Policing the plains

by R. G. MacBeth

POLICE WITH DOGS AND EQUIPMENT ON SPLIT LAKE. N.W.T.

And when Commissioner Perry wrote in his report as above quoted, he was able to support his statement by actual facts from that very same year. He said: "All over the North-land members of this Force are carrying out these difficult journeys. Attached to this report you will find many reports of equally dangerous patrols. Sergeant Hayter, 700 miles return journey from Fullerton along the West Coast of Hudson Bay to Rankin Inlet, to meet Sergeant Borden, who went up from Fort Churchill, carrying mail and taking a census of the Esquimaux; Sergeant Walker from Fort Churchill to York Factory and return; Sergeant Nicholls from Norway House to Fort Churchill and return to Gimli; Sergeant Edgenton from Split Lake to Fort Churchill, arriving with dogs abandoned by the way, and three days without food; Sergeant Munday from the Pas to Lac de Brochet and return, 900 miles in fifty-one days; and Sergeant MacLeod from Fort Vermilion across the Caribou Mountains to Great Slave Lake." This is a most formidable list, and to anyone who knows the country and the climate it affords the imagination a moving panorama, in which constant danger and almost incredible endurance are portrayed. All this forcibly reminded Canada of the devotion of her sons in the Northern hinterland, and that was the purpose of it being definitely stated. And it gives us a sort of veneration for the memory of the four men of the Fitzgerald patrol whose magnificent strength, after having been tried and proven on many similar journeys for years, succumbed before a combination of intolerable cold, blizzard-swept trails, unfamiliar river passes, shortage of provisions and starving train-dogs. For it was the death of these men that brought home to the people the astonishing achievements and heroisms of Canadian chivalry on the frontiers.

Fitzgerald himself, as we have already seen, had been famous for years as an intrepid patrol man, and had been promoted to the rank of Inspector for his services. All the others, Kinney, Taylor and ex-Constable Carter, had been more than once mentioned in dispatches. This is a legitimate expression, because in reality the Mounted Police were always on active service, and their merits were made known in the reports of their superior officers.

Strangely enough, from the human viewpoint, it was at Fitzgerald's own request that he was selected by the Commissioner in 1910 to take command of the Mackenzie River district. It was only the year before that he, then a staff-sergeant, had handed over that district to Inspector Jennings, but after receiving his promotion, Fitzgerald heard the insistent call of the great familiar North so overwhelmingly that he asked to be sent back into the white wastes again. And further, to vindicate some divine purpose running through it all, he suggested the patrol in that direction himself. The patrol had always been from "Dawson to Fort Macpherson and Herschell," but Fitzgerald asked to have its order reversed, and offered to go from Herschell Island to Macpherson and Dawson, from which latter point he could get into touch by wire with headquarters at Regina and report on his district. To this the Commissioner agreed, and so notified the Comptroller at Ottawa, as well as the officer commanding at Dawson, who was told to expect the patrol from Macpherson about the end of January.

When the patrol started from Fort Macpherson everything seemed favourable for a mid-winter trip. The men were all in fit condition, thoroughly acquainted with conditions of winter travel, and so keen to make a record journey that they did not burden themselves with more food than necessary for themselves and their dogs, of which they had fifteen for their three trains. The sequel proved that had they been able to keep the route they would have made Dawson in good shape. The trouble came upon them when neither map nor compass or any previous knowledge availed them in the maze of rivers and mountains that lay in their way. Taylor and Kinney had never been over the route, Fitzgerald had been over it once on another trail from the Dawson end. Carter had been over the new trail once a few years previously, but he, too, had come over it from Dawson to Macpherson, and a route with its piloting marks of bluffs and trees or banks by the way-side looks quite different when traversed the opposite way. Carter was a powerful, experienced and thoroughly reliable man, who had seen much service in the Force. Though not in the corps at the time of the patrol, he had been confident of his ability to guide the party to Dawson, and Fitzgerald had taken him on in that capacity.

The weather was intensely cold, and the going heavy, with here and there the rivers bursting up through the broken ice and creating very difficult trails. But they were all used to that, and did not mind it. Over a portage at a certain point they secured the services of an Indian, named Esau, to break trail and guide them to a certain point from which Carter was sure he knew the way. There the Indian was discharged and returned to his camp, Fitzgerald probably feeling that extra expenditure of Government funds for a guide was not justified when Carter was along.

The scene changes to Dawson. The patrol did not arrive when expected, and Superintendent A. E. Snyder, an experienced officer, who was in command there, began to get anxious, and when some Indians arrived from the Fort Macpherson direction he got in touch with them at once. From them he learned that Esau, who had been discharged at a certain point, expected the patrol to be in Dawson many days before the day of Snyder's inquiry. Snyder, fearing the worst, became alarmed. He wired the Commissioner as to the situation, and at the same time called Corporal Dempster from Forty Mile and instructed him to get ready a party to go in search of the lost patrol. The Commissioner flashed back instructions to send out a search party, and it went without delay. It is evident from his telegram that the Commissioner, who knew the perils of the trail and had his hand on every part of the country, thought the trouble was with the failure of the guide, because he asks why the Indian, who was mentioned by Snyder, was discharged, and in order that no undue risks be taken he says, "Send a well-outfitted party."

The party sent out was fully up to requirements. Corporal Dempster was a noted traveller of those Yukon trails, and at the date of this writing is out on the same difficult route, his strength unbroken by the intervening years. For his party in search of Fitzgerald he chose Constable Fyfe, ex-Constable Turner, and an Indian, Charles Stewart. They had all been over the country again and again, and so knew it well. They were all eager to go in the hope of reaching their missing comrades. The broad outline of their duty was given them by Superintendent Snyder, with the Spartan simplicity and directness characteristic of the Mounted Police. It ran thus: "Corporal Dempster. You will leave to-morrow for a patrol over the Fort Macpherson trail to locate the whereabouts of Inspector Fitzgerald's party. Indians from Macpherson reported him on New Year's Day at Mountain Creek. Fair travelling from Mountain Creek is about twenty days to Dawson. I understand that at Hart, no matter which route he took, he would have to cross the divide. I think it would be advisable to make for this point and take up his trail from there. I cannot give you any specific instructions; you will have to be guided by circumstances and your own judgment, bearing in mind that nothing is to stand in your way until you have got into touch with this party."

Dempster and his men made a record trip, both going to Macpherson and coming back. And this they did despite the fact that they had to face high winds, blinding snowstorms and flooded ice, besides searching the rivers that branched off the main route. They arrived back in Dawson on April 17, 1911, gaunt and haggard. "It's the hardest patrol I ever made," said Dempster, and that not by the perils of the way, which he was well able to meet, but because, as had already been told to the world, he had found the dead bodies of his four gallant comrades, where they had perished of cold and hunger on the way.