In the late summer of 1874, two senior officers of the Northwest Mounted Police sat in a trading post in Fort Benton, Montana, and studied the strange little man who had just stepped through the door. Commissioner George French and Colonel James Macleod had ridden south out of pure desperation. Their column of some 300 men was lost somewhere on the Canadian prairie, its horses dying, its supplies nearly gone, and the whiskey fort they had been sent to shut down nowhere in sight. What they needed was a guide, someone trustworthy who actually knew the country.

What they got was a short, bow-legged, slope-shouldered half-Blackfoot named Jerry Potts, holding a Winchester Model 73 that was nearly as long as he was, wearing a little bowler hat that did not belong with his greasy buckskins and moccasins. Potts offered little conversation to inspire confidence. But the Canadians were in no position to be critical. They accepted his services, reluctantly, not knowing the arrangement would last for the next 22 years.

Jeremiah Potts was born in Montana around 1840. His father, Andrew, was a Scottish fur trader working out of Fort McKenzie, and his mother, Crooked Back, belonged to the Kainai, or Blood Tribe, of the Blackfeet Confederacy. The relationship between his parents did not last long. When Jerry was still a toddler, his father was killed by a half-blind Piegan known as One-Eyed Eye.

The man had been thrown out of the post by a clerk and wanted revenge, so he came back that night and waited until he saw a silhouette against the window, then opened fire with his flintlock. His aim was true, but he killed the wrong man. Instead of the clerk, it was Jerry’s father. It is often said that once Potts grew up, he tracked the killer down and settled the score himself, but the historical record suggests otherwise.

According to Roger Touchie, who wrote the definitive book on Potts, it was the Piegan themselves who killed One-Eyed Eye, and they did so almost immediately. The source for that claim, if correct, is one of Jerry’s own sons. Not long after his father’s death, Jerry’s mother returned to the Blackfeet, leaving the boy in the care of a trader named Alexander Harvey. By most accounts, Harvey was not a kind man.

The historian D. Bruce Seeley described him as violent and vindictive, a man who “neglected and mistreated Potts before deserting him in 1845. ” The specifics of that mistreatment are largely unknown, though malnutrition may have been part of it. Either way, young Potts found himself abandoned again.

Fortunately, another fur trader, Andrew Dawson of Fort Benton, took him in and raised him as his own, bringing the boy along on his travels and encouraging him to mix with the native people and soak up their languages and customs. By the time Jerry was fully grown, he could converse in several native dialects. In his late teens, Potts sought out his mother’s people and drifted back and forth between the Blackfeet and the white traders for years. He would eventually take a native wife and run a camp of his own.

With age, he also developed a violent reputation. Many of the stories told about him border on the unbelievable, and separating fact from myth is difficult, but a few of the fights are worth mentioning. In 1864, Potts was serving as a guide for prospectors shortly after gold was discovered at Alder Gulch. The expedition was uneventful until they decided to head back to Fort Benton after a few weeks of panning on the Sun River.

That is when they ran into a large war party of Lakota. Jerry and his two companions tried to outrun them but had no chance. Their only hope was a cabin about two miles away; if they could reach it, they might be able to hold off the attackers. The problem was that between them and the cabin stood a couple of hundred Lakota.

Potts reined in his horse, hollered for the others to follow, and charged headfirst into the war party. It worked. The Lakota scattered long enough for him to reach the cabin, then settled in for a siege. That night, Potts sneaked out, stole fresh horses from the Lakota camp nearby, and he and his companions rode hard back to Fort Benton.

On another occasion, Potts and one of his cousins were out hunting when a small party of Crow ambushed them. The cousin was shot and killed almost immediately, but Jerry took cover behind his horse. Because he had learned the Crow language, he could hear his assailants discussing what to do with him. They decided to pretend to let him go on the condition that he leave his rifle on the ground, then shoot him in the back once he turned away.

Potts played along. He set down his rifle and walked in the opposite direction, and the moment he heard a rifle cocking behind him, he flung himself to the side, came up with his revolver, and killed all three men. Did it really happen that way? No one can say for certain.

