Policing the plains : $b being the real-life record of the famous Royal North-West Mounted PoliceMacBeth, R. G. (Roderick George)
History
Policing the plains : $b being the real-life record of the famous Royal North-West Mounted Police
MacBeth, R. G. (Roderick George)
Northwest, Canadian -- History; Royal Canadian Mounted Police
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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