Francis Joseph Fitzgerald

Francis Joseph Fitzgerald
Francis Joseph Fitzgerald
Born	12 April 1869 Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Died	on or about 14 Feb. 1911 beside the Peel River south of Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Known for	Royal Northwest Mounted Police

Francis Joseph Fitzgerald was a Nova Scotian who became a celebrated Boer War veteran and the first commander of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police detachment at Herschel Island in the Western Arctic (1903). From December 1910 until February 1911, he led a mail patrol from Fort McPherson southward to Dawson City. When the patrol did not arrive in time, a search party led by Inspector William John Duncan Dempster, was sent from Dawson City and found the bodies of Fitzgerald and the other patrol members. The trip became known as "The Lost Patrol" and as "one of Yukon’s greatest tragedies."

Fitzgerald served with the militia in Halifax until the age of 19 and then enlisted as a constable in the North-West Mounted Police on 19 November 1888. He spent the next nine years in the Maple Creek District, Saskatchewan. At age 28, under the command of Inspector John Douglas Moodie, Fitzgerald was the first to chart an overland route from Edmonton to Fort Selkirk, Yukon via northern British Columbia and the Pelly River (1897). The voyage took eleven months, having covered about 1,000 miles (1 600 km). As a result of this achievement, Fitzgerald was promoted corporal in 1899.

The following year, under the command of Lawrence Herchmer, Fitzgerald joined the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles to fight in the Second Boer War. The mounted rifles participated in a number of major drives that resulted in the destruction of at least twenty percent of the Boer forces in the western Transvaal, most of these being captured. It was not all one-sided, however. On 31 March the unit fought as part of an outnumbered British force at the Battle of Harts River, or Boschbult. When Fitzgerald returned to Halifax after the war, he was given accolades by the local newspapers.