Policing the plains

by R. G. MacBeth

CHAPTER XI

IN THE GOLD COUNTRY

Away on the banks of the Red River hard by where the City of Winnipeg with its aggressive business marts and its surging polyglot population now stands, there is the old Kildonan Church, which the original Selkirk Settlers, pioneers of the West, built for themselves and their children. These early colonists, unmindful of worldly gain, had the traditional hospitality of the Highland race to which they belonged, and the proverbial absence of class distinction which always obtains on a frontier:

"No bolts had they to their doors
Nor bars to their windows,
But their houses were open as day
And the hearts of the owners."

It was natural that to such a place should come on frequent visits the Hudson's Bay men, the explorers and pathfinders, most of whom were of the same race and creed as the pioneers. And it was natural too, that when these pathfinders came to the end of the long trail their bodies should be brought back to rest in the God's acre around that old church, the famous cemetery where

"Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep."

There were other lines of Gray's immortal poem that could be applied with great appropriateness to that churchyard that lay in the midst of a settlement in which were men of undoubted talent and power had their lot been cast in other surroundings. Such lines, for instance, as these:

"Some village Hampden, who, with dauntless breast,
The little tyrant of his fields withstood:
Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest:
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood."

But there are many resting there who became known far beyond their early circle. Most of them are not connected with our present story, but one monument in that ancient churchyard bears the name of a man whose record shines out with splendour in the history of the Yukon, which region was afterwards the scene of one of the most brilliant, successful and grandly tragic chapters in the record of the Mounted Police. The name is that of Robert Campbell, the famous Hudson's Bay Company explorer, who threescore years before the famous gold-rush which required the guardian presence of the Police had discovered the Yukon River, and had travelled for years in the regions which later on became known as one of the great gold-fields of the world. Campbell was not looking for gold or caring for it. He was opening out a new Empire for trade with the usual self-forgetful devotion of its employees to the interests of the great Fur Company.

I remember Campbell, guest often in my father's house on the Red River in my boyhood, and later, for he lived to a great age. A Highlander too was he, from Glenlyon in Perthshire, tall, stately, handsome, with black hair and beard, his whole bearing suggestive of power. A modest man withal, for he refused to call after himself the great river he had discovered, and he left no material out of which a real biography could be written. But it was because he had blazed the way and because another Hudson's Bay man, Hunter Murray, had built Fort Yukon, that others throughout the years began to penetrate into the wild until, in the nineties, there came the discovery of acres of gold which attracted the wildest rush in the history of mining. There have been many wild rushes in different parts of the world, but those who went on the Yukon rush faced climatic conditions in blizzards, bottomless snow drifts and desperate cold, as well as on torrential streams and treacherous rapids, which, from the standpoint of hardship and privation, dwarf all other mining expeditions into insignificance. Of all this burden and exposure and hardship the Mounted Police, in the simple discharge of their duties, bore the lion's share, and that without any financial compensation such as others expected who were drawn to the north by the lure of gold. The Police had nothing beyond their small pay, and they kept themselves strictly and sternly aloof from opportunities to enrich themselves either in the way of business or in the way of allowing any offers to be made them as a price for shielding law-breakers. They did not make any money, though it was being made by thousands all around them. But they did their duty so valiantly and so uncompromisingly that they added to their already great prestige and showed the world a new record in keeping potentially dangerous frontier camps almost entirely free from crime. There was hardly any gun play. There were only two or three homicides, and there were no failures in justice and no lynchings.