Submitted photo Esplanade
A group of Mounties in 1878 at Fort Walsh.
Former NWMP constable Fred Mountain once owned part of the SW Hill in the city. If only he’d kept it in the family, it would have been worth millions!
Who was this Mountie? Mountain was a school boy, barely 18, when he joined the NWMP in 1878. He was posted to Fort Walsh which had been established three years earlier. He was recommended as a “first rate horseman,” but it was his prestigious family name that earned him the commission with the NWMP, a force which often chose from the social elite.
The young man from Quebec had good references. Frederick Armine Ramsey Mountain came from a highly respected ecclesiastical family. He was born in Quebec in 1860, the son of Rev. Armine Wale Mountain. His grandfather was Bishop George Mountain, the first principal of McGill College. His great-grandfather Bishop Jacob Mountain came to Quebec in 1793 as the first Anglican bishop and founded the Cathedral of Holy Trinity, the first Anglican cathedral built outside the British Isles.
When Constable Fred Mountain completed his three-year commission with the NWMP in 1881, along with his discharge he received a land warrant for 160 acres of land, to be purchased at a cost of $1/acre. During Mountain’s term, a NWMP constable was earning about $1/day. The land would have cost the Constable $160, about five months’ wages.
A quarter section of land in the North-West Territories in 1881 was uninhabited frontier land isolated from any kind of settlement, even a railroad line. He chose to locate in the Medicine Hat Coulee (river valley), however, in a letter Mountain wrote in 1914, he referred to the warrant, writing “that there was no land at that value.”
In 1882, he built a cabin of cottonwood logs with a “turf and board” roof, a stable and a horse corral. Mountain described his corral as being “in the coulee” so it may have been beneath Prospect Drive near the river off First Street S.W. In 1883, he applied for squatter’s rights rather than paying for the land.
However, not seeing a future in this neck of the woods, Fred Mountain soon abandoned the land and headed west to the Rocky Mountains. He walked away from a quarter section of land that extends from the South Saskatchewan River to Sixth Street S.W. and east/west from Fifth Avenue to 10 Avenue S.W. (today east of Red Deer Drive). It encompasses the River Heights subdivision, the hospital and part of the Harlow subdivision.
By 1884, he was working with the B.C. provincial police in the Slocan Valley. His homestead patent was cancelled by the Dominion government. Eventually, he settled in Victoria doing survey work. Frederick Mountain died in Montreal in 1915 at the age of 53. He is buried at his great-grandfather’s church, Holy Trinity Cathedral. His cottonwood log cabin was relocated after 1883 to what is today 351 First St. S.E. and remained at this location until 1935. The Mountain homestead is now the home of many local citizens who wouldn’t recognize it as “without value.”
This article was researched and composed by Sally Sehn with Malcolm Sissons, Members of the Heritage Resources Committee of the City of Medicine Hat.
