Forty Years in Canada : Reminiscences of the Great North-West With Some Account of His Service in South Africa

An Ex-library copy. Hardcover, 428 pages, 5.5x8.5 in - 14x21.5 cm, B&W plates.

Covers soiled, rubbed at corners. Spine faded, chipped and bumped with tear at head and closed tear at heel. Backing material separating from gatherings. Edges age-tanned, large tidelines on top and fore edges. Endpapers, title page, and frontispiece recto foxed, moderate tidelines on frontispiece. Front endpapers ghosted from library stickers. Very small tear in front hinge. Gutters cracked in many places. Pages age-tanned.

In this volume, Colonel Samuel Benfield Steele (better known as Sam Steele) recounts his career as a member of the North-West Mounted Police and a commanding officer of Lord Strathcona’s Horse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Steele’s early stories are a veritable who’s-who of Indigenous-settler conflicts in the late 1800s, including figures such as Gabriel Dumont and Sitting Bull. His accounts of life on the Great Plains and – later – in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush range from collecting customs taxes from gold miners to chasing wanted men to describing initiation rituals amongst First Nations groups. Although they form the briefest part of the narrative, Steele’s stories of the Boer War match the rest of the volume in excitement. Throughout, he offers historical context and explanatory details. Peel(3) 4077.