Under their various names the Mounted Police have played a vital,colourful, but often controversial role in Canadian history, andnowhere has this been truer than on the northern frontier. The policewere the agents through which the central government assertedsovereignty over the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, just as ithad done earlier on the Prairies.
This book describes to what extent the RCMP shaped the northernfrontier -- a frontier which steadily shifted, separating territoryunder actual government control from that in which it was nominal. Thechapters treat each new spurt in this expansion and the period ofcontact and transition which followed.
As agents of the government the police imposed on the Canadian Northa system largely alien to it which was designed not to express theaspirations of the north but to regulate and control it. Through theenforcement of laws and in other public services the RCMP demonstratedthat the land and its people including the Indians and Inuit, belongedto Canada. This political nature of the force was of the highestimportance. In assessing their performance of often harsh and dangerousduties, Morrison refers to them as “group heroes” in the“Canadian tradition of collective heroism.”
In view of the current concern over Canada’s sovereignty in thePolar Seas, this book is a timely explanation of how the territory wasoriginally brought into the orbit of Canadian control in what wasthought to be the final chapter in Canada’s “manifestdestiny.”
