Sperry Cline

Sperry Cline, DCM was a frontier policeman and author in British Columbia, Canada.

Cline was born near St. Thomas, Ontario in the early 1880s. In his teens, he traveled to England and joined the British South Africa Company's cavalry. He rode with the Matabele Field Force for the defence of Bulawayo and then stayed in South Africa, where he later fought in the Boer War, earning a Distinguished Conduct Medal.

After recovering from malaria, Cline returned to Canada and moved to Hazelton, British Columbia in the winter of 1904. In Hazelton he tried his hand at many jobs, beginning with mail delivery in the form of mushing the huskies down the frozen Skeena River to the coast and back again. He freighted supplies by canoe, worked as a pilot on a sailing sloop and was a foreman at the Silver Standard mine. In 1914, he finally found his niche. On the day of the second robbery at the Union Bank in New Hazelton, Cline was asked by Hazelton's Chief Constable, Ernie Gammon, to join the posse that would capture three of the four surviving bandits. Shortly thereafter, Cline joined the police force at Hazelton and would be a policeman in British Columbia for the next thirty-two years. He acquired the nickname "Dutch" because of his tendency to pepper his English language with a liberal smattering of Cape Dutch, Swahili and Chinook, often all in the same sentence.

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