Police. But
the dwindling down of the rush to the mines rendered the trail
practically unnecessary. The British Columbia Government did not desire
to assist and police detachments could not be spared, hence Macdonnell's
trip. It involved a route by saddle horse and pack train of over 1,200
miles, but it was carried out in perfect order.

Inspector J. D. Moodie, a noted sea and land patrolling officer, was
asserting the jurisdiction of Canada in the regions of the Hudson Bay
where there was much trading by people from the outside. Sergeant
McArthur, who held a lonely post at Cape Fullerton, receiving word that
the natives were being urged by traders to kill musk-ox contrary to law,
undertook on his own initiative, in the Arctic midwinter, a patrol which
lasted fifty days. Sergeant Donaldson, soldier and sailor too, who was
to meet a tragic death the next year, made a dangerous voyage from Fort
Churchill to Fullerton and return. A patrol with mail went from Regina
to Churchill, Assistant Surgeon LeCroix being sent with this patrol.
Staff-Sergeant Fitzgerald, hero of many trails, and who also was to find
a tragic end in the "white death" frosts of the Yukon, made that 1908
winter a patrol in a whaling ship to Baillie for the purpose of
ascertaining the condition of the natives and asserting Canadian
jurisdiction. Superintendent Routledge, going from Regina to Smith's
Landing, some 1,100 miles, looked into the matter of wild buffalo herds,
as did Sergeant Field and Sergeant McLeod, who went from Fort Vermilion
to Hay River on a similar errand.

The most extensive patrol of that year was the one undertaken by
Inspector E. A. Pelletier, who, accompanied by Corporal Joyce, Constable
Walker and Constable Conway and at a later stage by Sergeant McArthur,
Corporal Reeves and Constables Travers, McMillan, Walker, McDiarmid and
Special Constable Ford, left Fort Saskatchewan on the 1st of June for
Athabasca Landing on the way to Hudson Bay via Great Slave Lake, which
latter point they left on the 1st of July. They in due time reached
Chesterfield Inlet on the Hudson Bay. They were met at that point by
Superintendent J. D. Moodie with the Hudson's Bay steamer _MacTavish_
(called after a famous Hudson's Bay Company family). By this boat
Pelletier and his men started for Churchill, but the _MacTavish_ in a
storm was driven on a reef and totally wrecked. The men all escaped and
went to Corporal Joyce's lonely post at Fullerton. Pellet