STIRRING DAYS IN THE ARCTIC

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 55, 6 March 1937, Page 26

STIRRING DAYS IN THE ARCTIC

Charles Deering LaNauze has been over to Scotland Yard. He went there to study the latest methods of Britain's crack police force. In Canada he will apply what he and his companions learned to Canada's crack police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted, of which

LaNauze is assistant commissioner, a position he has reached from the ranks, states a Canadian paper.

■ LaNauze knows.Canada. Not long afj he was stationed in the Maritimes, uniting ■ the land and the new sea forces of the Mounties. Catching rum runners was a new line for LaNauze, but he made good. That is why he is now one of the eight top men of the force. And while there have been many escapades in his life as a Mountie since 1908, no case has been as thrilling as his first trek into the Arctic, a junior inspector, on the trail of the murderers of two priests.

Twenty years, ago when LaNauze set out for the Arctic on that trek,; white men had seldom travelled north of the Arctic Circle, and the Eskimos had for the most part never seen. a white man. LaNauze had never come in' contact with Eskimos, but before he came back he brought his men with him. ;

It took LaNauze two and a .half years and 3000 miles of hard travelling. He started in the early summer of 1915 and made the cabin of the murdered priests at Dease Bay at the top of Great Bear Lake by early winter. Today it can be flown in a day. : The cabin was his winter quarters. and after stocking it with, food, he started out with his Eskimo to visit the Eskimo villages on the sea ,ice of Coronation Gulf.

Questioning tribes here and there, LaNauze's interpreter found a few old friends, and from these he learned who had killed the priests. LaNauze sat by, scanning faces,, but maintaining a poker face even when he knew by gestures and facial expressions that his in-

terpreter had found out who killed the priests.

More information was gathered and men came into the igloo who had seen the Eskimos in their priestly cassocks, armed with new rifles and field glasses. LaNauze hit the trail, and they soon fnund the wife of one of the murderers. He himself was found in an igloo, whittling, with rifle and knives stacked beside him. He.was overjoyed when told he would not be killed at once. Then he and his family joined LaNauze's party. On they went to find number two murderer. LaNauze topping an ice hummock saw a string of dog teams in the distance. He made speed, overtook them. The other wanted man was there. He also was surprised he would not be. killed at once, as he had been told would happen if the white men found him.: And with this' man's family joining the cavalcade they made Herschel Island in the Canadian Arctic Expedition's sailing ship that spring. It took LaNauze twenty-seven days in all to get his two men and clear the mystery once he had reached' Coronation Gulf.

The end of the story: LaNauze's two prisoners cried when they were sentenced to hard labour at Fort Resolution, because their friend LaNauze would not be along. They had killed the priests in self-defence. They had come along with the two priests to help them. Because the priests could not well understand the Eskimos, and the Eskimos were not accustomed to white men, there was some misunderstanding, the two natives told LaNauze. The priests had forbidden the Eskimos to converse together, and the simple natives thought they were to be killed so they took the initiative. A few years after their sentences they were pardoned, and rejoined their families, model prisoners.

And while LaNauze now seldom sees the Arctic, he often recalls the contacts he made in those early: days with his simple, hospitable Eskimo friends.