s at Lake LaBarge and
Little Salmon, accumulating stores of goods from the coast to be taken
through in the spring to Dawson, where a shortage was impending. He had
no easy time getting over the route, he and his men only saving
themselves from wreck on Lake Bennett by throwing overboard some of
their freight. With forty below zero and everything frozen up, Starnes
had to build winter quarters at Little Salmon, and with the true
democracy of the frontier we find the officials he was escorting into
the Yukon giving a hand--Judge McGuire, Mr. F. O. Wade, Crown
Prosecutor, Dr. Bonnar and others. But early in the spring Starnes moved
on to Dawson. The rush was setting in and with Inspector F. Harper and a
few men he had to hold the place for law and order during a sort of
interregnum period. No civil courts were established till Judge McGuire
came, and to administer the law under such conditions was always trying.
But it was done. Offenders were given no rest. "Gunmen" were made
impossible and gamblers found no city of refuge in the gold country. In
three months Starnes and Harper, principally the former, tried 215
cases, these being all the way from dog-stealing (dogs were dogs in the
north), drunkenness, keeping or frequenting disorderly houses to
vagrancy, using vile language and refusing to work. If men would not
work when free they were sentenced to jail with hard labour, because
these experienced men knew that idleness is the prolific progenitor of
crime. In consequence crime never got a start in the most quickly
crowded mining camp in the world. It had been held down from the
beginning. The place had its saloons and dance hall and fools were
fleeced there as they are in older centres, but the superb strength and
incorruptibility of the Mounted Police proved too much for the lawless
element, and the whole period makes one of the proudest records in the
history of this wonderful force.

The big stampede for Dawson started in 1897-98, and to cope with the
incidentals and probably accompaniments of it, there was a whirlwind
series of movements by the Mounted Police which seemed to anticipate
every contingency, head off all manner of calamities, make provision for
protecting the boundary line against infractions of the customs
regulations, and generally see that law and order should prevail all
over the wide area that was soon teeming with a nondescript
heterogeneous population of excited gold-hunters. Two of the big men