OF ;THE PLAINS * BY WILLIAM ALLEN JOHNSTON... #Dosyrizht, 1000, by the New York Herald Co. All Rights Reserved.) \ IOTURBE to yourself a country whose lower jateral boundary line is eighteen hundred miles long and whose northern limit is the Arctic Olrcle, two thousand miles away--a vatg ocean of land, silent, limitless, awe in | wpiring. : The big, transcontinental express thundering along ta far way seems lost in the vastness of it, a sort of helpless, hopeless geasuring worm seeking the im- possible. Day after day prairie wastes and wheat fields, furze covered hills and barren sloughs alternate in dreaty succession from the car window. Now and then solitary houses drift by In the offing like solitary sails at sea. "By night there's the North Star, telling of the boundless north, with its mountains, lakes and ice fields, trackless, soundless, mysterious, almost In- comprehensible in area. Picture to yourself this half a continent of land and then conceive of its being policed by eight hundred odd cavalrymen, policed and held firmly In hand from its earliest days of savagery and border ruffianism, "through all its rebellions and vicissitudes, right up to fts present day and wonderful development into wheat fields and gold fields, The. headquarters of the Northwest Mounted Po- Hee--King Edward gave them the prefix "Royal"-- are at Regina, capital of the Northwest Territories, a raw, unfinished city of the prairie about one hundred miles due north of the border line of Montana and North Daketa. 3 From Regina the slender lines of control branch out--west to the Yukon, east to civilization, south to the forty-ninth parallel, the great boundary line be- tween this country and Canada, and north to the un- explored fastnesses of the forest wilderness. '| There are eight districts in all, with divisional headquarters in the largest town In each district, and from there the control reaches out in the form of detachments, where one or more constables live in seclusion and make daily rides over their spacious allotments of territory. Two miles out of Regina are the barracks, a dozen lorg, low bulldings, where the new recruits-- "rookies," they are called--are drilled, bunked and fed until they are ready for and given their detach- ments. ; It is a very busy post. From the time the bugle 4 sounds for "morning stables" till the close of day it fs ride and drill, drill and ride, with numerous duties nterspéfsed. It is picturesque, too. The full dress uniform con- sists of scarlet tunic with yellow facings, blue cloth breeches with yellow stripes, white helmet, cavalry boots and overcoat. In winter a fur overcoat and moccasins are worn and in summer khaki sults and cowboy sombrero. Sometimes the big transcontinental train brings in d crew of enlisted men, who are met and marched to ' » barracks, They are serious faced as a rule; th; have no {illusions about the service they are about to enter. They enlisted, every man, not under the inspiration of marching bands, flying colors and all the panoply of war, but quietly, grimly, and for some good reason which each man chooses to keep to himself. They are a heterogeneous crowd. as a rule, so far as antecedents are concerned. Side by side with a second son of some {llustrious English family stands a Cockney, h-less and audacious, or an Eastern log driver, or a man from Toronto with the twang of that city, or a Frenchman from Quebec, or a cowboy from Montana. There are Scotch halfbreeds and Irish thorough- breds, and each man talks at first the speech of his pace; "but after a bit," said an Irish sergeant, with a grin, "they all learn to swear in one tongue, and that's good enough prairie Epglish." There's a tradition that oftentimes in the rough bar- racks one may hear the soft drawl of a London club. "Maybe," sald the Irish sergeant sceptically, "but whoever that was, he talked In his sleep then. Sure, there's no time to drawl by the daytime." - The individual histories of the men of the Mounted Police are no doubt as interesting as the story of the force itself; and in 'almost every case a natural ques- tion rises to the lips of the visitor--*"How did you come to take on?" They used to ask a similar question in the early dys of Texad when maiiy of the settlers tame to that State, not because they especially admired it. but be- eause it was liberal in laws and confines and they had some excellent reason for hurriedly leaving home. Most of them made excellent citizens, but all of them buried their past behind them, and a few curious ones promptly decided that it was unwise to ask any ques- tion bearing upon their past, evén the slnple one of "How did you happen to come to Texas?" The lanocent visitor at Regina, as well as the newly enlisted man on the force, finds very speedily that the same question Is generally tabooed there, One day at headquarters the Commissioner of the Mounted Police paused for an Instant as he was re- viewing a line of recruits and scrutinized searchingly the face of a high heeled young cow puncher. "Your face seems familiar to me," he sald quietly. "Where have I seen you before? The new recruit winked blandly and kept a discreet if somewhat worried silence. The Commissioner racked his memory. "Why, see here," he finally exploded, "I had you be- fore me once for cattie thieving!" "Sure," sald