Jerry Potts
[INTRO]
No era in United States history has captured the imagination of generations more than the Wild West.
From movies to television to books, it’s well documented in pop culture, and by extension, heavily fictionalized.
When you think of legendary figures from that era, you probably think of Wyatt Earp, Jesse James or Billy the Kid.
But there were a lot more Black and Mexican cowboys than John Wayne movies will have you believe.
And what if I told you that nothing compared to the story of a Canadian man born to an Indigenous mother and Scottish father who rose above adversity to become a legendary figure of the Canadian West.
And without him, the early North West Mounted Police may have never survived to become the RCMP.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today we are putting on our best cowboy hat and boots, hopping on a horse and riding off into the sunset to share the life and times of a man criminals feared because he hunted those who wronged him with the singular focus, commitment and sheer will of John Wick.
This is the story of Jerry Potts!
Just to the south of the 49th parallel in Fort McKenzie, Montana.
, a trading post built by Kenneth McKenzie for the American Fur Company in 1832 is where our story begins.
Roughly eight years after the fort opened, a baby named Ky-yo-kosi, meaning Bear Child, was born.
His mother was a Kanai-Cree woman named Namo-pisi, or Crooked Back, and his father was Andrew R. Potts, a Scottish fur trader. described as quiet, well-liked and well-meaning.
Ky-yo-kosi would go by Jerry Potts for much of his life.
As the child of European and Indigenous cultures, Potts was a member of a growing nation that today we call, the Metis.
Jerry Potts’ life got off to a difficult start almost immediately.
In 1840, when he was still a baby, an Indigenous man named One White Eye was thrown out of Fort McKenzie by a French-Canadian trader named Mercereau.
The reason behind it is not known, but One White Eye wanted revenge.
He waited until evening, when he knew Mercereau would be locking the wooden shutters on the wickets of the fort.
When One White Eye saw a shadow at the shutters, he fired his musket at point-blank range straight into the face of the figure.
Thinking he had his revenge, One White Eye fled into the night.
What he didn’t know was that Mercereau had asked Andrew Potts to close the shutters while he was elsewhere and as a result.
Andrew Potts was dead.
Following his father’s murder, Jerry Potts was given to Alexander Harvey, a vile, violent and vindictive man, by his mother, who left Fort Mackenzie to rejoin her tribe.
A story of his unforgiving nature tells of Harvey pursuing a Blackfoot man who stole a pig from the fort until he was found and shot him in the leg.
Harvey then went up to the man, gave him a pipe and invited him to have a smoke.
Believing that they were now even for the stolen pig, the Blackfoot man accepted.
As they talked, Harvey pointed at something in the horizon when the Blackfoot man looked, Harvey put a gun to the man’s head and shot him.
Harvey was Jerry’s guardian, and he neglected the boy and treated him horribly.
Malnutrition left him bow legged and stunted in stature. Thankfully Jerry’s time with Harvey was not to last because in 1845, everything changed.
Some say Harvey simply abandoned him at Fort Benton, Montana, which would not be out of character, while other sources state that Harvey was killed, or died of an illness.
Either way, Jerry Potts was only five years old and alone in the world.
In that time, he had suffered the death of his father, been abandoned by his mother, and after years of mistreatment, was abandoned again.
For a time, he survived on his intelligence and wits, getting food when he could from others, and venturing out into the land to find food on his own.
But then American Fur Company trader Andrew Dawson came into his life
Dawson called himself, the last King of the Missouri, and he proved to be a gentleman who gave Jerry Potts the love and structure he needed.
Dawson taught him to read and write and encouraged him to interact with the Indigenous people who came to the fort so he could learn their languages and customs.
He believed in the power of education, and he ensured Jerry Potts was taught everything he needed to know in order to succeed.
By the time Jerry was a teen he was a skilled outdoorsman who loved being in the open prairie and away from the confines of the fort.
Around this time, he travelled to the Belly River area near modern-day Lethbridge and joined his mother’s people to learn more about his own heritage.
He didn’t forget Dawson, and often went back and forth between the two cultures.
As he neared the end of his teens, Jerry wanted to experience the rites of passage of the Cree through the Sun Dance which was no easy task.
The rite of passage involved being tied to a pole by thongs threaded through his chest muscles.
To complete the ritual, he had to tear himself from the thongs either immediately or stay tied to the pole for three days before he tore himself loose.
Jerry didn’t tear himself away immediately.
Not after the first day.
Or the second.
He stayed there, for three full days, until he had reached the end of the ritual.
Only then did he tear his body away.
