t Edgenton from
Split Lake to Fort Churchill, arriving with dogs abandoned by the way,
and three days without food; Sergeant Munday from the Pas to Lac de
Brochet and return, 900 miles in fifty-one days; and Sergeant MacLeod
from Fort Vermilion across the Caribou Mountains to Great Slave Lake."
This is a most formidable list, and to anyone who knows the country and
the climate it affords the imagination a moving panorama, in which
constant danger and almost incredible endurance are portrayed. All this
forcibly reminded Canada of the devotion of her sons in the Northern
hinterland, and that was the purpose of it being definitely stated. And
it gives us a sort of veneration for the memory of the four men of the
Fitzgerald patrol whose magnificent strength, after having been tried
and proven on many similar journeys for years, succumbed before a
combination of intolerable cold, blizzard-swept trails, unfamiliar river
passes, shortage of provisions and starving train-dogs. For it was the
death of these men that brought home to the people the astonishing
achievements and heroisms of Canadian chivalry on the frontiers.

Fitzgerald himself, as we have already seen, had been famous for years
as an intrepid patrol man, and had been promoted to the rank of
Inspector for his services. All the others, Kinney, Taylor and
ex-Constable Carter, had been more than once mentioned in dispatches.
This is a legitimate expression, because in reality the Mounted Police
were always on active service, and their merits were made known in the
reports of their superior officers.

Strangely enough, from the human viewpoint, it was at Fitzgerald's own
request that he was selected by the Commissioner in 1910 to take command
of the Mackenzie River district. It was only the year before that he,
then a staff-sergeant, had handed over that district to Inspector
Jennings, but after receiving his promotion, Fitzgerald heard the
insistent call of the great familiar North so overwhelmingly that he
asked to be sent back into the white wastes again. And further, to
vindicate some divine purpose running through it all, he suggested the
patrol in that direction himself. The patrol had always been from
"Dawson to Fort Macpherson and Herschell," but Fitzgerald asked to have
its order reversed, and offered to go from Herschell Island to
Macpherson and Dawson, from which latter point he could get into touch
by wire with headquarters at Regina and report on his dist