Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

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Famous People Column – An open Column for all writers

July 20, 2007

JERRY POTTS is dead, but his name will live

Hart Dowd

He was the kind of man you ignored at first glance.  Short, bowlegged, droopy moustache, fringed buckskins, black felt hat – the 34 year old, M?tis seemed to be just another buffalo hunter.  Only the smoldering dark eyes and unsmiling face suggested Jerry Potts might be better as a friend than an enemy.

For 22 years, from the September day in 1874 when the North West Mounted Police {NWMP} hired him, he was their friend, guide and mentor in the arts of following prairie trails and surviving in the wild Canadian West.  Time and again Potts helped the inexperienced Mounties out of tight spots.

The force was in a desperate state that autumn of 1874.  For 11 weeks the raw recruits had marched out from Manitoba, ordered to put down the illegal whiskey trade and bring law to the West.  The pitiless prairie had tortured them with hail, dust, searing heat and hordes of mosquitoes.  The men were ragged, exhausted, and sick with dysentery and typhoid.  Many of the horses and oxen were walking skeletons.  The Mounties were also thoroughly lost, having tried in vain to locate infamous Fort Whoop-Uo, in what is now Alberta, where unscrupulous traders were driving the Indians berserk with rotgut whiskey.

On or about September 18, the main party collapsed wearily in Montana’s Sweet Grass Hills near the international boundary, while Commissioner George A. French and a few others rode south to Fort Benton for help.  They met Potts at the fort’s trading post and hired him for $90 a month.

The first day on the trail together the police knew they’d struck a bargain.  Potts rode boldly ahead of the advance guard, and at noon found him sitting beside a fat buffalo, killed, dressed and ready for the cooking pot.  Next day he led them to the best fresh water they’d tasted in weeks.  Later, when an enormous herd of buffalo surged around them for hours on end, Potts ordered them to march slowly and to fire no guns, lest the animals stampede and trample them to death.

On October 9 he led Assistant Commissioner James F. Macleod to the gates of Whoop-Up.  Here the white traders swapped firewater for Indian trappers’ furs.  A typical recipe for this lethal stuff was “one quart whiskey, one pound chewing tobacco, a handful of red pepper, one bottle Jamaica ginger, and one quart molasses.  Dilute with water and heat.”  In the Canadian West of the day, a man’s life was worth a horse and a horse was worth a pint of whiskey.

Firewater had triggered the tragic Cypress Hills massacre of the previous year, when a band of drunken American wolf hunters slaughtered an equally drunken band of Assiniboines over some stolen horses.  Even before the ugly news reached Ottawa, the government had authorized the formation of the NVMP.  The massacre hastened the police presence in the West.

But on this October day, not a trader was left in Fort Whoop-Up – they’d fled at news of the Mounties approach.  Potts accordingly led the force about 30 kilometres west to a pleasant site on the Oldman river, where a post named after the assistant commissioner grew into today’s city of Fort Macleod.

Gradually the Mounties learned more about their remarkable guide, more from observation and local gossip than from his own reluctant words.  He was born about 1840 of a Blood Indian mother and a Scottish father who had been a clerk for a fur company on the Missouri River.  His Indian name was Kyi-yo-kosi, “Bear Child,” and he soon built a reputation as a warrior.  He was fluent in his mother’s tongue and he spoke enough other Indian languages to get him out of tight spots.  He also spoke English.

Potts was a total plainsman.  He read trails and could find his way through a blizzard or black night without map or compass; he could sniff out water at eight kilometres.  In dealing with Indians, Potts was deemed “a master of finesse.”  Potts had one very noticeable flaw: “He had an unquenchable thirst which a camel might have envied,” recalled a Mountie of the time.  If regular whiskey couldn’t be found, Potts drank Jamaica ginger, essence of lemon, Perry Davis’ painkiller, or even red ink.

All through those crucial formative years of the NVMP, Potts was on hand for events great and small.  But the old West was already dying, the buffalo were almost annihilated, and the railway was coming, with settlers behind.  By helping the Mounties tame the West; Potts had helped do away with the kind of life he loved.  Later in his life he stayed on at Fort Macleod, kept a ranch on a nearby reserve and helped train police scouts.  In the late 1880s, he married his fourth wife and left many descendants in the West.

Potts died in July 1896, probably of throat cancer.  He was buried in Fort Macleod’s Roman Catholic cemetery with full military honours.  The NWMP gathered to salute him as one of their own.  Three volleys were fired over his grave, and the trumpeter sounded the “general salute” after each volley.

“Jerry Potts is dead,” said the Fort Macleod Gazette, “but his name will live.”

Hartson S, Dowd

hsdowd@telus.net