This first detachment of the Royal Mounted Police made an expedition in the summer of 1874 into the very heart of the Blackfeet country, and returned to Dufferin in November, having made an effective campaign in the interests of law and order, {306} from which very important and momentous results have ensued since that time. That the small body of less than seven hundred men should exercise such control, not only over so vast an area of almost unknown wilderness, inhabited by such a diversity of human beings scattered widely apart, is practically an isolated fact in all history. To this magnificent Force is largely due, to-day, the conditions that invest the North-West with such promise and prosperity. "The Force may be said to have largely completed the work it originally set out to do," writes Frank Yeigh[1]; "so far as the frontier provinces are concerned, a work that is worth many times its cost, as an object-lesson of the power and authority of government existing behind all real civilisation." [1] _Through the Heart of Canada_. T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1910. Still, the task of the mounted patroller is by no means yet completed. The present force costs the country nearly three-quarters of a million dollars a year. Their outposts are being set farther and farther afield. Thus, from the promontory of Cape Chidley, at almost the most northerly point of Labrador, the barracks overlook Hudson Straits; another guards Hudson Bay, while a third protects the Arctic seaboard, and the most western post serves to protect the gold land of the Yukon. It is a fact, and a striking one, that on the three-hundred-mile road from White Horse to Dawson the traveller {307} is as safe as in any part of Canada. Of the life of this Royal Force Mr. Haydon says: "The stories of the daily life of these rough-riders of the plains are the very essence of romance, of high courage, of Herculean tasks performed and great difficulties overcome. The Mounted Police kept down lawlessness when the Canadian Pacific Railway was being built, they fought bravely during the Riel Rebellion of 1885, they kept well in hand the gold rush to the Klondyke in 1889-90, and not a few served in South Africa during the Boer War. But the deeds of the individual men call for high praise. Their qualities of fidelity, devotion to duty, and their fearlessness are constantly being exemplified. A thousand miles on the ice, 'mushing' by dog-team and komatik, through unexplored haunts of bear and wolf, is a common marching order for these splendid pioneers."