Canada that can presume
to give Dawson a lecture on morals."

But the Yukon service where the Police were at the beck and call of
every case of need or distress or danger, no matter how much hardship
and exposure they involved, was taking its toll. The men of the corps
were paying the price for the proud privilege of preserving the Pax
Britannica in a remote region inhabited by a mixed population and
showing a record for justice and law-enforcement such as no area of a
similar character in any part of the world had ever seen. For in that
year 1908 Inspector D'Arcy Strickland, an officer of kindly generous
nature, who had gone into the Yukon with Constantine at the very
beginning, died at Fort Saskatchewan, the report stating that he had
never recovered from the effects of that pioneer service in the North.
In the same year Inspector Robert Belcher, C.M.G., who had won that
decoration in the Boer War, retired after thirty-four years' strenuous
service. It was Belcher and Strickland who had first flown the flag and
established custom-houses amid the snow and blizzards and tremendous
cold of those deadly summits of the White and the Chilcoot passes in the
days of the gold rush. Wood himself, and Constantine the pathfinder,
never threw off the effects of the Yukon days, though the former moved
back as Assistant Commissioner to the prairie and the latter did much
strenuous work in the Athabasca district where conditions were almost as
severe as in the Klondike country. Many others there were, gallant
officers, and no less gallant men, who bore the mark of their northern
vigils and patrols to the end of their days. And this applies not only
to the men of the Yukon but to those who in the Hudson Bay, Peace,
Mackenzie and Athabasca areas were abroad in polar seas or on land that
for months was hidden deep by snow and ice.

The year 1908 witnessed some notable trips and patrols. In order to wind
up all matters connected with the Peace-Yukon trail Inspector A. E. C.
Macdonnell was instructed by the Commissioner to proceed from Fort
MacLeod via Calgary, Vancouver and the Skeena River to Hazelton in
British Columbia to dispose of stores that were there and bring the
horses back to Fort Saskatchewan. The Peace-Yukon trail was begun in
order to have a road to the Yukon mines over British territory, and
during its construction a great deal of valuable information as to the
country was acquired and given out in reports by the Mounted