OF MOUNTIES & MADAMS
Explore close to home these facets of Canadian history from opposite sides of the law
Moose, mountains and Mounties: much as tourism operators have wished otherwise, it’s been the trifecta of Canadian travel clichés since this country first changed its focus from drawing homesteaders to luring holidaymakers.
That third pillar — the mounted policeman — sets Canada apart from its global peers. Who else has a cop as a standard-bearer for its hospitality industry?
For most of us, the Mounties are a largely invisible law enforcement agency, or simply the local constabulary. Horses and scarlet tunics? That’s mostly the stuff of citizenship ceremonies and postcards.
Here in Saskatchewan, the RCMP Heritage Centre in Regina aims to bring the “real stories of the red serge” to life, sating tourists who can’t get enough of the Dudley Do-right stereotype and restoring a sometimes scandal-tarred image for Canadians who are still fuming over last month’s speeding ticket.
Opened in 2007, the Arthur Erickson-designed centre with its swooping roofline puts visitors square in the saddle of Canadian history, charting the force from its beginnings as the North-west Mounted Police in 1873 through to its place as one of the world’s most revered law enforcement agencies.
Though its headquarters moved to Ottawa in 1920, the RCMP training academy — or “Depot” — remains in Regina where it provides six months of basic training to recruits. The heritage centre shares the grounds, and a highlight of admission is the sergeant-major’s parade as shiny-booted cadets are put through their paces.
With interactive displays, the museum tells not only the stories of how the national police force was founded, but how Canada’s image as a land of peace, order and good government was forged.
So much for the earnest stuff. Get the spine-tingling with famous crimes — the capture of “Mad Trapper” Albert Johnson was described as the O.J. Simpson trial of its time — and delve into the intricacies of forensics, or take a seat at the driving simulator to chase bad guys in a police cruiser.
Ride along with Sam Steele and learn the truth about the immortal phrase, “the Mounties always get their man.” Let’s just say it was more Hollywood script than hardcharging sergeant.
Not that Ottawa wasn’t seduced by stardust. The federal government sent out images of stalwart scarlet-clad police officers in immigration pamphlets and tourist bumf as early as the 1880s, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia.
Originally known as “Pile of Bones,” Regina grew up to the east of the police academy, near the present-day Wascana Lake, and its local merchants were said to have reaped the benefits of having a large population of armed constables nearby.
Wascana Centre, which incorporates the 120-hectare lake and its 14 kilometres of trails and parkland, contains the provincial legislative buildings and key attractions like the Royal Saskatchewan Museum and Mackenzie Art Gallery. It’s a charming oasis, especially after long hours driving through featureless prairie. Heritage walking tours are available.
While Regina was living a largely peaceable adolescence, its rowdy cousin down the road, Moose Jaw, most decidedly was not.
Call them Law and Disorder. Located about 65 kilometres west on the Trans-canada Highway, Moose Jaw cemented its “Little Chicago” reputation during Saskatchewan’s dry years (191624) and later during U.S. Prohibition (1920-33), when its alleged network of tunnels became a conduit for rum-running. It was said to
have been a bolthole for gangster Al Capone when it got too hot in the U.S.
With its wide streets and muscular architecture, it’s easy to see the comparisons between “the Jaw” and the Illinois hometown of Public Enemy No. 1.
But Moose Jaw’s dark side grew out of something more prosaic: the railways. With the CPR moving its divisional headquarters from Regina, and the Sault Line steaming up from the U.S., Moose Jaw became a centre for gambling, drunkenness and houses of “ill repute.” Police were dispatched constantly to end brawls between railroaders.
Reginans, lacking their own redlight district, took advantage of $1 round-trip train tickets to trawl Moose Jaw’s swinging River Street.
The police department of Moose Jaw, by its own historical account, was as much part of the problem as the solution. In the 1920s, authorities from the capital probed rumours that its officers were protecting bootleggers, and in 1924 the city was rattled when a massive theft ring perpetrated by Moose Jaw constables was uncovered.
Suits, dresses, overcoats and shoes had been pilfered from a number of stores, and several officers were arrested and later sentenced to hard labour.
“The clerk’s office at the police station at the time of the arrests resembled a dress goods store,” the Moose Jaw Police Service notes on its website.
Not to be outdone, police chief Walter Johnson “ruled the streets of the city with a baton in one hand and ill-begotten money in the other” between 1905 and 1927, writes Dave Yanko in the online magazine Virtual Saskatchewan.
As for Capone, no one can definitively place him in the city. But that hasn’t stopped a flourishing industry in all things gangster, with the Capone’s Hideaway motel downtown taking it to new heights with an elevated Roaring Twenties car advertising its rooms.
At the Tunnels of Moose Jaw tour company, customers relive the 1920s of “blind pigs,” speakeasies and fedoras on the Chicago Connection expedition, while the Moose Jaw Trolley Company ferries passengers past the city’s mural collection and its legendary but tamer River Street in a replica tram. It also lays on crime, murder and ghost-themed tours.
The tourism agency is in on the act, too. Tired of the bland “Friendly City” slogan, it has gone full violin case and rebadged Moose Jaw as “Canada’s Most Notorious City.”
As Jacki L’heureux-mason, of Tourism Moose Jaw, explained to the CBC: “Not all of our history was rosy and sun shiny, and that’s OK. We embrace that. We know that we have learned many things from those notorious moments.”