FAMOUS CANADIAN MOUNTTIES

Waikato Times, Volume 122, Issue 20504, 21 May 1938, Page 15 (Supplement)

FAMOUS CANADIAN MOUNTTIES

Much Altered Force :: Efficiency Unimpaired

(Lloyd Lewis.)

ONE OF THE MOST-PRIZED positions in the Canadian Civil Service, is the command of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to which Colonel Stewart Taylor Wood, a veteran of the force, has been appointed. While this is a popular choice in Canada it should fie no less popular in the United States, for Colonel Wood’s great-great-grandfather was no less a person than Zachary Taylor, American soldier and President of the United States. Thanks largely to the splendid work of his predecessor, the late Sir James MacBrien, the new Commissioner takes over an organisation that is as little like the original Royal Northwest Mounted Police as an aeroplane is like the old covered waggon. From 1873 to 1920 a Mountie was usually mounted, in the accepted sense of the word, and his duties consisted largely of patrolling the great areas beyond the jurisdiction of city and provincial police. Then the Machine Age caught up with this picturesque but horsebound force and began to do amazing things with it. Other Provinces besides those of the prairies asked for protection, and the " Northwest” in its named was changed to " Canadian." The personnel began to increase in numbers (there are now nearly 3000) and the mounts to disappear. The scarlet uniforms (except for special services and occasions) were packed away in mothballs. The Training Course For New Recruits was broadened from athletics, first-aid, equestrianism, and military drill, to embrace everything apertaining to the prevention and detection of crime. Individuals specialised in chosen fields, such as the preventive service, the air service, the marine service, or the Arctic service. Every discovery of use in police work was brought into action —motor-cars, and motor-cycles, airplanes and gunboats, ballistic experts, finger-print specialists, chemists and photographers. Most recently, a splendid new building was provided for the headquarters staff at Ottawa. In brief, the Mounties had "gone modern,” and yet in doing it had succeeded in retaining in a degree all that was traditional and romantic—the scarlet and blue uniform, saddle horses (226 of them), the courage and patience that eventually, even if it requires years of effort and * globe-trotting, always "get their man." Colonel Wood already knows his force, having joined it on graduating from the Royal Military College at Kingston, Ontario, been stationed at many posts throughout Canada, and been acting Commissioner for several months past. But it will take a long time for him to become familiar with all its activities through first-hand knowledge. I doubt if any Commissioner ever visited every post "north of 53” from the Atlantic to the Pacific and up to the Arctic, or ever took one of the Long Perilous Patrols that are a regular part of his constables’ "beats." But he will see it all through the eyes and the reports of officers and men. ~He will note seaplanes hovering over the Nova Scotia and British Columbia coasts with watchful eyes for every incoming craft, and especially small fast craft that may be rumrunners, and he will have the satisfaction of knowing that such patrols are proving effective in combating drug and liquor smuggling into Canada. He will see armed cruisers operating the year around, pursuing suspects onto the high seas and even into United States territorial waters under new co-operative arrangements between the F nited States Coast Guard service and the Canadian preventive service, to the great discomfiture of lawbreakers. In cities, towns, and camps, wherever there is serious labour trouble, he will see a small group of Mounties taking charge, unostentatiously and even unarmed. Although many duties call for the carrying of heavy service revolvers, it is one of the traditions of the force that firearms are never fired except in times of gravest emergency and as a last resort. To "shoot

it out" with a desperado would be tantamount to a confession of failure. The reluctance to shoot is the cause of a few casualties, but, on the other hand, it increases respect for the police and their Certainty of Ultimate Victory. The Commissioner will see his men charging thousands of men and women annually with infractions of the law under Federal and Provincial statutes and the criminal code and securing an impressive proportion of convictions, too. Offences range all the way from juvenile delinquency to counterfeiting and murder in the six Provinces— Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island—where the Mounties are the "law" beyond incorporated cities and towns. Turning toward unsettled regions Colonel Wood will find solitary constables, decked out in furs, mounted on snowshoes, skis, dogsleds or horses, moving slowly along unmapped trails on errands of mercy, investigation, and punishment. He will watch them bringing out lost or hurt trappers, Indians, prospectors; he will see them taking the census in distant forts and settlements; mediating disputes between tribe and tribe, husband and wife; enforcing: game laws and gathering details on flora, fauna, and men. He will find his inspectors flying down the Mackenzie to Aklavik and into Great Bear Lake (the site of radium mining); sailing on the annual Government expedition to the scattered posts in the archipelago of the Far North; holding improvised "court” for Eskimo grievances. He will peruse Arctic police reports for a region as great as all Europe. He will read for instance how Corporal Grey, Special Constable “ Koomanapik" and a native guide " Kippomee," w’ith two dog teams, left Pond Inlet to patrol to Pingitalik, situated on northeast coast of Melville Peninsula. It was called "a routine visit to the natives of the district, to obtain vital statistics and game returns, and generally to carry out the many duties of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the Far North." The white man and two Eskimos started on February 3 (when the sun was seen for the first time since November) and returned in 48 days after travelling more than 1000 miles over as difficult terrain as one might expect to find even in the Arctic. But I doubt if the Commissioner tvas particularly impressed with the report. Several such patrols occur every winter, as "routine" duties, and all are very much alike in hardships, courage, cold, storms, and perilous seas encountered and conquered. What if many of these trips do overtop exploring expeditions of history both in extent and accomplishments! A Civil Servant neither looks for nor receives publicity, and for the most part remains modestly hidden in a Government Blue Book. I have had the pleasure of hob-nobbing with some of these constables in their tiny white shacks "on perilous seas forlorn" and always found them Quiet, Friendly, L'nassuming Men, who took their jobs but not themselves seriously and thoroughly enjoyed the life they had chosen. They will tell you that three or four years in the Arctic is great training for after years and affords a fine chance to save your pay. Needless to mention, they don’t wear their scarlet coats and jack boots among the fiords and glaciers! To return to civilisation and its greater problems, Colonel Wood can be expected to intensify rather than relax efficiency in crime detection. He has already made a close study of sleuthing methods in London and Washington and is conversant with all the "tricks" of law and criminal. It is said that he is held in high esteem by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. This close friendship and association between the two augurs -ill for crooks who would cross the international boundary. In short, the deserved reputation of the R.C.M.P. has -never been at a higher level than it is to-day nor has its future been more bright. And, for the pageant-loving public, there are still the scarlet uniforms, the big glossy horse* and those glorious Musical Rides.