Part 11 (1/2)
But the end was not yet. John Cashel, a brother from Wyoming, had come up and was given permission to see Ernest in the cell. As he entered the chaplain was leaving and the guard being relieved. Taking advantage of the situation, John Cashel slipped his brother two loaded revolvers with which that evening Ernest held up the unarmed Constables and made his escape. It was a dark night, with heavy snow falling, and this clever and daring criminal well armed got clear away. Then the alarm was sent out, detachments were notified and Commissioner Perry, accompanied by Inspector Knight, went up to Calgary to take personal direction of the search. Evidently, as happens in such cases this outlaw had friends, who, supplied him with information, telling him what was being done and to add to the confusion, people all over the country became nervously excited and began ”seeing things,” so that several supposed Cashels were reported from a dozen directions. A drunken half-breed in Calgary caused excitement by telling that he had Cashel tied up in his camp, but the cool-headed Sanders saw through his yarn and locked up the half-breed for being drunk and disorderly. Superintendents Primrose and Begin, on the Commissioner's orders, sent patrols out through the ranches. Here they came across ranchers who had been held up for food and money by a man whose description tallied with that of Cashel. As the Police could not cover the whole country, some civilian volunteers were called for and these were placed along with police detachments. Finally Sanders mapped out the country, got detachments together to the number of five under Major Barwis, Inspector Knight, Inspector Duffus, Sergeant-Major Belcher and himself, and the order was to search every building, cellar, root house and haystack with instructions that if they found Cashel they were, if human life was to be saved thereby, to set fire to the building or stack where he was and smoke him out. The detachment under Inspector Duffus, consisting of Constables Rogers, Peters, Biggs, Stark and McConnell, while searching Pittman's ranch 6 miles from Calgary, came across Cashel in the cellar. He was found by Constable Biggs, who was fired at by Cashel out of the dark hole. Biggs returned the fire and backed up the steps to tell the rest. Constable Rogers then ordered the men to surround the house and sent word to Inspector Duffus, who came and called on Cashel to surrender. But he would not answer and the building, a mere shack, was set on fire. When the smoke started, Cashel agreed to come out and was arrested. This was the close of an arduous hunt, a great many of the Police having been almost continuously in the saddle day and night in cold weather for weeks. They were determined that no one should boast of eluding the Police by making a clear ”get away.”
This time there was no escape, and the daring murderer was hanged in Calgary, first confessing his crime to the Rev. Dr. Kirby, his spiritual adviser. Once more the unbreakable net of the famous riders of the plains had been thrown out to show that the whole country became a prison for anyone who offended against its laws.
It was perhaps the recurrence of cases of this kind where the Police were proving the enormous value of the Force to the country that caused Superintendent Primrose in 1903 to make a plea for some increased recognition of his men. In his report he says, ”In nearly every walk of life in the past twenty years wages have gone on increasing, but, I regret to state, the same scale of wages still obtains in the Police Force. For instance, I am at present employing a constable on detective work whose pay is seventy-five cents a day for which we have to pay a Pinkerton man eight dollars a day.” And it is no disparagement to the Pinkertons to say that the Police could give them some ”pointers” when it came to work on the frontiers.
The question of pay for their men was a constant anxiety for the officers, who were themselves receiving a mere pittance in comparison with the salaries paid to men of equal education and experience in other departments of the civil service. So we find, in 1904, that fine officer, Superintendent Wood, in the Yukon making reference to the fact that though an increase of pay had been granted to others the pay of the Police had remained practically the same since their organization. Wood feels that it is humiliating for the men. ”A constable's life,” he writes, ”is not altogether an enviable one. He is liable to be exposed to the inclemencies of the weather at all seasons of the year, and is at times called upon to risk his life in the performance of his duty. He is under much closer and severer restraint than private individuals.” This is putting it all very mildly, as was the manner of the Police when they were speaking of themselves. Then Wood goes on to say, ”It is of importance that a member of the Force should be made to feel that his position is an honourable one, and that he is ent.i.tled by virtue of his office or calling to the respect of the community at large. This state of things could be arrived at if he felt that his position was equal to those in other walks of life, and that his services were rated equally as high. But the mere fact of his receiving 50 cents to 75 cents a day with his food and clothes while carpenters, blacksmiths and labourers on the outside receive five times as much and in the Yukon ten times as much, is enough to instill a feeling of inferiority so far as his calling is concerned.” This is an important view. And Wood in the same report emphasizes his argument, though he does not refer to it in that connection, that the Police are expected to do work as mail-carriers, postmasters and such like, outside proper police duty, because the country could not get civilians to do it at the remuneration offered.
