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The Mild West
The Myth of RCMP
From: National Dreams
$1.96
For a hundred years the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has occupied a special place in Canadian history and our imaginations. The story of how they drove out the American whiskey peddlers and pacified the West is familiar to every school child. Their frontier exploits have been romanticized in decades’ worth of movies, books, and television shows. Our identification with the Mountie reveals something basic about our understanding of our own history. The narrative of the Mountie subduing the fiery spirit of the Indian and making the West safe for settlement is one of our basic cultural myths.
Contributors
Daniel Frances
Daniel Francis is an historian and the author/editor of more than twenty books, including five for Arsenal Pulp Press: The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture , National Dreams: Myth, Memory and Canadian History, LD: Mayor Louis Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver (winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award), Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada's First War on Terror and Imagining Ourselves: Classics of Canadian Non-Fiction. His other books include A Road for Canada, Red Light Neon: A History of Vancouver's Sex Trade, Copying People: Photographing British Columbia First Nations 1860-1940, The Great Chase: A History of World Whaling, New Beginnings: A Social History of Canada, and the popular Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He is also a regular columnist in Geist magazine, and was shortlisted for Canada's History Pierre Berton Award in 2010. Daniel lives in North Vancouver, BC.
