In the spring of 1885, it appeared that war was about to set the Canadian West aflame. Louis Riel had established a Metis provisional government at Batoche, and the Cree, led by war chief Wandering Spirit, had killed settlers, taken hostages and forced the capitulation of Fort Pitt. Among the forces marshalled to quell the unrest was an elite scouting unit of the Alberta Field Force, led by the charismatic Sam Steele of the North West Mounted Police. Aggressive, tenacious and supremely confident, Steele was a seasoned policeman who had earned a reputation for getting the job done. Composed of North West Mounted Police, ex-militiamen and savvy cowboys from Calgary, Steele’s Scouts relentlessly pursued the Cree warriors and their prisoners through the western Saskatchewan wilderness, acting as shock troops and often fighting at close quarters. The story of Sam Steele and his contingent is an unforgettable account of the campaign that marked the end of the Wild West on the Canadian prairies.

Sam Steele, “the man who tamed the Gold Rush,” had a high-profile public career, yet his private life has been closely protected. Sam Steele: A Biography follows Steele’s rise from farm boy in backwoods Ontario to the much-lauded Major General Sir Samuel Benfield Steele. Drawing on the vast Steele archive at the University of Alberta, this comprehensive biography vividly recounts some of the most significant events of the first fifty years of Canadian Confederation—including the founding of the North-West Mounted Police, the opening of the North through the Klondike, and Canada’s participation in the South African War—from the perspective of a policeman who became a military leader. Impeccably researched and accessibly written, Sam Steele is perfect for anyone interested in Canada’s early decades.

After a fatal encounter between Louis Riel's Metis rebels and the North West Mounted Police at Duck Lake in March 1885, the Canadian government mobilized forces in both Ontario and Alberta to suppress what became known as "The Northwest Rebellion." The western force was assembled in Calgary by Gunner Jingo Strange, a retired major general who readily knew the right man to lead an advance unit: Samuel Benfield Steele. He called them "Steele's Scouts." Steele's Scouts patrolled through bush and swamp, under the constant threat of ambush. They were vital to the furious battles near Frenchman Butte and Loon Lake, where the scouts alone fought the Cree warriors. Their actions contributed significantly to the defeat of Canada's last rebellion. Wayne Brown, a long-time admirer of Sam Steele, knows well the landscape and rebellion battle sites of the Northwest Rebellion and has followed the trails of Steele's Scouts. With each stage of Steele's journey, Brown gives detailed directions so that history buffs or the curious can visit these heritage sites.

A GLOBE AND MAIL BESTSELLER Had there been no Sam Steele, it has been observed, Hollywood would have had to invent him. Born into the comparative stability of the Victorian era's Pax Britannica, Steele lived to witness the postwar turmoil of the Lost Generation. From humble beginnings in what is now Bracebridge, Ontario, to his knighthood in England two years before his death in 1919, Steele's life epitomized the themes of personal adventure, service to crown and country, and the zeal for modernization and social order that characterized nineteenth-century Canada within the British Empire. Steele's long and storied career threaded through many pivotal moments in Canada’s settlement and development history: the Fenian raids, the expansion of law and order (on horseback and sporting red serge) across the North-West Territories, the exile of Sitting Bull into Canada, the construction of the national railway that welded together the nation, Riel's Rebellion, the Klondike Gold Rush and opening of the North, the Boer War, and the Canada's coming of age during the First World War.

Recounts the life of Edward Mallandaine, a teenaged railroad worker who appears in the photograph depicting the ceremonial laying of the last spike to mark the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in Craigellachie, British Columbia, in 1885.

Since 1977, people have asked Jane Hall over and over what it was like to have been among the first few female members of the RCMP, and, like so so many of her peers, she has avoided answering the questions. How could one sentence do the question justice? To truly tell the complete story, Hall needed to tell some of the good as well as some of the bad. Says Jane Hall: "It is time to break the silence; time to acknowledge our successes and our failures. Time to move forward."