I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at this misrepresentation of Canadian history, particularly the disservice done to the history of the Mounted Police in the Yukon.

I'll leave it to Pierre Berton, noted historian, born and raised in Dawson City Yukon, and author of the definitive history of the Klondike gold rush, Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 to express my exasperation with this silly movie:

The American idea of an untamed frontier, subdued by individual heroes armed with six-guns, was continued in The Far Country, another story about a cowboy from the American west - Wyoming this time - driving his herd of beef cattle into gold country. The picture is a nightmare of geographical impossibilities, but the real incongruity is the major assumption on which the plot turns that there was only one mounted policeman in all of the Canadian Yukon at the time of the gold rush and that he could not deal with the lawlessness. When James Stewart and Walter Brennan reach the Yukon border with their cattle, the customs shack is empty.

"Where is the constable? asks Brennan.

"Up on the Pelly River. Trouble with the Chilkats," someone replies. He's got a real tough job, that constable. He patrols some ten or twenty thousand square miles. Sometimes he don't get home for two or three months at a time."

The historical truth is that the Yukon Territory during the gold rush was the closest thing to a police state British North America has ever seen. The Northwest Mounted Police was stationed in the territory in considerable numbers long before the Klondike strike. They controlled every route into the Yukon and they brooked no nonsense. They collected customs duties, often over the wails of the new arrivals, made arbitrary laws on the spot about river navigation, and turned men back if they didn't have enough supplies, or if they simply looked bad. In true Canadian fashion, they laid down moral laws for the community. In Dawson the Lord's Day Act was strictly observed; it was a crime punishable by a fine to cut your wood on Sunday; and plump young women were arrested for what the stern-faced police called "giving a risque performance in the theatre," generally nothing more than dancing suggestively on the stage in overly revealing tights.

In such a community, a gunbelt was unthinkable. One notorious bad man from Tombstone who tried to pack a weapon on his hip was personally disarmed by a young constable, who had just ejected him from a saloon for the heinous crime of talking too loudly. The bad man left like a lamb but protested when the policeman, upon discovering he was carrying a gun told him to hand it over. "No man has yet taken a gun away from me," said the American. "Well, I'm taking it", the constable said mildly and did so, without further resistance. So many revolvers were confiscated in Dawson that they were auctioned off by the police for as little as a dollar and purchased as souvenirs to keep on the mantelpiece.

In 1898, the big year of the stampede, there wasn't a serious crime let alone a murder in Dawson. The contrast with Skagway on the American side, which was a lawless town run by Soapy Smith, the Denver confidence man, was remarkable. But in The Far Country Dawson is seen as a community without any law, which a Soapy Smith character from Skagway he is called Gannon in the picture can easily control. (In real life, one of Smith's men who tried to cross the border had all his equipment confiscated and was frogmarched right back again by a mounted police sergeant).

{in the movie the lone Mountie says} "Yes I'm the law. I represent the law in the Yukon Territory. About fifty thousand square miles of it."

"Then why aren't there more of you?"

"Because yesterday this was a wilderness. We didn't expect you to pour in by the thousands. Now that you're here, we'll protect you."

"When?"

"There'll be a post established here in Dawson early in May."

"What happens between now and May? You going to be here to keep order?"

"Part of the time."

"What about the rest of the time?"

"Pick yourselves a good man. Swear him in. Have him act as marshal"

The movie Mountie leaves and does not appear again in the picture. His astonishing suggestion that an American town marshal, complete with tin star, be sworn in by a group of townspeople living under British jurisprudence is accepted. Naturally they want to make Jimmy Stewart the marshal; he clearly fits the part. But Stewart is playing the role of the Loner who looks after Number One and so another man is elected to get shot. And he does. Others get shot. Even Walter Brennan gets shot. Stewart finally comes to the reluctant conclusion that he must end all the shooting with some shooting of his own. He pins on the tin star and he and the bully, Gannon, blast away at each other in the inevitable western climax.

To anybody with a passing knowledge of the Canadian north, this bald re-telling of the story passes rational belief.

excerpt from Hollywood's Canada, by Pierre Berton, 1975.

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