Sperry Cline

Sperry Cline, DCM (26 May 1881 – 8 May 1964) was a Canadian frontier policeman and author in British Columbia.

Early life

Cline was born near St. Thomas, Ontario, to an ethnic German family, the son of Jonas and Marie Cline. The family were Baptist. Gunanoot was found not guilty.

Throughout his years on the Hazelton police force, he became known as a man of common sense and integrity, often willing to apply practical solutions to a situation, rather than always going "by the book". He had a wheelbarrow in which he would haul the patrons of the local hotels who had imbibed too freely off to the Skookum House, (jail). Cline jokingly referred to his wheelbarrow as the "Hazelton Patrol Wagon". His earlier experience with mushing sled dogs would come in handy on many occasions, once he took a dog team 170 out of town to an isolated cabin along the Yukon Telegraph Line, to investigate the disappearance of a lineman who, as it turned out, had frozen to death.

When Cline left Hazelton in the 1920s, he moved onto the police force in Smithers and then on to the Chemainus police force, from where he was transferred to the Police Training School in Victoria.

Author

Cline retired from the British Columbia Provincial Police in 1946 and went on to write a series of articles about his adventures in Hazelton, which he entitled Policing the Skeena. Many of these stories would be featured in the magazine BC Outdoors and some would go on to be published in Art Down's Pioneer Days in British Columbia series.

With pioneer sternwheeler historian, Wiggs O'Neill, Cline co-authored, Along the Totem Trail: Port Essington to Hazelton.

Cline died in Burnaby on 8 May 1964.