Bear Child: The Life and Times of Jerry Potts

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

The subject of this biography appears only sporadically in the first
half of the book, and even after Jerry Potts becomes a documented part
of Canadian history, the bulk of the narrative deals with other people.
We know little with scholarly certainty about the first decades of
Potts’s life, and even writing about his later years involves, the
author tells us, the challenge of “separating fact from legend.”
Potts, whose mother was a Blood Indian and whose father was a Scot,
became multilingual and moved easily between the white and Aboriginal
worlds. Author Rodger Touchie offers a wealth of information about the
bloody rivalries of the fur trade and about Native bands on both sides
of “The Medicine Line”—the border recently demarcated to separate
Canada from the United States.

Potts entered our history and folklore in 1874 at a fortuitous meeting
in Fort Benton, Montana, with the legendary Mountie James Macleod. The
horrors being precipitated by American whiskey traders in what is now
Alberta, and the Cypress Hills Massacre, which the author describes as
perhaps the “single major turning point in western Canadian
history,” had led Macdonald’s government to create the North West
Mounted Police, and the agonizing trek west of the first recruits is
well recounted here. That they survived their first years is largely due
to the skills of Jerry Potts, who acted as adviser, guide, tracker, and
hunter for the new force, earning more for his services than did most of
the policemen. He became a trusted translator and intermediary at
delicate negotiations with Native bands bloodied by violent encounters
with the U.S. Cavalry and often at war with one another.

Scholars will find nothing new here; most of the author’s sources are
secondary and many are memoirs, always a bit suspect when written long
after the fact. Still, if a few of the anecdotes are apocryphal, the
story of this extraordinary man and the men who first led the NWMP in
volatile and tumultuous times is an important one. Sidebars throughout
the book add detail about various places, persons, and policies, and
there are many contemporary illustrations and some helpful maps.