Memorial to
Superintendent Sam Steele
Sam Steel's headstone is located in St. John's Cemetery Winnipeg.
As noted on the headstone, Steele was born Jan 05, 1851 and he died in 1919.
Everyone in the Force knows the name of Samuel Benfield Steele.
Authors David Cruise and Alison Griffiths provide details regarding
this famous Mountie's life and career. In The Great Adventure: How
the Mounties Conquered the West (1996), Cruise and Griffiths recount
the
following:
"At nineteen, Steel had been a member of Colonel Garnet Wolseley's
1870 expedition to the Red River to squash the Riel insurgents. By
1873, he had become a sergeant in the Kingston Artillery under Colonel
French...He came from a long line of British sailors and soldiers, all
of them officers and gentlemen..." Steele developed a reputation for
being a tough, no nonsense, competent police officer who gained the respect of his
peers. It helped that Steele "was a Herculean man with large appetites
and extraordinary strength." (p. 21)
At age twenty-two, Steele was promoted to the rank of sergeant-major
because of his skill with horses and his military experience. He was
also noted to have "a pensive, intellectual side to him" (p. 22) that
helped him in his leadership role.
Cruise and Griffiths further describe Steele as a man of boundless
energy: "He would drink heartily and kick up his heels with the best
of them, but be up the next morning long before dawn to break a string of
unruly mustangs, drill an entire division, shoot enough game to feed
them, discipline the ne'er-do-wells and finish off with a lengthy
report of the day's activities." (p. 22)
Steele was a remarkable man around whom stories grew large. He was
part of the wild of the Canadian West and part of the fabric of the
history of the North West Mounted Police.
Source: Cruise, D. & Griffiths, A. (1996). The Great Adventure: How the
Mounties Conquered the West. Toronto. Penguin Books.