Keeping the Peace in a Frontier Town
The original Northwest Mounted Police Barracks was passionately researched and restored in the mid-1990s
Standing sentry at the entrance to Spring Creek on the southwest corner of Main Street and Spring Creek Drive is a small white building. Unassuming on the outside and rather spartan within, the building is one of the crown jewels in Canmore’s attempts to reclaim and preserve what remains of its history.
The original Northwest Mounted Police Barracks, passionately researched and restored in the mid-1990s by a volunteer committee of history buffs, is probably the oldest NWMP outpost still sitting on its original site in western Canada.Of profound historical significance, the single-storey log building was declared an official Alberta Provincial Historical Resource in 1990, just one year after its prudent acquisition by the Town of Canmore.
The story of the barracks is the story of Canmore’s coal-mining past and its role in the Herculean effort to punch a railway through this vast country from coast to coast. It is also largely the story of our national police force in western Canada.
In the 1890s, the NWMP – barely 20 years old – was tasked with maintaining frontier law and justice in the Northwest Territories and the Canadian Pacific Railway work camps as construction progressed across the prairies. When the CPR decided to establish a divisional point in Canmore for refuelling and switching locomotives, the NWMP put down roots as well, establishing a permanent post west of the CPR roundhouse and beside a creek that provided fresh running water through the winter. Today that little creek is known as Policeman Creek.
The 26 x 20’ structure was built in 1893 (about a decade after Canmore’s first coal mine opened in 1884) for roughly $400. This included the stable and outhouse and the steel fittings and wooden slats used to construct the 4 x 8’ jail cell inside.
In their early days, Canmore’s NWMP were kept busy searching the trains that stopped in Canmore for illegal liquor, ferreting out illegal stills and dealing with public drunkenness come payday. There were prohibitions against liquor in the Northwest Territories, but smugglers were ingenious and pullmen and porters usually easily bribed. Entire berths would be filled with kegs or rubber bags of whiskey, which were then dropped out of the train to waiting accomplices as it neared Banff.
The NWMP also enforced the laws against prostitution, rousted vagrants and hobos riding the rails, and responded to calls from mine management to put down any labour unrest and keep an eye on malcontents.
A large number of officers rotated through the Canmore detachment in its first 25 years, but by 1918 the man most closely associated with the town’s early police force – Const. H. C. Clarke – took up residence in the barracks with his wife Dora and five young children. They stayed until 1930, when the barracks began its 50-year life as a private residence.
Canmore’s old-timers still remember the colourful flowers Dora Clarke set out on the front porch in summer and the musical and athletic talents of the children. Dora’s prowess as a cook was renowned, and the drunks and vagrants housed in the cells were often treated to her home cooking.
Now operating under the auspices of the Canmore Centennial Museum, the barracks are open to the public, with a small gift shop and tearoom manned by volunteers on weekends through the winter and every day throughout the summer. Inside, visitors will find period furniture and decorations, historical photographs and carefully preserved evidence of the extensive archival and archaeological investigation undertaken during its preservation.
