Sam Steele's Forty Years in Canada: History or Fiction?

Sketch by Robert Baden Powell "Rider in the Mountains"

Between 1906 and 1914, Steele produced multiple drafts of the memoir. The initial drafts were in longhand, and, as he wrote and rewrote chapters, subsequent drafts were typed with handwritten corrections in the margins. The Forty Years in Canada manuscripts in the Steele Collection consist of seven to eight drafts that Steele worked on prior to the material being sent to Britain for publication as well as notes and materials that he and his editor started to compile for the second edition. Steele edited some of these drafts and had family members, including his daughter Flora, and friends like Pocock revise the work. Steele also asked former colleagues to confirm each other’s remembrances and look over sections of the manuscript. 

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Men working on the CPR line

In 1911, as Steele worked on the portion of his memoir concerning his time in the Rockies, he worried that he did not remember the events of March 1885 accurately so he asked colleagues and friends to send him their notes and reminiscences of the events. In the spring of that year, Steele was in charge of the detachment at Beaver Lake in the Rocky Mountains and had been sick with the flu or typhoid fever. Tensions had been running high amongst the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) workers building the transcontinental railway through the Rocky Mountains over lack of pay. On 25 March 1885, the tensions erupted in violence and protest, which would culminate in a standoff between the strikers and the NWMP.

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CPR train, c. 1885

Even when Steele had his own diaries from which to draw, it seems he did not necessarily feel as if he could rely on the sometimes sparse entries. He relied on his network to help him fill in the gaps so that he could provide a detailed account of the strike. It would become a key scene in the memoir because it had Steele utter a version of the iconic phrase “a Mountie always gets his man” and it showed Steele at his heroic best: standing against angry rioting CPR workers. Steele took great care to make sure his remembrances of the strike matched his colleagues’ accounts and to produce a manuscript that accurately captured his involvement in the building of the CPR line in 1885.