The whole thing troubles Wood, who was of a sensitive temperament and very anxious to retain high-cla.s.s men in the Force. And so he refers to it again in the following year and says that a constable who was a skilled mechanic and was saving the country great expense by looking after the manufacture of stove pipes, tinware, etc., had been offered as much an hour by town merchants as he was getting in a day in the corps on the scale allowed by the Police Act. And Wood, who feels keenly for the men, says, ”Our poor circ.u.mstances are so generally known that it has become usual to send members of the Force complimentary tickets for entertainments and reduce the fees in clubs and societies for them.”
Probably what was in the minds of those who sent tickets and reduced fees was that it was an honour to have with them the men in scarlet and gold who made human life and property safe on the frontier and whose standards of manners and education made them most desirable company. But the comparative poverty was there amidst abounding chances to be rich in the gold country and elsewhere in a new land. Men who served through the dangerous formative periods of Western history died poor in worldly goods. It is a fine thing to know that all through the years these men out of the sheer love of adventure and their high ideals of devotion to duty did such service, but the facts should not be lost sight of when the pensions of the ”old guard” survivors are being considered from time to time.
The quality of the non-commissioned officers and men is often brought out in their detachment reports. These reports reveal not only men of ability and insight, but throw light on the kind of people these Police in the north had to guide. Sergeant Frank Thorne, for instance, was in charge at a place called Tantalus. The man who gave that name to the elusive mining prospects of the region had a sense of humour and the fitness of things. Thorne says, ”Hundreds of people landed at Tantalus en route to the new White Horse diggings. Most of these people had been misinformed as to the best place to start from. I informed some of them, but found that a person with gold fever is very unreasonable and stubborn. Those that returned this way wore a very dilapidated and sorry appearance.” But the Police, I suppose, helped them out of their troubles, for these red-coated giants did not lose their humanitarian disposition even amidst the follies of the foolish. And the Police knew well the strain under which these deluded and disappointed people often found themselves, for Wood tells us of the Police at Dawson and White Horse having as many as forty lunatics committed to their care in a single year. This involved heavy and anxious work, and the Superintendent shows the spirit in which it was done when he laments the lack of suitable accommodation and fears lest some of these unfortunates may hurt themselves in the unsuitable quarters provided.
Speaking of the humanitarian disposition of the Police, one finds many incidents to show how they resented offences against the helpless, and how relentlessly they brought the perpetrators of such offences to book.
In the same year, 1904, of which we have been writing, Sergeant Field, of Fort Chippewyan, to whose rescue of a lunatic we have already referred, got word that an Indian had, at Black Lake, 250 miles away from the Fort, deserted two little children, two and three years of age and that these two children according to the testimony of other Indians had been devoured by wolves. Part of the clothing had been found and all around the blood-stained ground was trampled by wolves. The Indian was at Fond-du-Lac, but could not be advantageously arrested unless Field could get some evidence from others who were not there. So Field bided his time till all the Indians were at Fond-du-Lac in the summer. Some eight months had gone by, but Field did not forget. Fond-du-Lac was several hundred miles from Fort Chippewyan, but Field got there at the proper moment, arrested the Indian, took the witnesses along and started for Edmonton, where the Indian was tried and given a term in the penitentiary. It had cost Sergeant Field a strenuous trip by trail, river and train of nearly eighteen hundred miles, but he had by his action told the Indians of the whole region to deal properly with their children and their old people.
