Opportunity knocks
The discovery of potential difficulties in the far northwest corner of the country came, then, at a fortuitous time for the police. The federal government, starved for resources, but needing to make a response, ordered the Mounted Police to investigate the situation and make recommendations about a future course of action. For their part, the NWMP was pleased to be given a new opportunity to demonstrate their value to the nation and to the government. Thus in the summer of 1894, Inspector Charles Constantine and Staff-Sergeant Charles Brown were despatched to the Yukon River basin. After a brief reconnaissance, Constantine concluded that the Bishop's warnings were exaggerated and that the miners were not the threat to the First Nations population that Bompas had claimed. He also observed that Canada was losing tax revenue from the mines. Though most of the gold was on the Canadian side of the border, people generally left with their valuable findings for the United States. He also found that the country's sovereignty was in question because of the absence of a federal presence. At Constantine's urging, and with the full concurrence of the North West Mounted Police, the Canadian government dispatched a party of twenty men to the Yukon in the summer of 1895.

Constantine and his force operated with a restrained but determined hand. The police were vulnerable - they were but a small detachment, surrounded by hundreds of potentially hostile and largely American miners - and they were entirely on their own. But the NWMP had orders to establish Canadian jurisdiction, and they proceeded to do exactly that. Canadians had, from the time of Confederation, a healthy distrust of, and even distaste for, the United States. They often portrayed Americans as violent and chaotic and worried incessantly about the importation of American values into Canada. At the time of Constantine's trip north, Canada and the United States were engaged in a rancorous debate about the Alaska-Canada boundary (a conflict ultimately settled in the Americans' favour). Canadians were nervous about their control of the north, about American designs on the territory, and about their capacity to keep American influences away from the Canadian frontier. One of the first things Constantine did in the region, therefore, was to suppress the miners' meeting, which he did by sending an armed detachment to settle a dispute in accordance with Canadian law, informing the miners that no more such meetings were to be held. The miners accepted this policy because their first priority was finding gold, not establishing political control of the region.

The establishment of a police detachment in the Yukon may well have been one of the most timely government decisions in Canadian history. In August 1896, only a year after Constantine arrived back in the Yukon Territory, Skookum Jim, Dawson Charlie and George Carmack discovered gold near the mouth of the Klondike River. Within a few weeks, virtually the entire population of Fortymile and nearby Circle, Alaska, stampeded to the site of one of the world's largest gold strikes. Within another few weeks, miles of gold-bearing ground along Discovery, Eldorado and neighbouring creeks had been staked and a new community, Dawson City, sprang into existence at the junction of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers. Fortunately for the miners and the Canadian government, the NWMP were on site when the strike occurred, thus ensuring that the occupation of the gold fields took place in an orderly fashion. When conflicts over claims arose, the police provided a proper land registry. By the fall of 1896, several hundred miners were busy digging for gold, safe in the knowledge that their claims were protected by the presence of the North West Mounted Police.

Gold fever
The following summer, with a winter's worth of gold weighing them down, many of the Klondike miners headed south to enjoy the fruits of their northern gamble. When they arrived, first in Seattle and later in San Francisco, they re-entered a North American economy suffering through a serious depression. News of the Klondike strike electrified the continent, providing fantasies of creeks in the far distant and frozen Yukon River valley paved with the gold. Through 1897 and 1898, tens of thousands of would-be prospectors prepared themselves for the journey to the Yukon. Most began their trip at Seattle, Vancouver and Victoria. Others, falling victim to the scandalous hucksterism of Edmonton promoters, opted to try for the Klondike by way of the Mackenzie River - a bad mistake, which cost some their lives. Some came prepared for the worst the north might throw at them. Others, counting on their good fortune and demonstrating their profound ignorance, carried little more than the clothes on their backs. In the Yukon, the Mounties and the small Klondike society braced themselves for a massive assault, with many worrying that the arrival of thousands of ill-prepared stampeders would cause chaos, starvation and anarchy in the region.

