Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875-1910

From the Author: "Whatever Webb made of the dusty, fire-damaged annual reports sent to him that fall from the RNWMP’s headquarters in Regina, Saskatchewan, he did not say; the Mounties do not receive even a passing mention in his in his sprawling 1935 study of the Texas state police. Maybe the prospect of extensive archival research in Canada (in the dead of winter) did not appeal to him; or perhaps Webb was simply conserving academic energy for his massive study of the Great Plains, which appeared in 1931. To be sure, in the years since the publication of Webb’s book on the Rangers, scholars of each constabulary have often noted the parallels between what Webb’s Canadian correspondent termed “similar organizations in other parts.” But such comparisons have usually been fleeting and superficial, merely reminding readers that the Rangers and Mounties are likely the two best-known police forces in the world.(1) -------------- Beyond this challenge to exceptionalism, a comparison of the Rangers and Mounties offers fresh perspectives on the Great Plains. Writers and Scholars have long confined their studies to either one side of the 49th parallel or the other, imposing intellectual parameters seemingly no less arbitrary than the international border itself. The very existence of these rural constabularies at opposite ends of the region, however, as well as the remarkable overlap between their missions emphasizes the transnational reach of the Great Plains. That the two forces policed nearly identical populations – including Indians, peoples of mixed ancestry, homesteaders, and industrial workers – reinforces the notion that Texas and the Canadian North-West were bound by conditions of ecology, economy, and demography that transcended North American political boundaries. Moreover, because the enforcement of international borders was so central to the work of each force, comparing such efforts by the Rangers and Mounties establishes that the Great Plains belong in any academic discussion of the “borderlands,” which for many decades has served as a sort of shorthand referring exclusively to the American Southwest. (2) ---------------- The convergence of the constabularies’ work frames the political objectives and economic imperatives shared by authorities in Austin and Ottawa at this moment, while illuminating police strategies for facilitating the absorption of the hinterlands. While the methods of the police may have diverged sharply – contrast the Rangers’ enthusiastic dispensation of violence with the relative restraint of the Mounties – the goals and the net results of their efforts were virtually indistinguishable. Beyond merely linking together the Rangers and the Mounties or the geographical extremes of the Great Plains, such a discovery serves to integrate the frontiers of North America into a global story of economic transformation in the industrial age. (4)"