Francis Fitzgerald was an outdoorsman of the highest order. He had excelled on
a police expedition across arduous Arctic terrain that lasted more than two years; he had shone as a sergeant during the Boer
war; he was considered to be a man of integrity and intelligence. And so when, in 1903, it was decided that the Mounties needed
to establish a presence at Fort McPherson in the North-West Territories and on Herschel Island – where the whalers were
wreaking havoc plying the local islanders, the Qikiqtarukmiut, with alcohol and
not paying duty on their lucrative trade to boot – Fitzgerald was chosen to command the new posts.
There was only one way that Fitzgerald could send his reports to his superiors,
and check on the scattered prospectors and Indians that lived across the wilderness of the north, and that was via the annual
dogsled patrol that ran between Dawson City, a well-developed town that had sprung up to house the miners of the Klondike
gold rush just a few years before, and the two northern police posts. In 1904 the first patrol set out from Dawson:
it was easier to supply an expedition from the more southerly town and from there Gwich'in Indian guides, who knew the
land and were expert huntsmen, were easy to hire.
But in the winter of 1910-11, Fitzgerald and his men travelled in the opposite
direction. That year, Fitzgerald started at Herchel Island and made his way south. Breaking with tradition, he chose not to use an Indian
guide but employed former constable Sam Carter instead. Constables George Francis Kinney and Richard O’Hara Taylor travelled
with them.
The weather that winter was bitter. During the first week of January, temperatures
averaged minus 46 Celsius; one day they fell minus 54. And then the patrol missed
the turn off the Little Wind River into Forrest Creek. The four men were lost. On January 17th, Fitzgerald wrote
in his journal:
We have now only ten pounds of flour and eight pounds of bacon and some dried
fish. My last hope is gone, and the only thing I can do is return, and kill some of the dogs to feed the others and ourselves,
unless we can meet some Indians. We have now been a week looking for a river to take us over the divide, but there are dozens
of rivers and I am at a loss. I should not have taken Carter’s word that he knew the way from the Little Wind River.
The weather stayed against them as they attempted to find their way back to safety
at Fort McPherson.
They encountered neither game nor Indians. By the end of January, all four men were suffering from frostbite and scurvy. Their
skin peeled to raw flesh, their feet swelled and their flesh turned discoloured. As starvation set in, their ribs protruded
and their stomachs sank.
