith, now known as Lord Strathcona, High Commissioner to Great Britain. Steele’s first act was to name the unit Strathcona’s Horse and within days he had recruited a number of officers and NCOs from the N.W.M.P. and had selected 537 from almost 2,000 volunteers.

The men sailed in March 1900 and saw their first action on July 1. From then until October they were almost constantly in battle, winning the praise of General Sir Redvers Buller. “It will be my privilege ... to tell Lord Strathcona what a magnificent body of men bear his name.” Major General Robert Baden-Powell (future founder of the Boy Scouts) sought out Steele personally. Charged with organizing a police force to keep order after the war, Baden-Powell wanted to model it on the N.W.M.P. and asked Steele to command the South African constabulary in northern Transvaal.

Steele agreed but first returned home via England with Strathona’s Horse who were paraded on the grounds of Buckingham Palace where King Edward VII presented the regiment its battle colours, made the first presentation of the South African medal to each man, and pinned the Victorian Order on Steele. The press raved about “Fighting Sam” and he was fêted at numerous luncheons and dinners before returning home with the regiment in March 1901.

Recalled to South Africa to serve in the Transvaal, Steele settled in Pretoria with his wife and two children. Shortly after his arrival, his Klondike expertise was used again when gold was discovered in the Labata Hills, but many of his recommendations were ignored by the colonial officials and by 1906, the role of the force was reduced and Steele returned home.
 

This photograph, circa 1894, shows Sam Steele, second row, third from left, as Superintendent of the North-West Mounted Police at Fort Macleod, Alberta. [Photo, courtesy RCMP Collection, Ottawa/Western Canada Pictorial Index]

In 1914, he published his autobiography Forty Years in Canada, which sold even better in Britain than at home. Seven weeks after World War I was declared, Steele mobilized the western militia forces, thus enabling them to sail with the 1st Division. Promoted to major general in December – the first Canadian soldier to gain that rank  – he later headed the 2nd Division but British War Officials who felt division commanders should be staff college graduates refused to let him lead it into battle. He was then made commander of the British-run army camp at Shorncliffe until his retirement on July 1, 1918. Knighted on the recommendation of Britain rather than Canada, he was waiting to sail home with his family in January 1919 when he became the victim of the flu epidemic that swept Europe and died at Putney on January 30.

World War I chaplain, Major the Reverend C.W. Gordon, better known by his pen name Ralph Connor preached the memorial service. Steele’s body was eventually returned to Winnipeg, and, on the morning of his burial, it brought a temporary lull to the Winnipeg General Strike, as even the strikers bowed their heads while the cortege passed by in what was described as “the largest funeral western Canada had ever seen.”
Mel James