Sixteen Scalps: The Legend of Jerry Potts

In the fall of 1874, about three hundred men of Canada's newly formed North West Mounted Police were lost on the prairie, watching their horses die and searching for a whiskey fort they couldn't find. Their rescue came in the form of a short, bow-legged horse trader named Jerry Potts. The son of a Scottish fur trader and a Blood woman named Crooked Back, Potts lost his father to a bullet meant for someone else and was raised among traders and his mother's Blackfoot people. By adulthood, he had earned a fearsome reputation, taking sixteen scalps at the Battle of Belly River in 1870 and working as a hunter for the whiskey men at Fort Whoop-Up until the murder of his own mother turned him against the trade. Hired by the Mounties at Fort Benton, he would spend the next twenty-two years as their guide and interpreter. But separating the man from the legend means sorting through tales of Lakota war parties, a snow-blind ride through a blizzard, a council with Sitting Bull, and a child’s chamber pot.

 

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