Everyone has heard of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They constitute one of the most remarkable military forces in existence, with an amazing record for the capture and punishment of criminals in the frontier lands of the Dominion. I have met with the Mounted Police in all parts of Canada, have visited the headquarters in Ottawa and the training station at Regina, and have talked here at Dawson with the inspector in charge of the Yukon division. I find the service a gold mine of stories, and fully deserving its reputation for maintaining law and order on the fringes of civilization.

Our own “wild and woolly West” has disappeared, but Canada still has vast areas of undeveloped country into which white men are pushing their way under conditions similar to those in the United States a generation or two ago. But where our frontier was notorious for its lawlessness, that of the Dominion is equally noted for its few crimes. In the Canadian Northwest a “bad man” cannot long escape the strong arm of the law, and in nine cases out of ten he meets with punishment both swift and sure.

From the wheat lands adjoining our border to the gold rivers of the Yukon, from the Great Lakes to the Arctic Ocean, the settler, the prospector, or the trader can lie down to sleep at night with little fear for his safety. That this is so is chiefly due to this police force.

Detachments of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are now located all over Canada. They are to be found in the thickly populated centres as well as in the Far North. But it was as a frontier police that the organization was first created, and it was in the Northwest Territories that its reputation was made. It has its stations about Hudson Bay, along the Peace River, on the banks of the Mackenzie, and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The latest posts established are those on the north coast of Baffin Island, opposite Greenland, and on Ellesmere Island, less than one thousand miles from the North Pole.

The duties of the Mounted Police are widely varied. They are especially charged with the enforcement of federal statutes, and are wholly responsible for law and order in the Northwest Territory, the Yukon, the national parks, and the Indian reservations. Elsewhere the organization coöperates with provincial authorities and the federal departments. It looks after such matters as violations of the customs, of excise regulations, the circulation of radical or revolutionary propaganda, the improper storing of explosives, and the debauching of the Indians. Special patrols are sometimes sent out to strengthen the hands of the Indian Department when unrest is reported among their charges. Some are detailed to see that the betting at the race tracks in the various provinces does not infringe upon the laws, and others to escort trainloads of harvest workers to their destinations and prevent disorders on the way. Patrols go for hundreds of miles by dog sled into the Far North to keep order and investigate crimes among the Eskimos.

The actual discharge of these duties leads to a variety of activities. The Mounted Police patrol the United States border to guard against smuggling of liquor, Chinese, and narcotics. They ride about the newly colonized districts, visiting the homes of the settlers and watching for cattle thieves. Any complaint of disorder or law breaking is promptly investigated, and a member of the force may spend months in the rôle of detective, seeking evidence or making a search for a suspected man.

The Mounted Police have cut many of the trails of the Far North. When the big gold strikes were made in the Klondike, they built the first road through the wilds of the Yukon, and they have opened up parts of the Canadian Rockies to prospectors. Whenever a new gold district is discovered, or an oil find is reported, the Mounted Police are among the first on the scene, and every one knows that the law is at hand. That is why the Klondike was peaceable during gold rush days, while in Alaska, across the international boundary, notorious “bad men,” such as “Soapy Smith” and his gang, held almost undisputed sway for a time.

The Mounted Police sometimes erect shelters along the new trails, in which they place stores of food for use of prospectors in an emergency. They often bring relief to those in the wilds rendered helpless through injury, disease, or insanity. They settle on the spot minor disputes, especially among the Indians and Eskimos, sometimes perform marriages, and, as the Dawson inspector said to me to-day, do about everything any occasion may require except grant divorces. In extreme cases, a member of the force may arrest his man, try his case, sentence him to death, and, finally, act as clergyman, executioner, and coroner. It is the almost inviolate rule of the organization, however, that a prisoner must be brought in alive and given his chance at a fair trial.

All these activities are carried on by a body of only a little more than a thousand men, scattered from the Maritime Provinces to the Alaska boundary. Here in the Yukon there are but fifty-one men, for whom horses and dogs furnish a part of the transportation.

