or two of
foolscap, giving to the Department at Ottawa an official report of
their travels and observations, is the only record that survives.
And very few ever read these records, although they sometimes
thrill those who do read them."

One other important duty fell to the lot of these Policemen in the home
country, and reference has been made to it in the earlier pages, namely,
the self-imposed duty of becoming builders of the country by making
known the resources of all its various parts. And when they made known
the resources of the country they, without any gain therefrom
themselves, protected those who came in to develop them. Sometimes they
had to protect these people against themselves. In the Yukon gold rush
the Police threw a cordon around the entrances to the mining country and
prevented foolhardy, unfit and unequipped men and women, crazed with the
gold lust, from venturing a journey which would have meant their falling
frozen by the wayside or being lost in the angry rapids, which even the
inexperienced were ready in their ignorance to essay. These gold-seekers
were allowed to go in when they were prepared or when they were under
the care of men of experience. Similarly, at the time of this writing,
the Police in the Athabasca, Peace and Mackenzie areas are guarding the
ways to the reported oil fields of the North, so that the unfit in their
wild desire for reaching oilfields may not perish in the midwinter,
whose rigours they do not understand.

Yes, the Mounted Police, few and scattered in detachments, from the
Great Lakes to the Yukon, and from the boundary line to the Pole, had
enormous responsibilities at home, while many of their fellow-citizens
were abroad in the Boer War. And the man who was Commissioner of the
Police during that period had a burden to carry which only those who
knew the situation can estimate. That man was Superintendent A. Bowen
Perry, who succeeded Colonel Lawrence Herchmer in August, 1900, but who,
from the time of the big gold stampede into the Yukon, had largely the
direction of things there, and had taken over the command personally at
Dawson City when Steele left there in the fall of 1899. Colonel
Herchmer, who had been Commissioner from 1886, was an able and
conscientious officer. He had gone over to the Boer War in command of
the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles, but had to come back on sick leave,
when he retired also from the Commissionership. From the d