A very remarkable case in 1904 was that in which after an extraordinary display of mastery over difficulties, the Police under Staff-Sergeant K. F. Anderson (now Inspector) brought one Charles King to justice for the murder of his partner Edward Hayward, near Lesser Slave Lake in Northern Alberta. The case was not only a portrayal of the persistent methods of the Police, but it threw a fine sidelight on the way in which the Police had won the friends.h.i.+p of the Indians through guarding the Indians against exploitation by white men. It moreover gave a good exposition of the Indians' unique powers of observation.
[Ill.u.s.tration: CORONATION CONTINGENT. LONDON. 1911.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: CORONATION CONTINGENT. LONDON. 1911.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: INDIANS RECEIVING TREATY PAYMENT ON PRAIRIE.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: FORT FITZGERALD, ATHABASCA.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: ICE-BOUND GOVERNMENT SCHOONER.]
In October, Moos Toos, the headman of the Indian Reserve at Sucker Creek, came to Sergeant Anderson and told him that white men were cutting rails on his Reserve. Anderson immediately went over with the Chief and found men employed by a very prominent firm of contractors cutting rails. The Sergeant stopped them at once and made them pay the Indian for what they had already cut. This, of course, was pleasing to Moos Toos, who, on returning home with Anderson told the Sergeant that some days before, two white men with four pack-horses had come from Edmonton and camped on the Reserve near a slough. They had stayed there some three days or so and then one of them left, but there was no sign of the other. An Indian boy had noticed that the dog that had come with the white men would not follow the one that left. This was observation number one. Then some Indian women, as their custom is, went over to the place where the men had camped to see if anything was left that might be of service. One Indian woman noticed that the camp fire-place was much larger than required for ordinary use. Another Indian woman stood at the edge of the fire-place and looking up noticed, on the underside of the leaves of a poplar tree, globules of fat where the thick smoke had struck the cool leaves and the evaporating fat had condensed. She said, ”He was burning flesh in this fire.” These two things, added to the fact that a shot had been heard by other Indians in the direction of the white men's camp, made them suspicious. They told Moos Toos, their headman, and he, in recognition of the goodness of the Police to him, told Anderson about it, and added that he thought something was wrong.
Anderson thought so too, and with Constable Lowe went down to the place.
They raked in the ashes and found fragments of bone and other substances which they carefully sealed up and kept for a.n.a.lysis. Moos Toos, who was on hand with some of his Indians to help, found a large needle with the eye broken, then by going barefooted into the slough where the water was four feet deep, discovered a camp-kettle which some of the Indians had seen with the white men. Later on Moos Toos and Lowe found in the slough a pair of boots in one of which was stuffed a rag with various articles, including the other part of the broken needle. In the meantime, Anderson had got into touch with the surviving white man at the home of a trader some distance away and asked for his story. This man, who gave his name as King, said that his companion was a man he had overtaken on the trail over the Swan Hills. His name, he said, was Lyman, and he had been on the way on foot. King said Lyman had left the camp on foot for Sturgeon Lake and that he supposed he was on the way there. Anderson sent out in that direction, but there was no trace of such a man at any point, and a Hudson's Bay employee who had just come from Sturgeon Lake met no one on foot and there was no trace on the trail of anyone so travelling.