To get into the service a man must have a good character, a sound body, and some education. Most of the men speak both French and English. Recruits must be between the ages of twenty-two and forty, unmarried, and expert horsemen. The term of enlistment is three years, with reënlistments permitted. Many of the present force have been long in the service. In their training at Regina, much attention is paid to shooting with both rifle and pistol, and in the latter the Mounted Police now hold the championship of all Canada. Many of them are young Englishmen who have failed to make their fortunes and some are younger sons of the nobility. In the old days a son of Charles Dickens, the novelist, served beside a former circus clown and the brother of a baronet.

The inspector of this body at Dawson is the military ruler of a region bigger than Germany. It begins at the south, within thirty miles of the Pacific Ocean, and extends northward to Herschel Island, near where the Mackenzie River flows into the Arctic. It is about a thousand miles long and several hundred miles wide. The inspector tells me that his force is scattered all over this territory, from White Horse, at the end of the White Pass Railway, to Rampart House, on the Arctic Circle. When I asked him about the work of his force, he said:

“Each of our constables has one or two men with him, and sometimes an Indian or so. Together they patrol the whole country. They make long trips to the mines, and report what is going on among the prospectors. In out-of-the-way places they keep order among the Indians and the Eskimos. They also look after the poor and the insane. Recently we heard that a dangerous lunatic was at large over in the Donjek District. Our patrol went after him and brought him several hundred miles through the country to White Horse, whence he was later sent to an asylum. Last year our men penetrated to regions never visited before; they frequently make trips of hundreds of miles by dog sled.”

“But how can you keep track of the people in such a large territory?” I asked. “Your whole land is a wilderness, and for more than half the year it is all snow and ice.”

“Each hotel and road house is required to keep a daily record of all who stop there,” he replied, “and I may say that we know about where every man in the territory sleeps every night. We are informed of all the passengers who start up or down river, and get reports from every telegraph station they pass on the trip. When a steamer leaves White Horse for Dawson the purser hands in the names of his passengers and they are telegraphed here. If any one gets off on the way his name is wired to us, and we check up the list when the boat comes in. If three men set off in a canoe, the report on that canoe as it passes the next telegraph station will show us if one of them is missing. The patrols also send in reports of the names and business of all newcomers in their districts.”

“Give me some idea of the amount of crime committed in your territory.”

“Our record is fairly good,” replied the inspector of the Mounted Police. “Last year we investigated forty-two cases, only eight of which were under the criminal code. Out of this total of forty-two, we secured thirty-seven convictions. Remember that this is for an area as big as France, and for a population made up largely of frontiersmen, miners, Indians, and Eskimos. Most of the time we have so few bad characters in jail here that it is difficult to keep our barracks in order and the lawn properly mowed. Just now we have two women serving terms for picking the pockets of men who were drunk. They work in the jail laundry, so we are sure of help in our washing for the rest of the year.

“We have had but few murders in our territory,” the inspector continued. “The average was less than one a year for the first twenty years after the big rush to the Klondike, and in every case, without exception, the guilty were caught and executed. There are some interesting stories connected with crimes in this part of the world. Take, for instance, one that occurred in Alaska. The murdered man was a miner who had been killed by an Indian at the close of the season when the miners were about to leave for the winter. They had not time to follow the Indian, but they went to the chief of his tribe and told him that he must catch the murderer and have him ready for them when they returned in the spring. When the spring came they went to the chief and demanded the man. He replied:

“‘Me got him all right. You come see.’ He thereupon took them to the back of the camp and showed them a dead Indian frozen in a large block of ice. As they looked, the chief continued:

“‘We got him last fall. We know you kill him in spring, so we shoot him in fall. What use feed him all winter?’

