The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Prairie tales and Mountie legends
A century on, Canada’s celebrated Mounted Police are still the heroes of the wild northwest, finds David Williams
As tourist attractions go, the RCMP Academy, Depot Division in Regina, Saskatchewan, is an unusual one. The theatre lights dim and the film credits roll, and we’re soon watching a female Mountie cadet being doused in the face with pepper spray.
Gasping for breath, she heroically fights off her assailant. Next, young men are locked in a glass cabin, forced to exercise until breathless, and then drenched with riot gas. Choking, they’re only let out after answering a series of questions. “Working through the pain is what teaches cadets to focus,” intones the narrator.
I’m halfway through a road trip across the Canadian prairies, following the trail of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as they prepare to celebrate their centenary next year. Slickly edited, with a dashing soundtrack, Courage in Red is played to all “Depot” tourists visiting the RCMP Academy and reveals the legendarily tough training all cadets must undergo, showing that Mounties always get their man.
During this 1,300-mile (2,100km) tour of what is perhaps Canada’s second best-known image, its vast prairies, I discover that things have always been tough for the Mounties. The legend began in 1873 when the Canadian government – alarmed at the lawlessness of whiskey, bison and wolf traders and their corrupting influence on indigenous tribes across the newly acquired Northwest Territories – formed the North West Mounted Police.
Shortly afterwards, traders brutally slaughtered more than 20 members of the Assiniboine First Nation in the Cypress Hills Massacre. This spurred the need to establish order and in 1875, the Mounties were ordered to march 900 miles (1,448km) west across the prairies from Manitoba, enduring illness and hardship, finally stopping where the Bow and Elbow rivers meet – the heart of modern-day Calgary.
Today the timber fort they built is long gone, but in its place, by two swirling rivers where for millennia ancient tribes met, is a recreation of that remote outpost. Inside Fort Calgary, tour guides explain how the Mounties’ forerunners successfully introduced law and order, helping to lay the foundations for modern-day Canada.
It was from here that I launched my road trip. Unlike most departing Calgary, I journeyed east, away from the better-known glories of the Rockies. Often outshone by the west, the east of Calgary remains largely uncharted tourist territory, a land not only of endless prairies but also of industrial-scale agriculture and roads so long and so straight that you won’t turn the steering wheel for hours on end.
It’s a land of history, eerie rocky landscapes and visual drama. Shaped by the dinosaurs, glaciers, wild bison and indigenous people, and bursting with wolves, coyotes, moose, bears and eagles, the prairies are ripe for exploration, tamed by the mighty Trans-Canada Highway.
Calgary itself teems with great public art, green landscaping and grand new buildings including a dramatically styled library and “Studio Bell”: a striking five-floor edifice devoted to the history of Canadian music. The highlight is watching one man play a thunderous 32ft 1924 theatre organ that replicates 25 instruments, including drums, a glockenspiel and bird whistles.
The best way to explore Calgary’s regenerated RiverWalk and its old warehouses, home to hip new cafés and restaurants, is by guided Segway tour. When you’ve finally overdosed on glass, steel and concrete, escape to 127-acre Heritage Park Historical Village, a living history museum where disused buildings, including chapels, garages and schoolrooms, are sent to live out the rest of their lives.
A 1903 Mountie outpost relocated from Berry Creek, Alberta, reveals how constables lived back in the day. The log cabin is basic but has a stove (for fighting -20C/-4F temperatures) and shackles and guns (for fighting lawbreaking traders). Head downtown and up the 626ft-tall Calgary Tower to the observation deck, where you can gaze for miles across the prairies towards the mysterious east.
As you leave Calgary on the Trans-Canada Highway, your first prairie close-up delivers a knockout blow. Staring towards the distant horizon as you glide along is a little like being in freefall. It is only as you become accustomed to the vast “emptiness” that features begin to emerge: ranches and massive grain elevators (including antique wooden structures) puncture the skyline, while distant freight trains, 2.5 miles (4km) long, are mind-boggling as they criss-cross this immense landscape.
It is almost meditative as – tyres drumming on concrete – your mind homes in on the finer details: vintage tractors rusting at the side of fields; comely, dilapidated timber homesteads abandoned to nature; farms ringed with trees like oases in the desert. And, everywhere, pretty red-painted timber barns.
Driving is easy on Canada’s wellpaved highways and the traffic is light. Turning off to Drumheller and the Badlands – named by settlers for its hostile terrain – the landscape changes dramatically. Gone are the flat prairies. In their place are muddy rivers, deep A history of the Mounties