The Canadian Mounties, originally called the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP), were less than 3 years old when Sitting Bull’s Sioux killed or wounded more than half of Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer’s 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment near Montana Territory’s Little Bighorn River on June 25, 1876. Sitting Bull had not played a significant role in the actual fighting–it was not his place to fight like one of the young braves, and chiefs did not direct the movements of warriors–but the defiant Hunkpapa chief was well-known as a wise and powerful leader who wanted to be free to roam and hunt buffalo. By the following summer, Sitting Bull was lodged in Canada, where the scarlet-clad lawmen would have a close and occasionally dangerous association with him for about four years.

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On May 7, 1877, some 11 months after Custer’s bloody disaster, 34-year-old NWMP Major James M. Walsh, a sergeant and three troopers followed an Indian trail to the dun-colored hills and ravines of Pinto Horse Butte, some 280 miles north of the Little Bighorn. The trail led up from the Montana border, about 50 miles to the south. A good-sized band had passed over this ground. The Indians had crossed into Canada’s North-West Territories close to where the White Mud–or Frenchman’s–River flowed down into Montana. According to Walsh’s two Métis (mixed-blood) scouts, this was Sitting Bull’s trail. If so, the NWMP, especially the 90-odd men Walsh commanded at Fort Walsh, would have no small task preserving law and order in the border country south and east of the Cypress Hills, in what would become the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Even before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Walsh and the other Mounties had realized that the U.S. military operations against the Sioux and Cheyenne were likely to drive hostile Indians north across the border. It had only been a matter of time before Sitting Bull and his followers crossed into Canada. Still, it was one thing to expect their arrival but another to actually deal with them.

Around noon on the 7th, Walsh’s scouts spotted mounted Indians sitting motionless on hilltops, watching them–a sign that an Indian camp was nearby. As they rode on, they saw more and more Indians on the hills, until the small patrol was surrounded. None of the Indians, however, made any attempt to stop the scouts.

Moments later, Walsh and his men rounded a hill to find a large camp spread before them. Reining in, they sat in their saddles while a group of Indians rode toward them. Spotted Eagle, war chief of the Sans Arc Sioux, told them they were the first white men to dare approach Sitting Bull’s camp so unconcernedly. Walsh asked to meet Sitting Bull. Shortly, the Hunkpapa chief, at the head of a retinue of lesser chiefs, approached.

Walsh studied the chief, who was in his 40s (his exact birthdate in the 1830s is not certain), about 5 feet 10, with a muscular build. He had alert, crowlike eyes, a broad, pockmarked face, a prominent, hooked nose and a firm mouth; two long black braids hung down over his shoulders. He was bowlegged and walked with a limp.

Sitting Bull must have been just as curious about Walsh and his Mounties. Walsh, almost as tall as Sitting Bull, held himself straight as a lance. Wiry as a mountain lion, he had intense brown eyes set in a weathered face, a full mustache, whiskers below his bottom lip and wavy brown hair beneath a blue and gold cap.

Walsh and Sitting Bull shook hands. At first Sitting Bull treated the redcoats with cautious reserve, but he gradually warmed up to them. They all retired to the camp and sat down for a conference that lasted the remainder of the day. Walsh asked them why they had come to the White Mother’s (Queen Victoria’s) country. To find peace, they replied. The Sioux claimed they had suffered greatly at the hands of the blue-clad Long Knives, that they had been fighting on the defensive for years. They hoped the White Mother, or Grandmother (the term preferred by the Sioux), would give them sanctuary in her land. Spotted Eagle said they had been forced to cross the medicine line (the border–the Sioux also called it ‘the big road’) to protect their women and children from the Long Knives. John Peter Turner, historian for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (that name didn’t come until 1920), wrote in Volume 1 of The North-West Mounted Police 1873­1893: ‘Sitting Bull said, in effect, ‘Yesterday I was fleeing from white men, cursing them as I went. Today they erect their lodges by the side of mine and defy me. The White Forehead Chief (Walsh) walks to my lodge alone and unarmed. He gives me the hand of peace. Have I fallen? Am I at the end?”

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