Badmen of the American west gave him the nickname in derision—"The Queen's Cowboy". Yet it was no bad title for the greatest mountie of them all—Commissioner James Macleod, C.M.G, Lawyer, soldier, councillor, policeman, judge—his story is the story of the territories which are now Saskatchewan and Alberta. It was he who named Calgary in the Gaelic of his native Hebrides. It was his unswerving honesty and courage that won the Indians for peace. For the men of his time it was not too much to say that Canada owed more to "Colonel" James Macleod, on account of the Northwest, than to any other man. Macleod and his wife Mary—her beauty, a byword throughout the West—lived through a period crowded with exciting events. The tragedy of the Riel rebellion (Mary Macleod saw with her own eyes the killing of Scott), the coming of Sitting Bull, his warriors reeking with the blood of U.S. cavalrymen who had fallen in Custer's last stand, the building of the great railroad that was the lifeline of the new Dominion, the vanishing of the buffalo—in all this thronging cavalcade of history Macleod played a leading part. This is a hero to fire the imagination of all young readers. His story is unforgettably a great story of Canada. 

From the dust jacket