“We had a case of a miner who inveigled two young men with money to go with him in a canoe two hundred miles down the Yukon. From there they were to make their way inland to a gold prospect the miner had located. As they camped, the miner had one of the men build a fire, while he took the other off to hunt game. Within a short time the man at the camp heard a shot and later the miner came in and said they had killed a bear about a mile away and wanted the man at the camp to go with him to bring in the meat. The two started off together, the miner walking behind. The stranger began to think that all was not right. He turned his head quickly and found that his companion had raised his rifle and was drawing a bead on him. He grappled with him and succeeded in getting the gun. He ran away and finally got to Dawson, where he notified us. We watched the river and within a few days the old miner came down in a boat. Our men arrested him and then went back to the camp and found the body of the man who started out to hunt bear. The murderer was tried in a month and hanged two months later.”

“Do you ever have any lynchings?” I asked.

“I do not believe there has ever been a lynching in all Canada,” said the inspector. “Certainly I never have heard of one in the Yukon. Neither do we have hold-ups such as are not uncommon, I am told, in the United States.”

The inspector’s reference to hold-ups reminded me of a story of a highwayman I heard at the Mounted Police headquarters in Ottawa. A road agent held up a man and a woman who were riding through the hills. He covered them with his revolver and made the man dismount so he could go through his pockets. The woman was sitting on her horse, congratulating herself upon her escape, when the robber stepped up to her, saying, “Beg pardon. Just a moment, madam.” He thereupon gently raised her skirt to her knees, thrust his hand into her stocking, and took out her money. He seemed to know just where it was, and there was no waste effort.

“One of the classics of our service”—it is the inspector who is speaking once more—“is the King-Hayward case. Edward Hayward, a young Englishman, was killed in the wilds around Lesser Slave Lake. He had gone up there from Edmonton to hunt with Charles King, an American from Salt Lake City. Some weeks later an Indian notified one of our sergeants that two men had come into the country and one of them had disappeared. The officer got on the trail, went to the last camp fire, where the Indian reported seeing both men, and sifted the ashes. He found three hard lumps of flesh and a bit of skull bone. Near the camp fire was a little pond. In this Indian women were set to work to fish up with their toes any hard substance they might find in the ooze. They brought up a stick-pin of unusual design and a pocketbook. The pond was drained and on the bottom was a shoe with a broken needle sticking in it. The sergeant then examined the ashes of the fire with a microscope, which revealed the eye of the broken needle.

“King was tracked down and arrested, and Hayward’s brother was brought on from England to identify the trinkets of the murdered man. It took the sergeant eleven months to complete his case, and he had to bring forty Indian and half-breed witnesses from Lesser Slave Lake to Edmonton to testify at the trial. But King was finally convicted and hanged. All this cost the Canadian government more than thirty thousand dollars, yet it was not considered a waste of money.”

I inquired of the inspector the cause of most of the crime in his division. He replied:

“One of our troubles is with smuggled liquor. We try especially to keep it from the Indians, but nevertheless it gets in. In one instance bottles of whisky were shipped to the Yukon inside the carcasses of dressed hogs. In another a woman contrived a rubber sleeve, which she filled with whisky. All one had to do for a drink was to give her arm a hard squeeze.”

I asked how it was that the Mounted Police are so feared by bad characters that this whole territory can be controlled by a handful of them. The officer replied:

“Every man in frontier Canada knows that if he is wanted by the Mounted Police, they are sure to get him. A fugitive from justice could very easily kill one of our men sent after him, but he realizes that if he does so, another will follow, and as many more as are necessary until he is brought in. I have seen constables arrest men of twice their weight and strength, and have had one or two men round up a mob and bring them all to jail. This is true not only of our own bad men, but also of those who come across from Alaska. They may be dangerous on the other side of the border, but they are always gentle enough when they get here.

“The big thing that helps us,” concluded the head of the police, “is that the government supports us up to the limit. For example, it cost us two hundred thousand dollars to convict in one famous murder case, but it was done and the guilty man hanged. Ottawa always tells us that it is prepared to spend any amount of money rather than have a murderer go unpunished. It is that policy that enables us to keep order here.”

THE END