CANADIAN MOUNTED

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 9, 11 July 1938, Page 10

CANADIAN MOUNTED

THE NEW CHIEF

WITH FORCE SINCE

BABYHOOD

(From "The Post's" Representative.) VANCOUVER, June 22. In 1885 a young man just graduated from the Royal Military College at; j Kingston, Ontario, entered the North[west Mounted Police with the rank of j Inspector. He was a grandson of j Zachary Taylor, twelfth President of ! the United States. He served the Force well and faithfully until his death, thirty years later, when he had become Assistant Commissioner. His son, Stuart Taylor Wood, born in 1889, was destined to follow in his footsteps, and take one step farther.

The new Commissioner, who succeeds the late Major-General Sir James MacBrien, followed the Trail of '98 when his father, at the head of a squadron of scarlet-coated riders of the plains, dispensed law and order among a polyglot assembly of flotsam and jetsam at the Klondike. After thirteen years in the Yukon, Stuart Wood was sent "outside" to Upper Canada College and Royal Military College. At graduation he, too, was absorbed by the Force with the rank of Inspector. He commanded the third troop of the North-west Mounted unit that saw active service in France.

In 1919 Mr. Wood and his young wife went to Herschel Island, 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle, as commander of the Western Arctic sub-division. "That was the only job I ever held where I felt I really amounted to something," he observed in his office at Ottawa recently. Temporal authority over the scattered inhabitants of an awe-inspiring region, a third as large as the entire Dominion, prompted the remark.

When, in the fall of 1922, his wife developed a serious illness, Mr. Wood took her and her infant son on an old whaler, heading for civilisation and medical aid. They were caught in the ice-pack off the northernmost tip of Alaska. The patient's condition became acute. She was bundled into a small boat, which, with difficulty, reached Point Barrow, and there she was operated on by a medical missionary. The ice loosened sufficiently to release the whaler, and mother and baby arrived several weeks later at Vancouver. Her husband made his way back to Herschel from Barrow by dog team, via Fort Yukon and Rampart House, crossing the Richardson Range in a temperature of 60 degrees below zero. He made some notable patrols in opening up new detachments ' as far east as Coronation Gulf, the home of primitive Copper Eskimos, before going south to the command of the British Columbia division.