Jerry Potts, born to an Indian mother and white father in Montana, learned to fight early. Good thing. Tough, smart, expert with pistol rifle or any other weapon that came to hand, he lived at the heart of a violent and murderous time in the Canadian and American northwest.
Link to another story “A Quest to the Alaska Highway”
When Jerry’s father died his mother gave him to a fur trader and returned to her tribe. The trader, violent and vindictive, mistreated and then abandoned him. Another trader adopted him, saw that he learned to read and write and allowed him to mix freely with the various Indian tribes, learning their languages and customs.
Famous as an Indian fighter he fought at the heart of the last great Indian war in Canada, a war that pitted the Cree against several other tribes near Lethbridge. Of the battle Potts said, “You could fire with your eyes shut and be sure to kill a Cree.”
In 1872 a drunken whiskey trader killed his mother and Potts travelled back and shot the killer. Shortly after that he ran into a contingent of Northwest Mounted Police at Fort Benton. Aware of his prowess as a warrior, they hired him on the spot. He spent the rest of his life as a legendary member of the NWMP—22 years.
During his first few years, few major patrols went out without Potts in the lead. And when age finally slowed him down, he continued training new recruits and helping negotiate with the Indians.
His obituary in the Macleod Gazette and Alberta Livestock Record put it this way, [he] ““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 to what it is.”