the puncher eagerly: "sure, and 1 brought my rope with me," he added appealingly. "Now, sir, if you're short of horses and: need any" ---- In the same line that morning and touching elbows with the former horse thief was a former officer in a famous Irish regiment, whose father Is a King's counsellor in London, and yet another Englishman whose first and second names proclaim his family tv be, as jt is, one of the finest of the county aristocracy. Thif last man 1 knew quite well. He had been sent to lowa to iéaru ranching, after the English appren- tice idea, and at the end of four years was given his dower right--a considerable sum--with which to pur- chase his own farm. About this time he met up with a mining sharper from the Black Hills, at the end of which acquaintanceship he found himself minus his forme, farm and confidence in human mature and filling & minor position in a Deadwood store. He drifted north and joined the police simply be- cause he preferred a saddle to a clerk's stool, and his past record was as clean as a schoolboy's; but he and the furmer horse thief became gevoted friends and two of the most trusted members of the force. In the Far West they judge = man, so the saying ware Be stands in hd boots Tha Mounted Pellce il; Lad SQM JUL aR ak, AT THE SIGN HIS BRAV Family, past education. these do not count. exeept as they prove themselves in the present. It Is the man himself they welgh. the man in his boots. He must pass a rigid physical exmunination. They take big men, but smaller men are preferred. They must not measure under five fect nine inches in height nor less than thirty-eight and a half inches around the chest. They must be touzh of sinew and muscle. quick, self- reliant. able to withstand hardships and possess brains and a fair moral tone. The service does the rest. And a very remarkable service it is. Given eight hundred raw recruits, with their curious differences of race, breeding and previous conditions of livelihood, it seems very wonderful that they should become so unified that one grows to think of them not as indi viduals. 'but as redoubtable bulwarks of law and order--that they. should become so powerfal that a single one of them standing alone in a wilderness has all the controlling force of a great army. Some years ago. when the Canadian Pacific Rail- road Company was forcing its trunk line across the continent, a small army of 'Saultaux and Cree Indians, under commana of the fnfamons Chief Plapot. came down from the marth to stop the construction work Railroads portended = civilization, and civilization meant the cessation af whiskey smuggling over the border. Hence Plapot's magnanimous resolve. They did interrupt the work and they so terrified the "navvies" that the chiefs of construction hastily appealed to the Mounted Police, just as every one did then and does now when things no matter what, go wrong In the Territories. And the Mounted Police sent a single constable and companion guide to quell the disturbance. The chief of construction was inclined to laugh outrigut when he saw the number of aids seat him: 'wo men to @# quietus upon half a thousand In- diuns, naked savaes, who had put to rout as maly sspavvies" and left them cowering in their cabins! The arrival of the two men brought forth a fresh riot from the Indians. Troops of young braves circled around and around them, shouting loudly thelr war whoops, "La-ki-la-la" and "La-la-oo-¢e!" and offering every manner of insult. But whatever of effect the uproar was mtended to have was evidently completely lost upon the Iwo men. Their immobile faces changed mot a bit. They searched out the tepee of Chief Plapot and walked directly toward it. Plapot met them at the lepee with an evil leer and a cocked rifle. The constable pointed to the north. "Get!" sald he. Piapot's face worked diabolically and he tapped his rifle suggestively. At "he «ty 3 braves sureonnded the [nu wtll don ff GUELE famed pal BM CLLY Ladd heads. The air rang with frenzied war whoops of detiance, it was a delicate moment, the chief of construction thought. The savages, even thelr chief, were half crazed with liguor. Plapot was murderous in his nor- mal state. Now, with a rifle in his hands and fiendish deflance written In BIS ace, the lives of the two sur rounded men seemed to him just then to be of littie value. . But the constable at that moment, the critical mo- ment, did a mest surprising thing. He pushed aside Piapot's rifle in his ealm, self-reliant. dlmost solemn way and sticking one jong leg within the tepee he kicked the key pele down. Then he strode forward. leveling tepees right and left in thé same manner, and Plapot. leoking at him--being 2 wise chief--look- ing also beyond him, away east to the Dominion gov- ernment at Ottawa. coneluded gracefully to obey that first forceful injunetion of "Get! Before this--in fact, just after the Custer massa- ere--another Indian chief, noue other than the famous Sitting Bull. erossed the border into Canada and pro- ceeded to make some very bad but thoroughly char- acteristic moves. In a friendly encounter with the Blackfeet Indians he killed six of their number and pursued a seventh, who was wounded, directly up to a post of the Mounted Police, There were but twenty men at the post and Sitting Bull had five hundred war veteraus under hin. 