cure, and any innovation in our system tending to the prevention of
crime in Canada, and more particularly in the North-West and the Yukon
Territories, is to be welcomed." And then Wood goes on to advocate the
adoption of certain methods for the detection of criminals which for
that period showed that these men were keeping a little more than
abreast of their times though they were on duty in the wilderness places
of the earth. He advises the establishment of a Criminal Identification
Bureau at Ottawa with branches in all the cities and at the headquarters
of each division of the Mounted Police Force. He goes on to define
methods by photographs of every one arrested, measurements under the
Bertillon system and the use of the finger-print method, which he quite
properly declares, as we now know, to be the most infallible means of
identification. That Wood had made a special study of the subject is
evidenced by the fact that he backs his argument by appeal to history.
He says the finger-print system had been in use in Korea for 1,200 years
as a means of identifying slaves and was adopted in India in 1897 as a
way of preventing impersonation amongst the natives. The Scotland Yard
authorities accepted the system in 1898, which was the year of the Yukon
Gold Rush, and it is very interesting to find the Officer-Commanding on
that frontier being so forehanded as to be amongst the first in Canada
to advocate the use of methods now generally adopted. These men of the
Mounted Police were wide awake and were determined, we repeat, to
prevent the criminal class from getting a foothold in this country.

It is interesting to find in the same period that the Police never
seemed to forget. As related above, Fournier and LaBelle had been
executed in January, 1903, for the murder of Beaudien and Bouthilette. A
third man of the same party had vanished at the same time, but no body
had been found. Two years afterwards a body was found in the river,
taken to Dawson, the clothes removed and washed by Sergeant Smith and
the body identified by these clothes and a paper dried out, as the body
of the third man, Alphonse Constantin. Thus was the fact of his death
established in the interests of relatives and estate--a matter of vital
importance for the satisfaction of all concerned. And thus did the
curtain fall on the final act in a dark tragedy of the North.

But all these incidents were making for the future peace of the country.
It was the es