As soon as they learned of the strike, the federal government rushed additional men to the Klondike, but the task that they faced was formidable. More to the point, the ill-paid Mounties found themselves responsible for enforcing the law while all around them grand fortunes were being made and lost. Miners bought and sold claims containing hundreds of thousands of dollars in gold. The Mounties earned 50 cents a day, with an additional 50 cents a day offered as a special Yukon bonus. The small group of men - there were no women in the force until the 1970s - were not allowed to marry or, except for the officers, bring wife and family with them to the North. On call around the clock and with few personal freedoms or right, they lived in near-military conditions, burdened with a wide range of police and civil responsibilities. They were not permitted to buy their way out of their term of service as the police on the prairies had been allowed to do. The only way they could leave the force in the Yukon was to commit an offence, something that resulted in imprisonment followed by discharge. They joined the NWMP to serve as officers of the law, but now found themselves handling mining recorders' duties, customs, vital statistics and myriad other responsibilities. And all around them, as they tackled the tedium of 19th century federal administration, long-suffering miners struck it rich, lost their fortunes, made thousands in quirky business ventures, or "hooted it up" in the dozens of bars that sprang up in Dawson City and in the creeks.

Practical methods required
The problem, beginning in 1897, lay not with the veteran miners in the Klondike, but with the massed migratory herd of stampeders working its way up the coast to Skagway and Dyea, hoping to make it to Dawson City either that summer or the following spring. When the stampeders reached the border, the police turned back "suspicious" characters or those with a known criminal past. Ignoring legal restrictions on their authority, the NWMP imposed some special measures. People were not allowed into the Yukon unless they carried a year's provisions - roughly interpreted to mean 1,000 pounds of food and supplies, or the equivalent in cash. This requirement alone forced many of the ill-prepared travellers to return to the south. For the rest, it turned the gruelling climb over the Chilkoot Pass into a tortuous endurance test. But - and here the particular genius of the police shone through - it also meant that there was no starvation, as had been feared, in the Yukon during the winters of 1897-98 and 1898-99. The police worried about the mounting death toll at the infamous Miles Canyon and Whitehorse Rapids, where a fatal combination of poorly built boats and untrained boatsmen resulted in a number of drownings. To head off further problems, and quite outside their formal legal authority, the Mounted Police simply decreed that all stampeders had to hire an experienced guide to pilot their craft through the difficult waters. From the moment that the stampeders crossed the border, they knew that they were on Canadian territory and would be working and living under the watchful eye of the North West Mounted Police, whom they knew by reputation.

The police worried from the beginning that the rapid influx of miners might disrupt the local First Nations population and, as happened further south, result in bloodshed and violence. Having had considerable experience in dealing with plains First Nations, and having learned the importance of treating the indigenous peoples fairly and with understanding (if for no other reason than to keep them quiet), the police approached the First Nations with professionalism and some caution. They were aided in their work by the simple fact that most First Nations people withdrew from the Klondike corridor (the river from Lake Bennett to Dawson City and the small mining area) during the hey-day of the rush. Small detachments were opened in outlying areas, partially to bring Canadian law and order to the First Nations but, even more importantly, to protect the First Nations from the stampeders. The police reacted swiftly to the first - and only - outbreak of serious violence, the murder of a prospector by the Nantuck brothers in the southern Yukon in 1898. Two of the brothers were hanged in 1899, the third having died in custody, a swift example of the power of Canadian law. The actions of the police also reflected the social and cultural values of the age, for they worked to keep First Nations out of major communities, save for short visits, and did little to protect the indigenous people from numerous acts of racial discrimination. The police were also sometimes tempted by vice. There were occasional problems with drunkenness in the police barracks, at least one case of theft of public funds, and a few of the officers were seen crossing the footbridge to Klondike City (aka Lousetown) where the prostitutes plied their trade.

The Mounties extended a uniquely northern form of social control throughout the Klondike. The police accepted gambling and prostitution as necessary evils, believing that the miners needed an occasional "release." But at the same time, they enforced quite rigidly the rules of Canada's Sabbatarian laws, which forbade work and commerce on Sunday. Great stories emerged of men arrested for working on the Sabbath - who were then sentenced to cut wood on the police woodpile as punishment. The police also ordered that guns could not be carried in Dawson City, a decision that significantly reduced the frequency of armed confrontations and that ensured that the Klondike experience was markedly less violent than other gold rushes. They used the dreaded northern "blue ticket" to evict from the Yukon anyone they felt was likely to cause a disturbance - crooked gamblers were among the many tossed out of the territory without the benefit of trial, an illegal but effective means of maintaining public order.