Similar versions of the story exist, one in which he was riding with a Crow back to their village when he overheard them planning his murder and threw himself out of the saddle, guns blazing. The mythology around Potts is thick, and reality is hard to separate from the tall tales. The actual records, the ones with eyewitness accounts, show that Jerry’s first known killing occurred in 1862 at Fort Galpin, a post on the Missouri River. The details are sparse: a drunken quarrel with a French Canadian named Antoine Primeau.

The two stepped outside for a duel, and Potts came out on top. According to the historian Hugh Dempsey, that duel “established his reputation as a fighter amongst the rough frontiersmen of the upper Missouri country and few men would rile him, especially when he was drinking. ” Potts definitely liked to drink. That was supposedly the only time he ever killed a white man, though even that remains uncertain.

Most of his fighting was against native enemies of the Blackfeet. The Battle of Belly River in late October 1870 was a prime example. The previous winter, a smallpox epidemic had swept across the northern plains, killing more than 1,400 Blackfeet, with some sources claiming over 2,000. It was in this weakened state that their enemies, the Cree and Assiniboine, decided to attack with a force of around 800 warriors.

Their first target was a dozen or so lodges along the Oldman River, not far from the present-day site of Lethbridge, Alberta. They figured it would be easy pickings, but they did not realize a much larger camp was just three miles away. Living in that camp was Jerry Potts, and he was among the first to respond. According to an eyewitness, he led a contingent of Blackfeet into a coulee that ran parallel to another coulee occupied by the Cree and Assiniboine.

The two sides could not see each other, so they took turns crawling to the top to snipe and throw rocks. The stalemate lasted a couple of hours, until Potts spotted a small butte to the rear of the enemy lines that commanded a view of their position. He picked his best rifle shots and sent them up to pour a withering fire down into the Cree and Assiniboine ranks. From there it became a slaughter.

Between 200 and 400 Cree and Assiniboine lost their lives, 16 of them personally scalped by Jerry Potts. Potts had a close call himself during the battle. He had been chasing a pair of Cree with a scalping knife when one of them turned and fired point-blank at his face. He threw himself sideways at the last second and escaped with nothing more than a face full of powder burns.

Potts was in the area because he worked as a hunter for Fort Whoop-Up, a few miles up the valley. The fort owed its existence to American law enforcement. Selling liquor to Native Americans had been illegal in the United States since 1834, but nobody enforced it, especially at places like Fort Benton. That changed in 1869, when a new U.

S. marshal and Indian agent actually started doing their jobs. The whiskey men of Fort Benton closed shop and headed north into Canada, beyond the reach of American law, and into the heart of Blackfoot country. Their first post burned down, so they rebuilt in 1870 and called it Fort Whoop-Up.

The trade was extremely lucrative; the traders took in around $50,000 worth of buffalo hides in the first season alone, all of it paid for with rotgut whiskey. The stuff contained everything from chewing tobacco to ginger, red peppers, and by some accounts gunpowder, mixed with red ink to get the color right. It had dire consequences for the Blackfeet. A man named Jean L’Heureux, who lived among them during that period, later claimed the whiskey cost more than 100 lives.

Why would someone like Potts work for traders who were poisoning his mother’s people? The answer is not recorded, beyond the fact that Potts himself was a big fan of whiskey. It was not until things got personal that he changed his mind. Potts had a half-brother named No Chief.

In 1872, No Chief got drunk and killed a couple of his in-laws. In retaliation, another Blackfoot known as Good Young Man shot and killed No Chief. When Jerry’s mother arrived with a travois to retrieve the body, she too was killed. Potts did not learn of the incident for several weeks, but when he finally caught up with Good Young Man, he killed him on sight.

Then he quit the whiskey trade for good and headed back to Montana. It is often said that he then waged a one-man war on the whiskey traders, killing as many as 40 of them, a claim repeated even on his Wikipedia page, but no sources back it up. It is likely another tall tale. Potts spent most of 1873 with the Blackfeet in Montana, and by the summer of 1874 he was trading horses on the Marias River.

In September of that year, he rode into Fort Benton to sell a string of horses, which is how he came to be employed by the Northwest Mounted Police. The police force was almost brand new, created a little over a year earlier with the express purpose of shutting down the whiskey trade out west and establishing law and order. Their first major campaign, known as the March West, sent about 300 men, most of them completely inexperienced, west in July 1874 to put an end to Fort Whoop-Up. It was a disaster from day one.

