Born into a military family at Medonte Township, Province of Canada (now Ontario), he was the son of Royal Navy Captain Elmes Yelverton Steele, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, and one of six brothers to have served in the British Armed Forces.

[citation needed] In 1873, Steele was the third officer sworn into the newly formed North-West Mounted Police (NWMP), entering as a staff constable.

He was one of the officers to lead the new recruits of the NWMP on the 1874 March West, when he returned to Fort Garry, present-day Winnipeg, Manitoba.

In 1877, he was assigned to meet with Sitting Bull, who, having defeated Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn, had moved with his people into Canada to escape American vengeance.

Steele along with U.S. Army Major General Alfred Howe Terry attempted to persuade Sitting Bull to return to the United States.

He was present at the Battle of Frenchman's Butte, where Big Bear's warriors defeated the Canadian forces under General Thomas Bland Strange.

Two weeks later, Steele and his two dozen Mounties defeated Big Bear's force at Loon Lake, District of Saskatchewan, in the last battle fought on Canadian territory.

In 1887, Steele was ordered to take “D” Division to southeastern British Columbia, where the provincial government had mismanaged relations with the Ktunaxa (Kootenay) nation to the point that violence was threatened.

The division returned to Fort Macleod in the summer of 1888, and Steele commanded that post, the largest outside NWMP headquarters in Regina, for the next decade.

To help control the situation, he established the rule that no one would be allowed to enter the Yukon without a ton of goods to support himself, thus preventing the entry of desperate and potentially-unruly speculators and adventurers.

As the force reported directly to Ottawa, Steele had almost free rein to run things as he chose, always with an eye towards maintaining law, order, and Canadian sovereignty.

[4] This Canadian light cavalry unit, in British Imperial service, was sent to South Africa during the Second Boer War, where Steele commanded them with distinction in the role of reconnaissance scouts.

Steele, however, apparently disliked greatly[citation needed] what he was ordered to do by the British, which included burning towns, farms and homesteads, killing livestock of the Boer families and moving the populace to concentration camps.

Here they met Lord Strathcona for the first time and were presented with medals by King Edward VII during a visit to Buckingham Palace.

On 19 June 2008, Steele's wealth of personal papers and writings were repatriated to Canada in a ceremony in Trafalgar Square in London, England, headed by the Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex.