Mountie Day!

Happy Canada Day week all!

As promised, I am featuring lots of lovely Canadian things on ye olde blog! Be sure to check out my post for the Hey Canada!  blog tour ! and our little kick-off post (featuring a few videos!)

When people think CANADA! They think, well, all sorts of awesome things... one of those things is our unofficial National emblem: The red-coated Royal Canadian Mounted Police! 

Mounties are cool!  My dad ( who is ALSO cool) houses one of the largest collections of RCMP memorabilia and history in Canada. I grew up surrounded by heirlooms and paintings and plates and plaques and uniforms remnant of numerous eras of "the Force" and, most importantly, surrounded by the written recollection of the Mounties' history and formation as a stabilizing force in Canada.

My first Mountie-related book was Mrs. Mike .  I also really enjoyed Janette Oke's Canadian West series (remember Winn the mountie?)

Dad is  a chaplain for the RCMP (passion now manifest) and gets to do lots of cool things ( and even has his own AWESOME RCMP chaplain's uniform! cool! )

To help us find the BEST books on the history of the Mounties, their heroes (such as Sir Samuel Benfield Steele ), their legends ( the Mad Trapper of Red River), their horses, and the ones who are famous for being heirs of famous Victorian authors ---hello Dickens!, we went to the source: DAD!

So, these are some of Dad's favourite books about and written by the RCMP!

• The Royal Canadian Mounted Police: A Century of History 
• Bear Child: The Life and Times of Jerry Potts  
• Sam Steele: Lion of the Frontier 
• Forty Years in Canada ( reminiscences written BY Samuel Benfield Steele)
• The Lost Patrol: the Mounties' Yukon Tragedy
• The Mad Trapper of Red River: A True Story of Canada's Biggest Manhunt 

Mounties are cool. They always get their man. They have awesome uniforms. They ride horses to music .

Like most Canadians, they also know most of American history and how to diffuse a bomb and drop their heart-rates: