Steele's Scouts: Samuel Benfield Steele and the North-West Rebellion

David W. Leonard is the project historian (Northern Alberta) in the
Historic Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development. He
is the author of Delayed Frontier: The Peace River Country to 1909 and
co-author of The Lure of the Peace River Coun

As hostilities on the western plains led to the outbreak of the
North-West Rebellion in 1885, the Dominion government responded by
mobilizing a military force of 8000 men under General Frederick
Middleton. While Middleton himself marched on the Métis stronghold of
Batoche, a second column under Colonel William Otter headed for
Battleford. In the meantime, a third force—the Alberta Field Force
under Thomas Bland Strange—was sent to reassure citizens around
Calgary and Edmonton and then head north and east to capture the
perpetrators of the Frog Lake massacre. Much of the Field Force was
raised locally; at the head of its advanced scouting party, Strange
placed Sam Steele, a veteran officer of the North-West Mounted Police.

On the back cover of this book, the author is described as “a
long-time admirer of Sam Steele” who has “worked near and knows well
the landscape and rebellion battle sites.” As a result, Brown is able
to calculate, with some imagination, the minute-by-minute sequence of
activities. For the most part, however, his book is a folksy retelling
of a previously written tale. In addition, Brown makes historical
generalizations that stretch the truth, as, for example, when he
contends, “Canada’s first major industry—the fur trade—evolved
through the actions of two rival companies”; in fact, the fur trade
had evolved long before the North West Company was conceived.

The actions of Steele and his scouts during the rebellion have been the
subject of several studies, the most engaging and accurate account being
Steele’s own autobiography, Forty Years in Canada (1929), which
actually forms much of the substance of Steele’s Scouts. In the latter
book, no original sources are cited (aside from Forty Years in Canada),
and what few citations of published works there are do not indicate page
numbers.