They made only two miles on the first day, then came thunderstorms, mosquitoes, an outbreak of typhoid, a plague of locusts, and their horses began dying. Then they got lost. By late summer, things were going badly. French and Macleod rode south to Fort Benton looking for supplies, and French decided to ask around for a guide.

That is when Jerry Potts walked through the door. Potts’s first job was to guide the Mounties to Fort Whoop-Up. He told them the traders had already cleared out for Montana, but they went anyway, and sure enough, by the time they arrived, the post was almost completely deserted. There was no dramatic showdown.

But Potts had already earned his keep. Sam Steele, who would become one of the most legendary Mounties ever to serve, later wrote that Potts “won the confidence of the ranks the first day out, and when morning came, he rode boldly in the front of the advance guard. It was noon when the party reached the Milk River and found him there sitting near a fat buffalo cow he had killed and dressed for the use of the force. ” As for the empty fort, Potts allegedly summed it up in four words: “Bad medicine, many ghosts.

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With no whiskey to seize and winter coming fast, Macleod needed to get his men under a roof. When he asked where they should set up, Potts did not hesitate. The next morning he led the column across the St. Mary’s and Belly Rivers, then up an old Indian trail to the valley of the Oldman River, where they raised Fort Macleod.

The force was in place, but no one would take the Mounties seriously until they proved themselves. The first opportunity came in October, when a Blood chief named Three Bulls rode in with a complaint. A trader named William Bond had taken two of his finest horses in exchange for bad whiskey. Bond was holed up at Pine Coulee, about 50 miles north.

Macleod sent a small posse with Potts leading the way. Days later they returned with Bond and four associates in custody, along with wagons of whiskey, 16 horses, and over 100 buffalo robes. Macleod, serving as magistrate, found all five guilty. But that was it.

They were fined. No firing squad, no heads on poles. Before the fines were paid, a friend of the traders, a man named Waxy Weatherwax, arrived at the fort and offered to settle the fines in goods, everything from bacon to syrup, buffalo hides, and axe handles. Macleod agreed, much to the dismay of Potts, who argued the traders would simply return to their old trade.

As events would show, he was absolutely correct. The arrests were not enough to win over the Blackfeet. Potts went out to speak personally with the chiefs, hoping to bring them to the post to meet Macleod. First, though, he had to collect his family from Fort Benton.

His first wife, a Crow who had borne him a son, had grown homesick and returned to her people, taking the boy with her. By 1874, Potts had two new wives, a pair of sisters named Panther Woman and Spotted Killer. When the Mounties asked why he had two wives, Jerry explained that one wife will fight with her husband, but get two and they’ll fight with each other. Once his family was settled, Potts disappeared into the land of the Blackfeet.

He reemerged weeks later and told Macleod the chiefs would soon visit. Within days they appeared at the post. Macleod rolled out all the ceremony he could muster and sat through a long, dramatic speech from the Blackfoot spokesman, with Potts translating. When it was over, Macleod asked what the man had said.

Potts replied, “They’re damn glad you’re here. ” Whatever he told the Blackfoot in return evidently worked, because they never gave the Mounties any serious trouble. Potts’s other main duty was keeping the Mounties alive, which usually meant saving them from blizzards. In March 1875, he saved Colonel Macleod himself.

They were on their way to Helena to meet a newly appointed officer when a blizzard hit near the Milk River. Potts dug a snow cave, and they stayed in it for a couple of days, gnawing on half-frozen bacon until the weather cleared. One of the other Mounties present wrote, “Our guide, Jerry Potts, was a marvel. He rode steadily ahead with short stops at intervals when he seemed almost to smell out the trail, for nothing was to be seen in any direction.

” What they did not know was that Potts had gone snowblind along the way. He said nothing until they reached a U. S. Cavalry post on the Marias River.

He had guided them to safety without being able to see. Sam Steele wrote that Potts “possessed an uncanny sense of locality and direction. Others could guide travelers through country they had visited before, but this man could take a party from place to place by the quickest route through country altogether unknown to him, without compass and without sight of the stars. ”

Potts was also learning to adapt.

In the spring of 1875, while he was off on police business, a party of Assiniboine raiders made off with 35 of his family’s horses. A year earlier, he would have rounded up his Blackfoot relatives and gone to war. This time, he went to Macleod. He said he might have to handle it the old-fashioned way, but if the colonel could write a letter to the U.

