Several local law enforcement officers were on hand July 17, 2010 at the Cross River Heritage Center in Schroeder to welcome Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constable Mike Currie, who had traveled down from Thunder Bay. L-R: Cook County Sheriff Mark Falk, Constable Mike Currie from Thunder Bay, and Border Patrol Agent Aaron Logan. Currie was there with Tweed Museum Curator Peter Spooner, who gave a talk on the history of Potlatch Corporation’s ad campaign that featured the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s federal law enforcement agency. This summer, Cross River Heritage Center has an exhibit of Arnold Friberg Mountie paintings commissioned by Potlatch.
An ad campaign lingers in the memories of many Northlanders 40 years after its last artistic rendition was commissioned. It was a tremendous success, but it wasn’t selling a product directly to retail consumers. It was a trade-to-trade campaign in which a paper company sold its product to printing companies.
The company was Potlatch, and its Northwest Paper Division was located in Cloquet. How did the company get its name recognition? From its images of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
From 1931 to 1970, Potlatch commissioned 16 different artists who created 450-500 images of Canada’s federal law enforcement agents patrolling and protecting the Canadian wilderness. Many people grew up seeing these images on calendars in gas stations, restaurants, and barbershops. The campaign was the brainchild of Chicago advertising executive Frank Cash.
The company wanted people to think of Potlatch as strong, capable, and dependable, and Cash realized that images of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in their bright red uniforms (originally castoffs from the British queen’s army) against black and white backgrounds would do the trick. And they did.
Eventually, the company realized it did not have the facilities or expertise to properly care for its aging originals and reproductions, which were getting moved around and damaged, and it turned the collection – 376 pieces that hadn’t been given to corporate executives as keepsakes over the years – to the Tweed Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Minnesota-Duluth (UMD).
On Saturday, July 17, 2010, Tweed curator Peter Spooner regaled an audience at the Cross River Heritage Center in Schroeder with stories about the history of Potlatch’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police ad campaign. He was there because this summer, the Heritage Center is featuring an exhibit of original Potlatch Mountie paintings.
Spooner estimated that about 100 original Mountie images might still be circulating in private hands. A dozen paintings in Tweed’s collection were given to them by a former Potlatch employee who called Spooner and said he had some originals done by the first Mountie artist, Hal Foster. Thecaller said he had found them in a Dumpster in Cloquet when the company was cleaning out some of its storage facilities.
Perhaps even more enthralling, however, was the very real Mike Currie, a constable currently serving in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He stood in full regalia while Spooner gave his talk. Wearing the traditional red coat, dark riding pants with yellow stripes down the sides, and tan broad-brimmed hat, Currie made a striking appearance. The Mounties wore the uniform on a regular basis into the 1950s.
Hal Foster was the first artist commissioned to create paintings of the Mounties. According to Spooner, he rode his bicycle from Nova Scotia to Chicago to study art. He wanted to be an illustrator, and ended up becoming well known as the artist behind the Prince Valiant
comic strip.
The artist who produced more Mountie images than anyone was Arnold Friberg, and it’s his paintings that are gracing the walls of the Cross River Heritage Center this summer. Friberg was well known for his research and attention to accurate detail from the buttons on the uniforms and beads on the First Nation people’s clothing to the saddles on the Mounties’ horses.
Many of Potlatch’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police originals are 25” x 32”. Arnold Friberg made some of the biggest ones that are 4’ x 5’. Friberg also illustrated the Book of Mormon and won an Academy Award for creating the sets for Cecille B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.
He produced a lot of paintings of Native Americans and First Nation Canadians. Ironically, he died this July 1 at the age of 96 – on Canada Day.
“Arnold is very wellrespected among the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,” said Constable Currie, who is a drug enforcement officer in Thunder Bay. “All his paintings are sought after. Even today, there was a fight in my office over who would be able to be here today!”
Currie explained that the Mounties are Canada’s federal law enforcement branch. Canada is still very tied to Great Britain, and even the vehicle he drove to the event was registered under Her Majesty the Queen. Women first started joining the force in 1971, a year or two after the Mounties switched from sled dog teams to “snow machines” for winter travel.
Prospective Mounties must attend six months of intensive training. They are each issued a red uniform, but they have to earn every part of it piece by piece. They even have to take a class on how to polish their boots. “But even so, we still never get it right!” Currie said, explaining that they would often be required to re-polish their boots after inspections.
Mounties do not get promoted unless a job is available for them to fill. Some Mounties end up taking assignments in very remote regions of Canada in order to receive promotions, Currie said. Those places always have job openings, he said. Canada has 22,000 Mounties on the force right now. During the 1980s and into the 1990s there was a hiring freeze, so joining up isn’t necessarily easy.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police training center is in Regina, Saskatchewan, where all the streets are named after officers who have fallen in the line of duty. A very special group of 32 traveling Mounties puts on a display of maneuvers with their horses each year. It is called the Musical Ride, and Mounties can only serve on it for three years.
Each summer, the Tweed Museum features a rotating exhibit of 30-40 Royal Canadian Mounted Police images. Its museum store carries memorabilia ranging from current calendars to poster prints to Mountie Barbie dolls. The Tweed Museum has 14,000 square feet of exhibit space and is free to the public. It first opened in 1950 with a collection started by George and Alice Tweed. Mr. Tweed made his money in the mining and then the banking industries.
UMD is in the process of creating a museum studies major, Spooner said. Tweed Museum works with about 20 interns a semester from a variety of majors. Small historical society and tribal museums are springing up all over Minnesota, Spooner said. Support is also growing for a new Native American center at the university, Spooner said. “There are more and more Native American students at UMD all the time.”
So what does Mountie Mike Currie wear to work in Thunder Bay on a daily basis? A regular button-down shirt and tie – and navy pants with stripes down the sides.
And there is still a paper stock called “Mountie.”
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