“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

Heroes are a precious commodity. They give pride and meaning to any community and they help a community to bond in a positive way.

Cranbrook has had a hero for several generations, a hero who has affected us in many beneficial ways. But now that hero has sadly been taken away

I’m talking about Sam Steele, of course, and the recent decision by the Sam Steele Society to take our hero away. Not literally, of course, but surreptitiously before anyone outside their organization could say no.

So what are the facts? Major General Sir Samuel Benfield Steele was born in 1849 and died in glory Jan. 30, 1919, after a stellar career as a policeman, a soldier and a humanitarian in Canada, Great Britain, South Africa and right here in Canada.

The Canadian Encyclopedia describes Steele as “one of the most important builders of Canada as it expanded from coast to coast in the first half century after Confederation.”

Can you think of any other person associated with Cranbrook described like this? Not likely. Yet the local Sam Steele Society wants to purge him from the collective consciousness of our fine city. Talk about irony. Talk about insolence. Talk about an indignity. Surely this was a rash decision. If it wasn’t, it was the wrong decision.

I don’t doubt the decision was made in good faith. We all want the best for our city and see it grow and prosper. But taking away the name Sam Steele from “Sam Steele Days,” a highly entertaining and significant festival for more than 50 years, is not the way to do it.

Key City residents have been looking forward to the event for over half a century. It’s our gateway from spring to summer. A chance to let one’s hair down a bit and celebrate a local hero and the beauty of our community and our people. It’s a unique part of Cranbrook’s culture. Why would we throw it away?

So just how unique was Sam Steele? Plenty. And given the zeitgeist we’re living in now Steele’s uniqueness stands out both in Canadian history and the history of the British Empire.

Let’s be honest. At the time Steele and his men strode the grassy benches of the Rocky Mountain Trench, colonialism was at its height and prejudice against Indigenous non-colonials was at its height as well. Small wonder because the colonialists were taking away the aboriginals’ land they had occupied for almost ten thousand years.

Just a little south of Cranbrook, the United States of America was flexing its mighty muscles under the clarion call of Manifest Destiny, which in plain words, meant they already had taken over most of the North America and they wanted the rest of it too.

The Kootenays at the time were mainly occupied by the Ktunaxa people who greatly feared their traditional lands were about to be gobbled up by menacing gangs of  Canadian, British and American prospectors crazy for gold. One of these prospectors, an American, was murdered in mysterious circumstances south of Cranbrook, or Galbraith’s Ferry as it was then known, and the authorities of the day arrested and jailed a Ktunaxa man whose prospects for life there after didn’t look good. This resulted in what came became known as the “Kootenay Uprising” with a band of Ktunaxa warriors under the leadership of Chief Isadore breaking into the jail at Fisherville and spiriting the native prisoner away.

The event panicked government authorities in Victoria and Ottawa who were eager at all costs to avoid another “Indian War” like the many that had taken place for generations in the US. They needed a forthright man of courage and temperance to deal with the situation before the bush fire of Ktunaxa anger became a raging inferno.

This is where the resolute, pre-Mountie Sam Steele enters the scene and with 75 troopers on horseback marches clear across British Columbia, mostly a treacherous wilderness in those days, and confronts Chief Isadore about breaking the accused native murderer out of jail. He orders a trial and decides the evidence against the Ktunaxa accused was “skimpy and inconclusive” and orders his release.

This pleased Chief Isadore so much that by the time Steele and his men left Fort Steele “Chief Isadore and most of the settlement, both Indians and whites, considered them friends and watched them go with deep regret,” said local  historians Edna H. Hanic and David Scott in their book East Kootenay Saga.

So there’s the story. It would make a great Hollywood movie and it would be about a heroic policeman who came to what would become Cranbrook and showed that not all so-called “colonialists” were villains.

Why would we want to throw that story into the dumpster when we’ve been celebrating it for more than 50 years?

e-KNOW file photo

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist who likes to keep the story straight.

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