Now a full-fledged man in his culture, he began the next steps into adulthood.
And that meant Jerry needed to avenge his father’s death. [PAUSE]
As an adult, Jerry Potts stood at five-foot-six, and had a permanent lean to his right leg.
He had sloping shoulders and always looked like he was slouching.
Those that didn’t know him thought him weak and easy to dominate.
A mistake most only made once.
A French-Canadian named Antoine Primeau learned the hard way at the fort of Charles Galpin on the north bank of the Missouri.
Jerry Potts and Primeau had got into an argument at a saloon and decided to settle things.
When they stepped outside, Jerry drew his gun and shot Primeau dead.
Before long, people learned that Jerry Potts was not to be trifled with.
He was smart, capable and able to kill anything on the Great Plains.
Bison.
Deer.
Man.
If you happened to have injured someone he cared about, there was nothing that would stop his vengeance.
And at the top of his list was One White Eye, the man who had killed his father a decade and a half earlier.
Jerry tracked the killer for hundreds of kilometres until he found One White Eye at a Blackfoot encampment.
It did not matter to Jerry that he was surrounded by Blackfoot men and women; he pointed to One White Eye and challenged him to fight.
The fight was described as terrific, and Jerry would carry scars from it for the rest of his life.
He had intended to kill One White Eye, and, in the end, he was the victor.
He was surrounded by Blackfoot, so his win felt tenuous but by staying after he had won, the Blackfoot surrounding him felt he was an honourable adversary and allowed him to leave in peace and he became a longtime friend and ally.
This would not be the last time that Jerry Potts would enact revenge.
With that first name crossed off his list, Jerry Potts started working for the American Fur Company, which he had been exposed to so much during his early years.
He may have had a reputation, but he was also respected. While he could kill if he needed to, he often used his intelligence and patience to get a job done.
Around 1865, a man named W.S. Stocking bought a grey horse at Fort Benton for $150 and took it to his ranch.
Within days it was stolen, and he believed it had been taken by the Piegan People.
He asked around and was told to talk to Jerry Potts who used his connections with the Piegan and found out there was a man within the First Nation who claimed ownership of the horse.
Jerry sent for the man who claimed he got the horse from another man in another tribe.
Jerry did not believe him, but he asked how much the man wanted for a horse.
It was far more than the $150 W.S. Stocking originally paid.
Jerry could have easily challenged the Piegan man, and likely bested him in a fight, but instead, he invited the man to stay with him and Stocking for the night.
Once the man was asleep, Jerry got up, went over the grey horse and took it by the reins.
He then woke up Stocking, nodded at him, and handed the reins over.
Then he walked away into the night like the badass he was.
Stocking said “Jerry was about the most decent specimen that I ever met with. Certainly, a remarkable man, one with the sinews of a panther and the heart of a lion.”[1]
In another incident, Jerry was guiding two prospectors through Montana when they were attacked by a band of Sioux.
Jerry’s party fled on horseback as fast as they could until they reached a deserted cabin where they barricaded themselves.
Before the Sioux could attack, or decide what to do, eight shots rang out from a rifle in the cabin and eight Sioux fell off their horses, dead.
The Sioux thought all three men were firing, but it was just Jerry The two prospectors were in charge of loading the guns for him.
The remaining Sioux retreated and held a council nearby.
Jerry knew this meant they would return at night, likely to burn the cabin down to flush them out.
He wasn’t going to let that happen.
Under the cover of darkness, Jerry snuck out of the cabin, crawled on his stomach through the tall grass and reached the Sioux camp from the rear.
He then took three of the horses, went back to the cabin and led the prospectors away into the night without the Sioux ever knowing.
(PAUSE MUSIC TRANSITION)
Jerry Potts was suddenly in high demand.
In 1869, Jerry began working as a hunter for whiskey traders, providing them with food at Fort Whoop-Up located in present-day Lethbridge.
It became the whiskey trader’s base of operations in the Canadian West.
Other items were traded, but whiskey was big business.
It was illegally traded to the First Nations in exchange for furs and caused severe societal harm.
One report state that over a two-year period, 12,00 gallons of whiskey had netted 24,000 robes from the First Nations, worth $50,000.
That whiskey, then caused at least 112 deaths during that time.
To call what they traded whiskey is also a stretch.
A typical mixture contained one quart of actual whiskey that had been watered down, a pound of chewing tobacco mixed in, a handful of red pepper, some Jamaican ginger and a quart of blackstrap molasses or red ink.
