![]() Hollywood got into the mythmaking act, Walden says in an interview, to ease the existentialist angst Americans felt at the conquest and disappearance of their frontier. The Mountie as icon of all things chivalrous and civilized took shape soon after Parliament established the North-West Mounted Police in 1873, and 150 recruits galloped west to battle whiskey traders in the emerging provinces.Ī bigger job was also involved - imposing white, Anglo-Saxon, male-dominated culture on lands Indigenous people had long called home, and where a growing number of immigrants were settling, according to Trent University historian Keith Walden, author of the book, Visions of Order: The Canadian Mounties in Symbol and Myth. “Oh, goodness, it just kills me,” he says. ![]() Now, the tattered image eats at his insides. But he didn’t notice until he retired in 2004. The rose-coloured public view of the Mounties began to change at about the time Klatt first donned his uniform. Klatt was a pallbearer at two of the funerals. Klatt would nab his share of criminals during 30 years as a Mountie in Saskatchewan detachments, including an arrest right out of a Hollywood script: he burst his way into a house where an armed murderer was holed up.Īlong the way, six colleagues he worked with or knew well died while on duty, including two who were gunned down. “I’m sure the complainant was impressed with the amount of work I put into it - he had to be! But I was just devastated when I couldn’t solve it,” he adds with a chuckle. “I went house to house and interviewed everybody,” recalls Klatt, now a director on the board of the RCMP Heritage Centre in Regina. But the myth about Mounties always getting their man propelled Klatt like an officer possessed. It wasn’t much of a caper - someone’s fishing tackle box was stolen in the lakeside resort of Sandy Beach. Soon, Klatt faced the first crime he had to solve on his own. At that time we felt, gosh, we would have paid them to let us work.” “It wasn’t because you had to, it was because you loved it. “Every time this guy burped or sneezed I had a notation in my notebook. “I was on such a high,” Klatt says over the phone from his home in Regina. His first day on the job, in Fort Qu’Appelle, Sask., he stopped a man who had taken police on a high-speed car chase, and placed him under arrest in the backseat of his cruiser. He emerged from training, an imposing six-foot-four presence in uniform, bursting with pride. Mounty bank full#Klatt felt the full weight of the image when he joined the force in 1973, the centennial of its existence. By the 1950s, square-jawed Mounties in red serge and Stetsons were well established as symbols of Canada, an image fashioned by more than 250 English-language movies, and almost as many novels, largely portraying them as noble purveyors of law and order. “When you needed help they were always there,” says Klatt, who is now 68. ![]() Murray Klatt grew up on a farm in the Manitoba hamlet of Westbourne, a speck of a place along the Yellowhead Highway, northwest of Winnipeg.įarm life was hard and, most years, “there was no extra money for anything other than surviving.” But there was comfort in dependable things, like a close-knit family, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Woman impressed by a Mountie in Harwood Steele’s 1923 novel, Spirit of Iron. “You’re the first real man I ever met… brave, strong, chivalrous, with great, yes, great ideals - a fairy Prince, A Knight of the Round Table.” The myth: Clad in red serge and Stetsons, the dependable Mountie is an icon of all things chivalrous and civilized - and of course law and order. ![]()
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