he 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