Year: 1961
Language: English
Runtime: 28 min
Director: Colin Low
Producer: Wolf Koenig, Roman Kroitor
Executive Producer: Tom Daly
Writer: Stanley Jackson
Cinematographer: John Spotton, Roy Nolan, Jim Wilson
Editor: John Spotton
Sound: George Croll, Marcel Carrière
Music: Don Douglas
Production Company: National Film Board of Canada

This rousing historical account of an early triumph of the North West Mounted Police is brought to life by imaginative use of rare vintage photographs and artists’ sketches that vividly recall the days of the “whisky gap,” when American whisky traders were victimizing the First Nations people of the Canadian West in the eighteen-seventies. In 1874 – one year after being established to maintain law and order in the geographically vast and newly acquired North-West Territories – the North West Mounted Police trekked eight hundred miles from Fort Dufferin, south of Winnipeg, to Fort Whoopup, near present-day Lethbridge, to signify that the Canadian West would not become a lawless American-style frontier.

By: Andrew McIntosh