Jerry didn’t seem to care much about what was happening. He enjoyed whiskey himself and from his perspective, he was simply feeding the traders, not trading whiskey to First Nations.
His part in the whiskey trade, didn’t diminish Jerry’s standing among Indigenous Peoples, specifically the Blackfoot.
When the Cree and Assiniboine tried to take over the Cypress Hills and present-day southern Alberta from the Blackfoot, Jerry joined the Blackfoot side.
Near Fort Whoop-Up, the Battle of Belly River occurred on Oct. 25, 1870, with approximately 800 warriors on each side.
This was the same battle that Chief Piapot dreamt about and foresaw a Cree defeat, in my episode about him from 2023.
True to the dream, the Cree suffered a terrible defeat, with 200 to 400 dead, while the Blackfoot only lost 40 men in the last major First Nations battle on Canadian soil.
Jerry was at the forefront, and nearly lost his life when a Cree warrior he was pursuing suddenly turned around and pointed his rifle at him and fired at nearly point-blank range.
Jerry dove away and heard the whistle of the bullet go past his ear.
The Cree warrior ran off, and Jerry sat on the ground for a minute He said later of the battle,
“You could shoot with your eyes shut and kill a Cree.”
In 1873, Jerry’ relationship with whiskey traders ended abruptly as tragedy struck once again.
His half-brother No Chief was shot and killed by a man who was drunk on whiskey named Good Young Man.
When Jerry’s mother Crooked Back heard of the death, she built a travois, like a stretcher, and attached it to a horse.]
As she arrived at the scene, she found Good Young Man still in a drunken rage attacking everyone in sight.
She began to position her dead son on the travois to transport him for burial.
At that moment, she was shot in the back and killed.
When Jerry Potts heard of his mother and half-brother deaths, he swore off working for the whiskey traders.
Instead, he dusted off his guns and set out on the prairie on a mission for vengeance.
This time, his target was Good Young Man.
It didn’t take long for him to find Good Young Man who knew what to expect because he fled on his horse to escape certain death.
But like everyone in the Final Destination movies, once you are marked for death by the Grim Reaper, or in this case Jerry, there is no escaping fate.
Jerry was an expert marksman, and with one bullet from his rifle, he shot Good Young Man in the head, killing him instantly as he fell from his horse.
. The young man who had escaped alongside the dead man likely thought he was next, but Jerry was not an evil man.
The young man had done nothing to him, so Jerry spared his life.
With Good Young Man now dead, and his mother and half-brother avenged, Jerry declared war on his former employers, the whiskey traders.
The thunder of his vengeance echoed through the lands like the gust of a thousand winds.
This solitary figure wandered the prairie with two .44 pistols on a gun belt, a Henry rifle over his shoulder, a long-bladed skinning knife strapped to his leg and a small gun hidden in a hide-away pocket.
For the next three years, whiskey traders went missing.
No one could officially blame Jerry, but everyone suspected that he was the man wiping them out.
In between killing whiskey traders, Jerry began to buy and trade horses and before long, he became a wealthy man.
His herd usually had over 100 horses, which he sold for between $75 to $150 each.
When he went into Montana to buy horses, he would often carry $1,000 in cash on him.
Everyone knew he carried that much money, but no one dared to steal from him because they knew he was deadly.
Before long, his fame spread. \
It was said he knew every trail from Fort Edmonton to the land of the Cheyenne, and every hill in between
When others couldn’t find game, he always returned to camp with an animal he had killed.
While he was half European, and typically dressed in buckskin clothing and a Stetson, he did not always understand European habits.
When he found out that many settlers kept chamber pots next to their beds, he asked a friend why someone would do that when they had the entire prairie outside their house.
And soon he would gain fame and recognition because a new force was marching towards him…The North West Mounted Police.
On May 23, 1873, Sir John A. Macdonald established the North West Mounted Police to push whiskey traders out of the Canadian West, establish relationships with the First Nations and reduce tensions to prevent the sort of lawlessness permeating the Wild West of the United States.
This need became apparent just over a week later when whiskey traders and wolf hunters massacred at least 13 Assiniboine at a settlement in the Cypress Hills in present-day southwestern Saskatchewan on July 01st.
The settlers believed that the Assiniboine had stolen horses, which had not been the case.
This incident only brought more importance to the creation of the new police force, and the need to push out the whiskey traders from the west.
Just over a year later on July 8, 1874, a force of 275 men, 310 horses, 143 oxen and 187 Red River carts, in a line stretching 2.4 kilometres, began a 1,400-kilometre journey from present-day Winnipeg to southern Alberta.
