RURAL POLICE 311 



Charles Dickens did valiant service with this force, and has left 

 behind him a book (as yet unpublished), "Seven Years Without 

 Beer! " 



Far back in the year 1670 another body of men dominated 

 Canada, the staunch Scottish servants and officers of the Ancient 

 and Honorable Hudson's Bay Company whose character-mark 

 for loyalty and fair dealing remains indelible on the early pages 

 of the history of this land. The charter which was granted to 

 them in the reign of Charles II had run for two hundred years 

 and expired in 1870, leaving all Canada west of the Great Lakes 

 in a condition of readjustment and unrest. 



Illicit whisky-dealers, horse-thieves, and smugglers poured 

 into Western Canada from the United States to the south over 

 the invisible and unguarded parallel of forty-nine degrees, and 

 Canadian Indians and Canadian interests needed protection. 

 This condition of affairs was the immediate cause of the forma- 

 tion of the R. N. W. M. P. in the early seventies, the launching 

 of the project and the forming of the force being the pet scheme 

 of the then premier, Sir John A. Macdonald. 



The 300 charter-members of the Mounted Police had their work 

 cut out for them in the early days on this far frontier where 

 cupidity and lawlessness reigned and no law of God or man had 

 previously been enforced north or south of this part of the inter- 

 national boundary line. The profit to the American "wolfers" 

 had been great and was measured not in dollars but largely in 

 buffalo-robes and sometimes in squaws. The traders from the 

 United States brought bad whisky and worse ammunition and 

 fire-arms to the Canadian Indians and for their own gain en- 

 couraged tribal wars and the stealing of horses. 



In the forty years of its existence the R. N. W. M. P. has closely 

 identified itself with the growing history of Western Canada, 

 being the greatest moral ally to every creative factor of the 

 country's growth. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



CORRECTIONAL AGRICULTURE 



Cooley, H. R. Correction Farm of Cleveland. Annals, 46 : 92-96, 



March, 1913. 

 Farm Colony: Our Experiment in Cleveland, Proceedings National 



