“WILD” YUKON

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 December 1929, Page 8

“WILD” YUKON

MOVIE-MADE CLAMOUR. The moving pictures are all wrong about the wild Yukon, declares Commissioner Cortlandt Starnes, of th© Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In an interview he ridiculed the glamour thrown over the North in the days of ’9B. x “Why, the Yukon was as peaceful as •a picnic,” he declared. “All this guntoting, bad man, wild saloon, roaring dance hall stuff is bunk. It never even existed right at the first. “The saloons had mahogany bars, and tliey were as quiet as ice cream parlours. The girls wore long dresses in those days. They were the fashion. But look at the movies. They all wear short skirts and look what they actually weren’t. “The American movie and novel makes the Mounted seem romantic There’s no romance.” mouuc. Commissioner Starnes listed a few “don’ts.” “Don’t call a R.C.M.P. man a iMounty,” he warned, “and don’t say they ‘get their man,’ for both are Am©ncanisms and simply don’t belong ” He also explained the origin of ’the famous “mush” exhortation to dogs, inat was also an Americanism, he said, , starting with an American prospector who heard a French dog driver from Quebec shout “Marche.”