Driving the Dempster Highway — which stretches 770km from Dawson City, Yukon to Inuvik, N.W.T. — is a bucket list item for many people keen to go off the beaten track and experience a highway which, when it was built, was the northernmost major road project in the world. However, many people do not know the story behind the man after whom the highway was named, or his — and the highway’s — connection with one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the RCMP.
Construction of the Dempster Highway began in January 1959, and after several stoppages in work on the route it was officially opened in August 1979. The highway actually starts about 40km east of Dawson City, and for much of the early part of the road follows the old RCMP dog sled route from Dawson City to Fort McPherson, N.W.T. It was on this route, in the winter of 1910/11, that tragedy befell the Force, when the patrol travelling between the two points became lost in the snowy wilderness and bitterly cold weather.
In the summer of 1903, Sergeant Francis J. Fitzgerald of the North-West Mounted Police (as the force was then known; it became the Royal North-West Mounted Police in 1904, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1920) was tasked with helping establish NWMP outposts at Herschel Island in the Beaufort Sea and at Fort McPherson on the Peel River to the south. Fitzgerald was already a 15-year veteran of the force with considerable experience in northern Canada, where he would (by choice) spend almost all his career.
At the time the outposts were established, there was no telegraph or telephone connection between Herschel Island, Fort McPherson, and Dawson City; the only means of communication, or of transporting reports and mail, was on foot or via dog sled. Because of the arduousness of the 475-mile (764km) route from Dawson City to Fort McPherson, an annual patrol was made between the two points via dog sled every winter, beginning in 1904.
As provisions for such a journey were much more plentiful, varied, and cheap in Dawson City, all but one of the annual patrols made between 1904 and 1921, when they were no longer needed, began in that town. The single exception was the patrol of 1910, which actually began at Herschel Island, where Fitzgerald — by then 41 years old and recently promoted to Inspector — was in charge. He arrived at Fort McPherson in December, and on Dec. 21 he and his team set out for Dawson City.
There were three other men in the patrol: retired RNWMP Constable Sam Carter, a 41-year-old veteran of the north who would be serving as the guide; and Constables Richard Taylor (28) and George Kinney (27), both of whom were relatively new to the area. They had three dog sleds and 15 dogs, with a total of 1,302 pounds of equipment and provisions spread between the sleds. These included clothing and personal gear, cooking utensils, candles and matches, two axes, a portable stove, a tent, tarps, and sleeping bags. There were also 30 pounds of mail and official documents and dispatches to transport.
There were 900 pounds of dried fish for the dogs and just over 350 pounds of food — including bacon, lard, corned beef, tinned milk, beans, dried fruit, flour, sugar, tea, and coffee — for the four men, for a journey that was expected to last no longer than 30 days at most. There were few food caches along the route, so if the journey was prolonged they would have to depend on catching game to supplement their diet (which is one reason why they brought a .30-30 carbine), or else purchase meat from any First Nations people they happened across, as previous patrols had done.
The men left Fort McPherson in good spirits, seemingly confident that they could average the 15 miles a day that would put them in Dawson City well before the end of January 1911. The route, however, was a difficult and treacherous one. Maps were almost non-existent, and the trail was not blazed or marked in any serious way. Patrols had to depend on the skill of their guide, his knowledge of area landmarks, his memory of the distances between different points, and his ability to differentiate one creek or river from another. Many of the patrols hired a First Nations guide for this reason, but Fitzgerald put his faith in Carter.
This faith turned out to be misplaced. Carter had only done the Dawson City-Fort McPherson route once, from the Dawson City end, four years earlier. Although (according to Fitzgerald’s diary) the patrol made good time during its first five days, they had already missed a crucial cutoff, which they only discovered when they made camp with several First Nations families on Dec. 26. Fitzgerald hired one of the men, Esau George, to break trail for them and guide them over the portage to the Peel River.
On Jan. 1 the patrol reached a cabin on Mountain Creek and George was dismissed with pay of $24. In hindsight, considering that Carter had already mistaken the route before they had gone one-quarter of the way, Fitzgerald should probably have kept George on as a guide; why he did not will never be known.
The patrol was now battered by bone-chilling cold (the temperature averaged a low of -51 F each day), strong winds, and heavy snow. With three sleds and four men, that meant only one person could break trail for the dogs. Had George stayed with the group, two men could have broken trail each day, making for a firmer, easier trail and also enabling one of the trail-breakers to keep an eye out for game, ahead of the noisy dog teams that would scare them away.
By Jan. 12 the patrol was on the Little Wind River, eight miles past where they should have turned off at Forrest Creek, but Carter still thought the turnoff was ahead of them. They began moving up and down various creeks and tributaries, hoping to find the right one, but every route they took turned out to be a dead end. It normally took a patrol two days to go the 40 miles along the Little Wind River to Forrest Creek; Fitzgerald and his men spent nine days travelling 98 miles along the Little Wind, never finding Forrest Creek.
Carter had missed it; how or why we do not know. What is known is that the men had been out for 26 days, were less than halfway to Dawson City, and had four days’-worth of rations left. Fitzgerald wrote in his diary:
“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 [to Fort McPherson], 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.”
And so the decision was made. On Jan. 18 the men started back to Fort McPherson, doubtless planning to go on strict rations supplemented by dog meat and hoping to find some game.
They also probably hoped that their trail would not already be filled in and that the weather would improve, but everything that could go wrong, did. The winter of 1910/11 was a brutal one, and there was no game to be seen, in contrast with previous years where patrols had been able to supplement their supplies with moose and caribou. Heavy snowfall had filled in much of their trail, meaning it had to be broken all over again, and they encountered no one else in the wilderness.
By Jan. 29 — their 40th day on the trail — they were still 80 miles from the Peel River; Fort McPherson was another 150 miles beyond that. The 80 miles to the Peel made up the most rugged section of the Dawson City-Fort McPherson trail, taking the patrol over two mountains. On Jan. 31 the temperature plunged to -62 F. The patrol was down to two sleds with four dogs left for each sled; to go up a slope the two dog teams had to be hitched together to pull the sleds up one at a time.
The men were perpetually cold, exhausted, and exhibiting signs of frostbite, starvation, and scurvy, which weakened them. The snow obscured streams and creeks, which in their exhaustion and confused mental state they frequently broke through to, necessitating a stop to build a fire and allow them to warm up and dry off each time.
They carried on. By Feb. 5 — the date of the last entry in Fitzgerald’s diary — they were down to five dogs, having killed the rest for food. They were about 70 miles from Fort McPherson; a journey of four days under normal conditions. With a good trail and moderate weather, even a party in their weakened state could have made it in a week.
They did not make it.
To be continued
editorial@accjournal.ca
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