Anderson and Lowe then arrested King on suspicion and held him while they pursued further investigations. Anderson was convinced that the bed of that slough, if uncovered, could unfold a tale. And so he hired the Indians to divert it by digging a ditch that would drain it into Sucker Creek a half-mile away. It was quite an undertaking, but the Indians, who have lots of time on their hands in the summer and fall, offered to do the work for a hundred dollars. The work was well done and Anderson's expectations were not disappointed. He found amongst some minor articles a sovereign-case which was fairly conclusive evidence that the man who had vanished from the earth was probably an Englishman. The sovereign-case was traced back to the manufacturer in England and to the man who had sold that number to a certain Mr. Hayward, a man up in years, then deceased. The clue was followed up and a son of Mr. Hayward was found who recalled that his father had presented a sovereign-case to another son when that son left for Canada. The son who had gone to Canada was known to be in the Edmonton and Northern country, but the people at home had not heard from him for some time. Regardless of expense and without delay, the Police brought Hayward all the way from England to Edmonton for the trial. He identified the sovereign-case as the one given by his father to the missing man Edward Hayward. A specialist in a.n.a.lysing had been brought from Eastern Canada who p.r.o.nounced the blood, brains and bones found in the ashes of the camp fire to be human elements. There were some twenty witnesses in the case, those outside the Police being Messrs. J. K. Cornwall, George Moran and the rest half-breeds and Indians. Once more the police had the chain of circ.u.mstantial evidence welded solidly link by link. King was declared guilty, but on a legal technicality a new trial was ordered. By this time the witnesses were all back home. But they were brought back, including the brother of the missing man from England. The verdict again was guilty and King paid on the scaffold the penalty for his mean and cold-blooded murder of a travelling companion. A very curious thing in this trial was the sworn statement of Hayward, the witness from England, that his sister had told him there, the morning after the shot was heard by the Indians near the Lesser Slave Lake, that she had dreamed that their brother Edward had died by violence in Canada. This was not offered or accepted as evidence, but was mentioned incidentally as at least an extraordinary coincidence.
The Mounted Police were evidently determined not to allow crime to make any headway because if the impression ever got abroad that men could play fast and loose with law and go unrebuked, there would be no end to it. So we find Superintendent Sanders saying again that the Force should have more men to cope with the demands of the immigration movement. ”It is only natural,” he says, ”to expect that a percentage of criminals should accompany a large migration into a new country. A malefactor who finds it necessary to lose his ident.i.ty for a while cannot choose a more convenient location than a country just filling with new settlers and where one stranger more or less is not likely to be noticed.” This is sound reasoning, and Sanders is looking into the future when he is asking for men enough to deal with the new order of things so as to prevent trouble in the future. ”Once,” says he, ”get the new-comers within our gates imbued with the proper respect for British law and British justice, and prevent the criminal element getting a foothold, and a work will be accomplished of inestimable value hereafter.”
And up in the Yukon, a.s.sistant-Commissioner Wood, out of wide experience, says, ”It is a well-known saying that prevention is better than cure, and any innovation in our system tending to the prevention of crime in Canada, and more particularly in the North-West and the Yukon Territories, is to be welcomed.” And then Wood goes on to advocate the adoption of certain methods for the detection of criminals which for that period showed that these men were keeping a little more than abreast of their times though they were on duty in the wilderness places of the earth. He advises the establishment of a Criminal Identification Bureau at Ottawa with branches in all the cities and at the headquarters of each division of the Mounted Police Force. He goes on to define methods by photographs of every one arrested, measurements under the Bertillon system and the use of the finger-print method, which he quite properly declares, as we now know, to be the most infallible means of identification. That Wood had made a special study of the subject is evidenced by the fact that he backs his argument by appeal to history.
He says the finger-print system had been in use in Korea for 1,200 years as a means of identifying slaves and was adopted in India in 1897 as a way of preventing impersonation amongst the natives. The Scotland Yard authorities accepted the system in 1898, which was the year of the Yukon Gold Rush, and it is very interesting to find the Officer-Commanding on that frontier being so forehanded as to be amongst the first in Canada to advocate the use of methods now generally adopted. These men of the Mounted Police were wide awake and were determined, we repeat, to prevent the criminal cla.s.s from getting a foothold in this country.
It is interesting to find in the same period that the Police never seemed to forget. As related above, Fournier and LaBelle had been executed in January, 1903, for the murder of Beaudien and Bouthilette. A third man of the same party had vanished at the same time, but no body had been found. Two years afterwards a body was found in the river, taken to Dawson, the clothes removed and washed by Sergeant Smith and the body identified by these clothes and a paper dried out, as the body of the third man, Alphonse Constantin. Thus was the fact of his death established in the interests of relatives and estate--a matter of vital importance for the satisfaction of all concerned. And thus did the curtain fall on the final act in a dark tragedy of the North.
