Policing the Great Plains

Policing the Great Plains PDF

Author: Andrew R. Graybill

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0803260024

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In the late nineteenth century, the Texas Rangers and Canada?s North-West Mounted Police were formed to bring the resource-rich hinterlands at either end of the Great Plains under governmental control. Native and rural peoples often found themselves squarely in the path of this westward expansion and the law enforcement agents that led the way. Though separated by nearly two thousand miles, the Rangers and Mounties performed nearly identical functions, including subjugating Indigenous groups; dispossessing peoples of mixed ancestry; defending the property of big cattlemen; and policing industrial disputes. Yet the means by which the two forces achieved these ends sharply diverged;øwhile the Rangers often relied on violence, the Mounties usually exercised restraint, a fact that highlights some of the fundamental differences between the U.S. and Canadian Wests. Policing the Great Plains presents the first comparative history of the two most famous constabularies in the world.

Charcoal's World

Charcoal's World PDF

Author: Hugh Aylmer Dempsey

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1979-01-01

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780803265523

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Charcoal's World was bounded by the mountains, hills, and plains of southwestern Alberta. That was the homeland of his people, the Blood Indians, but Charcoal was not free to enjoy it as his ancestors had. For millennia, they had lived each day in the company of spirits, and even with the coming of the white man that much didønot change. Major Samuel Benfield Steele of the North West Mounted Police did not know about the Indian spirit world and would not have cared to learn. In 1896 when Charcoal killed a man and made attempts on others, Steele saw him as a common murderer and vowed to chase him down. The tale of Charcoal is well known among the Indians of southern Alberta. Their stories of his exploits agree in many ways with the official reports of the North West Mounted Police, but the two sources conflict in the reasons for the success of Charcoal and his eventual downfall. Hugh A. Dempsey has spent twenty-five years researching the material on Charcoal; he has studied the government records and spoken with the elders and historians of the Blood Reserve. The result is Charcoal's World, giving us the Indian side of this remarkable story of Indian-white confrontation.

The Vengeful Wife and Other Blackfoot Stories

The Vengeful Wife and Other Blackfoot Stories PDF

Author: Hugh A. Dempsey

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0806147946

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The Vengeful Wife and Other Blackfoot Stories by historian Hugh A. Dempsey presents tales from the Blackfoot tribe of the plains of northern Montana and southern Alberta. Drawn from Dempsey’s fifty years of interviewing tribal elders and sifting through archives, the stories are about warfare, hunting, ceremonies, sexuality, the supernatural, and captivity, and they reflect the Blackfoot worldview and beliefs. This remarkable compilation of oral history and accounts from government officials, travelers, and fur traders preserves stories dating from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. "The importance of oral history," Dempsey writes, "is reflected in the fact that the majority of these stories would never have survived had they not been preserved orally from generation to generation."

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