S. Cavalry, he would try the white man’s way first. Macleod wrote the letter, Potts carried it to Fort Belknap, and within a week he had every horse back without a shot fired or a scalp taken. That letter says everything about the next 20 years.

From that point on, Jerry Potts was no longer a warrior. He was a man in the middle, Mounties on one side, Blackfeet on the other, carrying messages in both directions. There is no record of exactly what he said to the chiefs, but whatever it was, it almost always came out the way Macleod wanted it to. The Lakota were another matter.

Following the Battle of Little Bighorn, many Lakota fled north of the border. By the time Sitting Bull arrived in Canada in May 1877, some 4,000 Lakota were thought to be residing there. In October of that year, a great council was held at Fort Walsh between the Lakota and a delegation from the U. S.

government. Jerry Potts was in attendance with Colonel Macleod, though it is not known whether he and Sitting Bull exchanged words. He was simply there. From then on, Potts’s story became the story of a man who was no longer needed.

The buffalo were gone by 1879. Ranchers and railroads moved in. Potts stayed on the payroll, but there was less and less for him to do. Tragedy struck in the fall of 1880, when an old single-shot musket he was examining went off in his hands and killed a child standing nearby.

It is not known whether the child was his own, but people who knew him said he was never the same afterward. He became sullen, kept to himself, and drank more and more. A year later, he had to be restrained after getting drunk and trying to kill a Blackfoot he had a grievance with. Roger Touchie wrote that Potts had “an unquenchable thirst which a camel might have envied,” and that he would drink anything containing alcohol, even essence of lemon.

Hugh Dempsey put it best: “Everyone who knew Potts admitted he was an unusual man and felt that his drinking was not uncommon on the frontier. With his virtues far outweighing his sins, he was considered to be a capable scout, guide, and interpreter rather than just a drinker. Regardless of his condition, no one could question his honesty, bravery, and faithfulness to the Mounted Police. ”

The Mounties never questioned his loyalty.

In 1885, during a native uprising in Saskatchewan, the young men on the Blackfoot reservation talked of joining in, until Potts went from camp to camp urging them to stay out. They heeded his words. Macleod had left the force by then, resigning near the end of 1880 but keeping his job as magistrate. He and Jerry remained friends for the rest of their lives, and many of the stories about Potts come directly from Macleod, including the one about the chamber pot.

One of Jerry’s wives had picked up a child-size chamber pot in Fort Benton and used it as a container for drinking water. When Macleod tried to explain its intended purpose, Jerry replied, “You white people are crazy. You got plenty of open prairie all around, and yet you use a good cup like this for kids to piss in. ”

The last ten years of Potts’s life were hard on him and his family.

His son Willie died two days before Christmas of 1886. The following year, both of his wives passed away. In 1891, Potts caught a stray shotgun blast while out hunting ducks. Most of the pellets were removed, but one stuck behind his ear, and Jerry treated it as a good luck charm.

A few years later, while drinking with Mounties, he leaned over to show off the pellet, and one of them flicked it out with a penknife. When Potts sobered up and realized it was gone, he was said to be genuinely worried, as if he had lost his medicine. Within months he was on his deathbed, though probably not because of the pellet. According to D.

Bruce Seeley, it was a combination of tuberculosis and heavy drinking; other sources claim throat cancer. After a stay at the Fort Macleod hospital, he decided to go home to the reservation to die surrounded by family. He gave up the ghost in July 1896, on either the 13th or the 14th. He was buried at Fort Macleod the next day.

Six Mounties carried him from the Catholic church to the police cemetery on the banks of the Oldman River, with rifle volleys and bugles, and laid him to rest next to his son Willie. His obituary in the Macleod Gazette read: “For years, he stood between the police on one side and his natural friends, the Indians, on the other. And his influence has always made for peace. Had he been other than he was, it is not too much to say that the history of the Northwest would have been vastly different to what it is.

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Most Americans have never heard of Jerry Potts, despite his descendants living on both sides of the border. Canada is a different story. He has a school named after him, a mountain, a road, a soccer field, and his own postage stamp. The character played by James Coburn in the film Major Dundee was at the very least loosely based on him.

He was not a saint, and no one who knew him would have called him one. But the history of Western Canada would have been a whole lot different without him.