There was a good deal of wage dispute on the line, but Inspector Sanders says, "As to the amount of wages received by the men and their not having any money to send to their families in the east, it was very noticeable to me that the men who complained most drank most." This needs no comment.
It is interesting to note here the outside opinion of the "Fort Steele Prospecter" as contained in an editorial in that paper in February, 1898. After giving a general description of the mixed class of men on the road it says, "The crimes along the road, however, are surprisingly small, considering the vicious element which comprises the contingent of camp followers" in the way of whisky sellers, gamblers and disorderly characters. "This happy state of affairs is due to the innate fear of Canadian justice and the scrupulous surveillance of the efficient corps of the North-West Mounted Police into whose hands the enforcement of law is committed. No one can travel over the line without a feeling of admiration for the system which can produce such excellent results, the absolute security of life and property in a region infested by rogues and adventurers from every clime." Sanders agrees that hosts of men had taken up work to which they were wholly unaccustomed. A lot of men were happy when handling an axe, but the pick and shovel had a saddening effect on them. And Sanders is in keeping with the general habit of the Police when he says, "We tried our utmost to have the real grievances of the men settled, and my representations to the general manager of construction always met with prompt attention." So they should, for they would be fair and just.
Inspector Howe, who was in charge in 1898 at Regina, had a wire from Boston about a man who had robbed the merchants of that æsthetic city of large sums of money. The man was supposed then on the train heading towards Regina. Howe sent a sergeant to Qu'Appelle, who boarded the suspected train and located his quarry in a Pullman compartment, which was locked. The man within, who was accompanied by a lady, would not open the door. At next station a Mounted Police constable got on board and the two men in scarlet uniform smashed the door. The woman threatened to blow their brains out, but failed. The runaway couple had the money and bonds, and after due process went back to Boston to serve a term.
Inspector Howe tells rather a rich story of a Police Inspector in Montana who apologized profusely to Howe for not answering by wire a telegram in which Howe had notified the said Montana Inspector of the whereabouts of a man much desired by the Police in that State. The Montana Inspector writes, "I handed my deputy a telegram and told him to send it off to you at once. He went out to send it but was shot dead, and this morning the coroner handed the telegram to me. It had never been sent, so you will see I am not altogether to blame." Howe considered the excuse valid, but the estimate of the value of human life in Montana it disclosed did not suit the ideas of a Mounted Policeman.
CHAPTER XII
STIRRING DAYS ABROAD AND AT HOME
In the report of Superintendent Cotton for the year of the big Yukon stampede there is related one of the many incidents which indicated that on the plains the Mounted Police were keeping up to their record for initiative and daring, even though their work was less in the limelight than the spectacular world rush to the Yukon furnished. It seems that some months before the date of the report a prisoner named Nelson, sentenced to a term of imprisonment for a serious offence, escaped by jumping from a train on the way to the Manitoba Penitentiary from Regina. Constable Clisby, who was on duty at Saskatoon, was notified by wire from Dundurn station, and at once took up the recapture. The Saskatoon ferry was out of order, so he could not use it. But he was not to be deterred from the pursuit of a criminal by a trifle like that, or he would not have been up to the Mounted Police standard in resource and inventive capacity. So, as the river was impassable in the ordinary way, Clisby commandeered a railway hand-car, and possibly nailed an extra plank or two upon it. Then he got his troop-horse to climb up and stand upon it, while this strong-armed constable took hold of the "pump-handle" and worked his way across the trestle railway bridge many feet above the surging river. One can easily see what a desperate risk this was to take in cold blood. The big bronco had been broken enough for use on the solid earth by an expert. But to venture into the air with a semi-wild horse, which by any movement of fright at the unusual experience might upset the whole outfit into the river, was about as daring an experiment as anyone could try. But the strange transport got safely over, and Clisby, shaking out that bronco into a long gallop, found his man in the home of a settler, engaged in filing off the leg-iron in order to be able to get away more swiftly. Of course the prisoner was gathered in, as was also the settler who had loaned the file and was standing by watching the interesting process. The peculiar thing was that when the settler, who had given the escaping prisoner the file and stood by to see him use it to make his escape more certain, was brought up before two magistrates for helping a prisoner to elude his sentence, these sapient administrators of law dismissed the charge. This miscarriage of justice so disgusted both the constable and his superintendent that in, contemplation of it they seemed to forget the astonishing feat with the hand-car. But we dig it up proudly from the old report. It is in keeping with this desire on the part of the Mounted Police to see justice meted out to the guilty for the protection of society that we find them impatient with legal technicalities which freed the guilty, or the views of any legally constituted body which headed off further investigation into what was possibly serious crime. And this remark is made at this point, because I come across a report in which a Mounted Police Superintendent, while not openly complaining, thinks it worth while to call attention to a Coroner's jury which, after inquest in the case of a man who had been found dead with his neck broken, brings in the unexpected verdict that the man died by the visitation of God. The fact that the Superintendent simply states the matter without note or comment indicates pretty clearly his opinion of the intelligence of that jury. It recalls the case of the famous frontier judge, Sir Mathew Begbie, of British Columbia, who is said to have been much disgusted and amazed when a jury acquitted a prisoner whom the evidence clearly indicated had sand-bagged an innocent citizen. The judge had no option but to discharge the notorious character whom the jury of his peers had exonerated. "You may go," said the indignant judge, "but it seems to me that you would be doing good service to this country if you sand-bagged every man on that jury."