This March West was ill-planned and much of the force was made up of inexperienced recruits looking for adventure.
They dealt with storms, mosquitoes, grasshoppers that ate their canvas tents, near starvation and frequent wrong turns.
At one point, some of the force, so desperate for water, they drank from a pond of stagnant water.
They paid for that decision when they had to march for days in soiled pants.
When North-West Mounted Police Commissioner G.A. French was in Fort Benton, Montana to find directions to their destination, he met with merchant Charles Conrad.
Over dinner, he complained about his terrible scouts who had led them horribly off-course.
Conrad thought for a moment and realized he knew just the man for French’s needs.
(MUSIC TRANSITION)
On Sept. 25, 1874, Commissioner French and Assistant Commissioner James MacLeod met Jerry Potts.
They were unimpressed with him.
Conrad had praised Jerry as an expert scout and hunter, but they saw a short, bow-legged man with sloping shoulders who did not command the room.
Jerry Potts held onto his Winchester Rifle during their first meeting, which was nearly as tall as him.
His clothes were greasy, and a bowler hat completed his odd look.
With little options available, French and MacLeod hired him and
It would prove to be one of the best decisions they ever made.
In fact, MacLeod would one day say that Jerry Potts was the greatest scout who ever lived, and the two became lifelong friends.
As Jerry led the North-West Mounted Police north, he was returning to a territory where he had seen tragedy and triumph.
He helped the Blackfoot secure a win in the great Battle of Belly River and the land was also the sight of his half brother and mother’s deaths.
Jerry led the police force to Fort Whoop-Up and when they arrived, they found an abandoned fort and all the whiskey gone.
Perhaps the whiskey traders fled knowing the police force was marching towards them.
Personally, I think it was news that Jerry was approaching that sent them running.
After Fort Whoop-Up, Jerry led the force to an island in the Oldman River near the Rocky Mountains, about an hour and a half south of present-day Calgary.
This is where he advised them to build Fort Macleod which became the headquarters for the North-West Mounted Police in 1876.
Legendary North West Mounted Police superintendent Sam Steele said Jerry possessed an uncanny sense of locality and direction, who could take travellers through territory in the quickest possible route even if he was unfamiliar with the land.
The North-West Mounted Police offered Jerry a contract of 22 years, for $90 per month.
This was no small amount.
It was more than what a typical guide received, three times the salary of a constable in the North West Mounted Police.
But there was a good reason for this.
Jerry had skills that the North West Mounted Police needed, including fluency in several languages.
He could speak English, Backfoot, Crow, Cree, Assiniboine, Algonquin and Lakota Sioux. Making him invaluable for the force when speaking to the Indigenous nations of the Canadian West.
Jerry accepted the contract and entered a life of legend.
Once Fort MacLeod was established, Jerry was tasked with making the First Nations acquainted with the police, and vice versa.
The fort sat in Blackfoot territory, and Jerry wanted to make sure both sides got along well.
He was smart enough to know that friendly relations were integral to the success of the force.
The first meeting between Chief Crowfoot and the North-West Mounted Police commanders happened on Dec. 1, 1874, as Jerry translated for Chief Crowfoot and Assistant Commissioner MacLeod.
That first exchange was a huge success and only a few days later, Chief Crowfoot returned with Chiefs Red Crow of the Bloods and Bull Head of the Piegans to hold a grand council, a rare gesture to white settlers.
Jerry made sure that MacLeod and the other leaders in the police force knew of the honour being bestowed upon them, and the need to respect all the parts of the ceremony including prayer and smoking of the pipe.
For the next few years, Jerry was involved in some of the most important moments in the west between the North West Mounted Police and the First Nations.
The Macleod Gazette wrote of him,
“A man who made it possible for a small and utterly insufficient force to occupy and gradually dominate what might so easily, under other circumstances, have been a hostile and difficult country. Had he been other than he was, it is not too much to say that the history of the North West would have been vastly different than it was.”
Jerry provided translation between Chief Crowfoot and police during the negotiations over Treaty 7 in 1877.
That same year, he went east to the Cypress Hills where the NWMP met with Sitting Bull.
Chief Sitting Bull and his warriors had defeated the United States Seventh Cavalry under General Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn in June 1876.
In response to this defeat, the Americans sent thousands of troops to Sitting Bull’s territory and as a result, the chief and his people moved across the border into Canada in May 1877 to find refuge and hopefully a reserve to live on.
In autumn of that year, Jerry, Commissioner James Walsh and a contingent from the North West Mounted Police met with Sitting Bull and were present when an American delegation crossed the border to negotiate for his return.
