Review of <i>The Cowboy Cavalry: The Story of the Rocky Mountain Rangers</i> By Gordon E. Tolton
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gordon E. Tolton’s detailed description of the activities of the Rocky Mountain Rangers adds new research to an earlier book of his published in 1994. The Rangers existed for just three months and saw no real action, but through their history one can learn much about southern Alberta during the North-West Rebellion of 1885 that is often ignored in standard accounts focusing on Saskatchewan and the Frog Lake area of Alberta. The first part of The Cowboy Cavalry places the Rangers’ activities of 1885 in the larger context of Louis Riel and the Métis, and especially the Aboriginal groups of southern Alberta: the Peigan, Blood, and Blackfoot peoples, who were then on the verge of starvation. When trouble broke out in the spring of 1885 there was panic among the settlers and ranchers of the area, but the restraining leadership of Crowfoot, and especially Red Crow, kept any large-scale violence at bay. Nevertheless, John Stewart, a well-connected former militia officer turned rancher, raised a unit of three mounted companies of ranchers and former North-West Mounted Police officers from around the town of Macleod.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".