Best Mounted Police Stories

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

The 18 Mountie stories in this anthology have been culled from a variety
of publications and span over a century’s worth of writing. The
authors include Rudy Wiebe, Charles Gordon (Ralph Connor), G.B.
Lancaster (a popular Victorian adventure writer who was actually a woman
writing under a pseudonym), and John Mackie (an English snob who, like
many English gentlemen in the late 19th century, enlisted in the North
West Mounted Police in search of adventure). The stories range in tone
from Victorian jingoism to traditional American western. Some stories
are representative of their era, in that they are openly racist against
First Nations people, although a few, usually written by people with
actual frontier experience, present a surprisingly compassionate view of
the Métis and the Plains Indians.

Editor Dick Harrison, a professor of English at the University of
Alberta, chose these stories to examine the myth of the Mountie. To give
an additional focus to the collection, he separated the Mountie story
into three separate genres: the British Mountie, the American Mountie
and the Canadian Mountie. Only two modern stories are included, and they
focus on the post-Mountie; the romantic uniform and the possibility of
heroic exploits have been replaced by grey polyester and the daily
tedium of rural police work. A renown anthologist of prairie literature,
Har-rison has also chosen to ignore the RCMP’s presence in the
Maritimes. This is not a flaw as much as an opportunity for a very
welcome sequel.