Sitting Bull rejected the terms.
Sadly, the story of Sitting Bull does not have a happy ending.
His people stayed in Canada for four years but were starved out by the government and forced to return to the United States.
Sitting Bull was murdered on Dec. 15, 1890, after he refused to comply with an arrest warrant issued by the United States government for allowing the Ghost Dance to happen on his reservation.
Following this meeting, Jerry returned west where he settled at Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills with his family.
. He scouted for the force and came to know every inch of land.
One story tells of w Commissioner MacLeod looking around for a pile of stones that had served as a landmark.
When MacLeod asked if they were lost without the rocks Jerry, somewhat offended said,
“No, stones are lost.”
Each year, Jerry travelled with Commissioner James MacLeod to Blackfoot Crossing near present-day Calgary to distribute treaty funds to the Blackfoot as per the terms of Treaty 7.
He also leads patrols out of Fort Walsh through the year, usually taking North West Mounted Police officers to meet with First Nations in present-day Saskatchewan and Alberta.
On these journeys, he saw the Indigenous Peoples starve following the disappearance of the bison from the Prairies.
Using his growing friendship with Commissioner MacLeod, he convinced him to buy 1,000 head of cattle to keep the Indigenous Peoples fed for years.
MacLeod agreed and sent a letter to Ottawa to make it happen.
On Nov. 17, 1879, Constable Marmaduke Graburn was sent out to retrieve an axe and picket rope that was left behind accidently near Fort Walsh.
When he didn’t return, Jerry Potts was called to help find the missing constable.
A recent snowfall had made tracking difficult, but Jerry was undeterred.
Where everyone else saw nothing, he saw a track, hidden by the snow.
Soon enough, he found some blood, and then down a ravine the pillbox hat of the recruit.
It wasn’t long before he found Constable Marmaduke Graburn’s body, with a bullet hole in the back of the head.
Graburn’s horse had also been tied to a tree and shot.
Looking at the scene, Jerry reconstructed what happened.
Graburn had encountered two men who rode up beside him.
One slowed down, got behind the Mountie and shot him in the head.
They then pulled his body off the horse and threw it into the ravine and then killed the horse.
It took Jerry over a year to find an Piegan man named Star Child who had killed Graburn.
And when he found him, he didn’t kill him instead, he informed Commissioner MacLeod of the man’s location and went with the North West Mounted Police to arrest him.
Star Child didn’t go quietly, but soon enough he was in handcuffs and Jerry, was able to convince the Chief to let the Mounties leave with Star Child so he could face justice.
In the end, Star Child was found not guilty and let go but it was not long before he was arrested for stealing horses.
In prison, Star Child learned English and after his release became a scout for, of all things, the North West Mounted Police but wasn’t meant to last… Child Star ran off with another man’s wife, contracted tuberculosis and died at 29.
Meanwhile as time passed Jerry dealt with a growing number of health problems, including a nagging cough and lung trouble that worsened with each year.
He fell into the unfortunate spiral of alcoholism, as tuberculosis became a constant problem.
His proteges took over his duties as he aged.
An unstoppable force in his youth, he was now slowing down and those long trips with the police were becoming more difficult. The land had been settled, and there was less of a need for a man of his skills.
When Jerry was 58, he retired from the North West Mounted Police.
By then he also had throat cancer, and it made it impossible to do his job.
One year later, on July 14, 1896, Jerry died at Fort Macleod, in present-day Alberta.
The Regina Leader-Post wrote of his invaluable part in the history of the force,
“He took Col. Macleod’s column straight as a die to Whoop-Up. He brought it on to the present site of MacLeod, and for years afterwards he was the unfailing guide, the faithful interpreter and the true and loyal go-between that made it possible for a small and utterly inefficient force to occupy, and gradually dominate, what might so easily, under other circumstances have been a hostile and difficult country.”
When Jerry was buried, he was given the rank of Special Constable and the full honours afforded to the rank during his memorial service.
But how has Jerry been honoured since?
In Lethbridge, Alberta, and in Fort Macleod, boulevards have been named in his honour.
In Calgary, Jerry Potts Elementary School honours the long-time scout of the North-West Mounted Police.
In the 1965 Western film Major Dundee, Samuel Potts, played by James Coburn, was inspired by Jerry Potts.
Of course, in that movie he is very much an American, and most of the action does not take place in Canada, but far to the south in New Mexico and Mexico.
And on Sept. 8, 1992, Canada Post issued a stamp to honour Jerry.