'This aspect of military order, coupled with the msigniti- cance of the post, filled him with righteous indigua- tion. Dashing up to the barracks, he threw himself from his pony and jabbed his pistel Into the stomach of a man who wet him at the door. The man at the door happened to be a veteran of the police, "Big Jack" Collins, and much to tire chief's surprise he: roemed pot to be alarined at alt at this brusque. magne Sf Liriauetion: nor was he affected greatly by the sight of Sitting Bull's warriors, a bloodthirst¢ mob, who had surrounded the barracks and waited ounlw for their chief's commund to raze it and scalp ae inmates. On 'the contrary, he was as calm in features and as correct in deportment as if the affair were an ordinayy incident of daily routine and as easily taken care of. The man at his side, Sergeant Mc Donald. seemad quite as unruilied; and Sitting Bull, being blessed like Plapot with an imagination, began to see things, : When they invited him into the barracks he obeyed, much to his own surprise, and they closed the door behind him. Wihia he found himself listen ine to 2 terse des ription of the law of the territories CR ekki RE NL we BA era d am Wl y ES SURROUNDED THE TWO MEN AND A DOZ"N RIFLES WERE LEVELLED AT a short time he also found himself forgetting that he had five hundred men surrounding twenty in the wilderness, and felt somehow that the situation was reversed and that he was sitting quite alone before a white man's tribunal in the law abiding East So. when his impatient warriors began storming the batracks deor and. screaming for thelr obeyed the simple command two m ordered them off. his braves were under control of the Mounted Police. He came into a wilderness expecting savage iverty, * and found instead the subjécting power of a reserva- From that on, moreover, he and Golden incident, when a single d a mob, not of red savages, but worse, of white desperadoes. days of Goldgn, filled With whiskey smugglers, gades of all descriptions, "a musenmn," wof red het divvles gathered from every den of iniquity in the States." A "tenderfoot" was killed one night, and Sergeant a bulldog little man, set out from his post all He found him in a saloon, Then there's that when the new mining camp was gamblers and rene- alone to get the murderer. thick with smoke, ruffians and liquor fumes, a I it seems incredible, he collared him, and, press- «nn his shoulder blades, shoved him ring down the road be- They followed in hot ped at a bridge, ing a revolver betwee out of the door and had him run: fore the mob collected itself. put found themselves stop) ot man stood behind two revolvers. lajor Steele, the First Com- where another qui He was none other than ¥ missioner of the mounted police. The putherity of the police, does not always avail, times a. man gives up his life while « it aud there's a vacant cot in the bar- 4 number over it for some other man to 'ome other mah who signs the this do I swear without any mental evasion, or secret reservation, so help me God,' ecrates five years or more of h ly patrols and extraordinary enlistment oath. and thereupon he cons life to daily 'risks, tone when the mercury goes down to a cup of tea will freeze at the fire, and whefe sun biind- to perish in the ice fields han bullets or knife thrusts. { the Northwest stands Arctic Clrele should There are no distance limits in i The bleak winters. 10 degrees below ads ten off the tral fuese claim anere details t The wounted policeman © coniftahle brought a demented man {aided he a, vad THEIR HEADS. tance of thirteen hundred miles, and this in the midst of winter. For forty-four days he travelled over white, soundless plains, with never a human voleg to greet his ears save the night ravings of a' The men of the boundary patrol have a path ope thou sand miles long, and travel, aH fn all, a million a year. One New Year's ady three constaliies set out mt & M hief. had raging snowstorm to catch a horse t but this meagre clew, that he might be found whebe two hundred miles to the north and west, week later they brought him back to the post. arresting him in a haifbreed settlement, where h associates outnumbered them a hundred to one Again, when a miner, O'Brien by nae, was dered during the first onrush to the Alaskan fields, they tracked and caught the criminals, clews whatever to ald them. Today the stage road from Dawson to Whitehorse, dred and twenty miles long, Is as well policed as duy gmall street in New York, and Is far safer for trians. : Ever since England began sending her "second sons" to Canada there has been some @ the part of the more practical settlers to make them. It is well enough in this connection to' ber that since the founding of the they have constituted the bulwark of 1s given many lives to its advancement. One night toward the end of & which the two men had not days, one of them, a scribbled some ve fire. The next morning the piece of paper near the desgd ) of the verses give an idea of the "second son" and fact that he fills a rather valuable place as a man if not as a ranchery-- " #We drown in unkpown waters, We burn in forest flame, We freeze on northern barrens; Some meet a self-sought shame. Fever, frost and hunger,' Thirst 'neath a Sh In their WAY, But little they reck thal 's cost ail Vigrat svi Sli gos"