When the North-West Mounted Police was first organized in Ottawa, Canada, in September 1873, its authorized strength was barely 300 troopers. Its assignment was to uphold Canadian law over 300,000 miles of Western wilderness populated by discontented Indians and sometimes visited by whiskey traders and desperadoes on the run from the United States.

Given the long, violent history of lawlessness in the American West, the idea of so small a force as the North-West Mounted Police (or NWMP) maintaining the Queen's law in the vast reaches of the Canadian frontier seemed ludicrous — and downright suicidal. By the early 1880s, however, the Mounties, as they soon came to be called, had established an authority over the vast area. Potential lawbreakers and renegades feared them. Indians trusted them to uphold justice.

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Few law enforcement agencies in history accomplished so much with so few men — or with so little violence — as the NWMP. Although far from being superhuman, the Mounties did carry out their duties in their own way, relying as much on persuasion and a purposeful presence as they did on brute force. In consequence, more often than not brute force was not needed to drive a whiskey peddling operation out of the territory, dissuade a hotheaded Indian band from taking the warpath, or convince a felon to give himself up.

Human they may have been — 'and oftentimes worse,' as one veteran retrospectively put it — but the Mounties could not have succeeded without an ample sprinkling of exceptional characters in their ranks. A most remarkable and legendary figure of the NWMP's critical early years was a man whose very name sounded as if it had been made up by a dime novelist: Inspector Sam Steele.

Samuel Benfield Steele was born on January 5, 1851, at Purbrook, near Orillia, Upper Canada (later Ontario), the son of Royal Navy Captain Elmes Steele and Anne Macdonald. Men of action had run through the Steele clan like water down Niagara Falls — young Sam's predecessors had fought on the Plains of Abraham before Quebec in 1759, at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and at Waterloo in 1815.

It was none too astonishing, then, that a fair-haired, slender 15-year-old Sam Steele would enlist in the Canadian militia in 1866, as an ensign in the 35th (Simcoe Foresters) Battalion of Infantry. His unit participated in the defense of Canada against the Fenian raids of that year. After Canada became an independent member of the British Commonwealth, he joined the 1st Ontario Battalion of Rifles on May 1, 1870, to serve in the Red River Expedition to retake Fort Garry from rebellious Métis (Franco-Indian mixed bloods) under Louis David Riel. In 1871, Steele was one of the first to enlist in the newly formed A Battery, Royal Canadian Artillery, the first unit of the new Canadian Permanent Force.

In 1873, Steele left the army to join the newly organized North-West Mounted Police as a staff constable. The commanding officer of the paramilitary body was called 'commissioner,' and the command was divided into troops. Steele was still only 22, and so wiry that he wore a sash under his jacket to add some manly bulk to his appearance, but he already had a solid military record under his belt.

Steele's A Troop, along with B and C troops, was rushed off by steamer from Toronto through the Great Lakes, and then marched 450 miles farther west to Lower Fort Garry (20 miles downriver from Winnipeg), where their personnel were sworn in on November 3, 1873. At that point, Commissioner George Arthur French learned to his dismay that most of his recruits had only claimed to be good riders. He assigned Steele to teach them horsemanship.

Train them Steele did, driving them hard throughout the winter and often picking them up, bruised and bloody, from falls on the frozen ground. Steele's remedy for the frequent complaints of saddle sores was to issue salt to rub into the injured party's wounds to form calluses. Eventually, one recruit wrote, 'We became so tough I could sit on a prickly pear.'

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