E-mail A Friend Tell a friend about the information found on this page by sending them an e-mail.   Your Name: Your E-mail:   Type an e-mail address, then click add: Add a Personal Message: (Optional)

November/December 1999 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Cape Breton coal Whale-eating bears

Lucretia’s great-great-uncle Major James Walsh

Those first federal policemen to enter the West were on a mission to drive off the whisky traders operating near the American border, and to pave the way for settlement of the Prairies. The now legendary reputation of the Mounties as fearless, incorruptible men in impeccable scarlet tunics springs full-blown from their first few years in the West. Accounts of the march and life in the posts they established often sound like campfire stories — gripping but exaggerated.

Still, there were heroic individuals. Perhaps none more so than Major James Walsh, who commanded B Troop in the Wood Mountain area of what is now Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan. For a time, it was a refuge for more than 1,000 Sioux warriors and their families who were on the run from the U.S. Cavalry.

Some months ago, writer Lucretia Grindle, who is based in Concord, Massachusetts, called to offer us a feature story on Walsh. Grindle is Walsh’s great-great-niece, and in the early 1990s she had come into possession of family papers that opened a window on her uncle’s extraordinary life.

Walsh, the son of Irish immigrants, was the eldest of six brothers. He was born and raised in Prescott, Ont. He had one daughter, Cora, who married but never had children. One of his brothers had a son, Lewis Walsh, who studied medicine in Michigan. Upon graduation, he went west to Arizona.

Perhaps inspired by his uncle’s stories of the friendships he made with the Sioux, Lewis served as a doctor to the Apache and Navajo. He married and had children, including a daughter, Patricia, who was Lucretia Grindle’s mother. Patricia grew up in the 1920s next to an Apache village. When she finished school, she went east, working as an actress and dancer.

Lucretia Grindle, crossing Grasslands National Park

Patricia eventually left the circus and Lucretia grew up hearing stories about the Walsh family’s colourful past. One of those tales was about a fearless red-coated soldier and a famous Indian chief.

"I always knew my mom’s stories were true. They were vivid but there were no names or dates." After Patricia died in 1991, Lucretia inherited her mother’s papers. "I began to go through them and discovered that the red-coated soldier wasn’t actually a British soldier but a Mountie. James Walsh. And the Indian chief was the Sioux warrior Sitting Bull."

After piecing together the history, she sold a publisher on the idea of a book about Walsh. Research for it took her into archives across the Prairies. But at some point she felt she was missing "the spirit of the story." So she marked on a map all the places mentioned in Walsh’s letters and reports, and, in the summer of 1997, with a friend, a guide and five pack mules, undertook her own personal ride west.

"I wanted to locate the place where that first encounter took place between Walsh and Sitting Bull. I believe I found it. We started at Fort Walsh and ended up at the NWMP post at Wood Mountain. "

The Horse in the Moon, the book she wrote about her journey across the Prairies and into her family’s past, will be published by Viking next spring. In the meantime, we offer in this issue Lucretia Grindle’s account of Walsh and of the warrior who became his friend.

— Rick Boychuk

top