prestige and showed the world a new
record in keeping potentially dangerous frontier camps almost entirely
free from crime. There was hardly any gun play. There were only two or
three homicides, and there were no failures in justice and no lynchings.

When in 1894 the first rumours of a probable rush into the region came
to the outside, the Dominion Government felt that it was imperative
that, in order to prevent lawlessness as well as to protect the
interests of Canada in respect to the area within her boundary, the
famous corps that had policed all the western frontiers should be
represented immediately in the gold regions of the far north. And it was
vitally important that a man should be sent in as officer commanding who
would be specially fitted for such an unprecedented and extraordinary
task. That man was found in the person of Inspector Charles Constantine,
and he, taking with him other picked men in Inspector D. A. E.
Strickland, Assistant Surgeon A. E. Wells, Staff-Sergeant Brown and
twenty non-commissioned officers and constables, left for their distant
field of action in the month of June. Strickland, who had done fine
service on the plains, was to be of great value in the north on account
of his knowledge of woodcraft logging, building and such like, in
addition to his regular police duties. Wells was to have his hands full,
since for some time he was, as some one said, the only doctor in a
region as large as France and had, with sometimes inadequate means, to
fight scourges of scurvy and the other diseases incident to food and
climate. The men in the detachments were experienced and hardy enough to
face anything that might turn up either in the shape of man or beast or
difficult atmospheric conditions.

Constantine had served in the Red River expedition, and then, on account
of special qualifications, had been made chief of the Provincial Police
in Manitoba, where he was a terror to evil-doers. When the second Riel
rebellion broke out and a volunteer regiment was being hurriedly raised
in Winnipeg for service in the Big Bear country, Constantine, to the
great delight of all of us who joined up with that regiment, became
Adjutant. During that campaign he was always to the fore in every crisis
and showed particular skill in rooting out men who were inciting the
Indians to revolt. One morning of dense fog away beyond Fort Pitt our
outside picket was fired on when I had charge of the guard. Calling out
the gu