But all these incidents were making for the future peace of the country.
It was the establishment of the ”Pax Britannica,” as Commissioner Perry said with justifiable pride in the record the Police had made throughout the years. He quotes the words of a famous Indian Chief to which we have already called attention in the chapter on Indian treaties when that Chief, referring to the Police, said, ”Before you came the Indian crept along. Now he is not afraid to walk erect.” ”For thirty-one years,” said Perry in 1905, ”neither white man nor Indian has been afraid to walk erect, whether in the great plains, the far North or the distant Yukon.”
And even at the time he was writing those words Corporal Mapley was on patrol over an unknown route from Dawson to the Peel River, Inspector Genereux of Prince Albert was away on a 1,750-mile trip North, of 132 days by canoe and dog-train to investigate a case of alleged murder, Sergeant Fitzgerald was on patrol to the mouth of the Mackenzie River and Inspector Moodie was establis.h.i.+ng new posts around the Hudson Bay--all having a rea.s.suring and stabilizing effect on the vast uncivilized North land.
And again turning to another side of their work there were many cases that were charged full of a Victoria Cross type of valour which went unnoticed except as things done in the ordinary course of duty unless some tragic element intervened to call special attention to it.
Constable Pedley, of Fort Chippewyan, for instance, a noted trailmaker, had made many a trip (as others did) fraught with tremendous hards.h.i.+p.
But it was not till one day when he broke for a while under the tremendous strain that his extraordinary efforts got into the light of public notice. Here is part of his modest report when he was detailed to escort a lunatic from Fort Chippewyan to Fort Saskatchewan: ”I left Chippewyan in charge of the lunatic on December 17, 1904, with the interpreter and two dog-trains. After travelling for five days through slush and water up to our knees, we arrived at Fort McKay on December 22. Owing to the extreme cold, the prisoner's feet were frost-bitten. I did all I could to relieve him, and purchased some large moccasins to allow more wrappings for his feet. I travelled without accident until the 27th, reaching Weechume Lake. Here I had to lay off a day to procure a guide as there was no trail.” This is put with great suppression of anything like telling what a difficult time he was having, but again we read between the lines. The trip is ”without accident” but there was ”extreme cold.” Pedley was nurse and doctor as well as guard over the unfortunate madman who raved as they travelled along almost impossible roads. Then Pedley goes on: ”I arrived at Lake La b.i.+.c.he on the 31st, and secured a team of horses to carry me to Fort Saskatchewan. I arrived on January 7, 1905, and handed over my prisoner.” Pedley had spent his Christmas and New Year not in a happy social circle, but in the company of the unhappy victim of insanity. And he ends his report by saying, ”During the earlier part of the trip the prisoner was very weak and refused to eat, but during the latter part of the trip he developed a good appet.i.te and got stronger.” Pedley's care was improving the madman's condition, but it was taking it out of himself. The unfortunate was transferred to Calgary guardroom, and that Pedley's nursing had worked a change is evident because a.s.sistant-Surgeon Rouleau reports that it was ”a remarkable case.” He was taken to hospital and discharged in February. Says Rouleau, ”His mind and speech were as good as ever.
His life was saved.” But the sequel is told in Commissioner Perry's report, ”Constable Pedley began his return trip to Fort Chippewyan. When he left Fort Saskatchewan he was apparently in good health, but at Lake La b.i.+.c.he he went violently insane as a result of the hards.h.i.+ps of his trip and _his anxiety_ for the safety of his charge. He was brought back to Fort Saskatchewan and then transferred to Brandon Asylum.” But we rejoice that this is not the end. Perry goes on, ”I am glad to say that after spending six months there he recovered his mind and returned to headquarters. He was granted three months' leave and is now at duty as well as ever.” And that this gallant man who was not conquered by cold and danger was not going to be conquered by the recollection of the breaking of a cord that had been subjected to too great a tension is attested by Perry's closing reference: ”In spite of all, he has recently engaged for a further term of service.” Comment on this is unnecessary.