The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cemetery at Dawson City, Yukon
In March 2025, we received a lengthy email from retired RCMP member Frank Dunn. Much of it records his restoration of the RCMP Cemetery at Dawson City in 1964:
"I was a member of the RCMP for more than 33 years and had the pleasure of serving for eight years in the North. My first posting in the North was Dawson City in August 1964 having driven 6,996 miles from St. John’s, Newfoundland. in 16 days, after spending three years in Newfoundland/Labrador. I had applied to go to 'G division because the members at that time were being paid $6.00 a month more for Isolation and Northern pay and it could not be more isolated that Nain on the Labrador coast.
After the Klondike Days celebration, the Cpl. gave me the cemetery file and directions to go up and cut the grass with the prisoner. It was evident that was the extend of service that the grave yard had seen for the sixty years since it had been established. Having dug a grave in the cemetery at Depot in Regina as extra duties while in training, I had been informed that there was only three RCMP authorized grave sites in Canada, Dawson City, Regina and the one in Ottawa. The file had a record of the names and placement in the cemetery and there was only one marble grave stone and the rest of them were rotting boards with no names or any visible markers and a lot of them had rotted off and cracked apart with deep divots above every grave.
It was decided that I would take a 12 hour shift with the help of the prisoner, Henry HENRY and I was to refurbish the gravesite however I wanted. We made up new headboards and painted them white and I hand painted the lettering and welded up a few tapered forms to pour the cement around each of the headboards and tapered the cement on top so it would not collect water and rot. Most of the graves had sunken areas so I put six by six timber around each one and we painted those white on all sides. Most of the lumber was in the warehouse as Dawson City as it used to be the headquarters and when the Alaska Highway came through in 1943 headquarters was moved to Whitehorse. It was too expensive to have all the contents of the warehouse barged upstream with the paddle wheelers so it was left at Dawson City and was curing for 50 years. There was just a wagon trail between Whitehorse and Dawson city at the time. Fred Caley who owned the grpcery and hardware store donated an eight foot roll of chain link fence that had been on his inventory for 30 years and I cut it in half so I could put a fence all around the entire site and he supplied the old pipe for the fence posts. We put a tarp in the Chevy station wagon and we hauled white gravel to put above each grave as they all were with a big sink hole above them. We hauled red gravel that used to be old pay dirt and put it on the walkways. I built a big sign and painted a crest of the force and the lettering there and put in big posts for the vehicle access and hauled black gravel for that pathway and built a big set of gates for that entry.
I am writing a book of my life and service with the RCMP and it is presently out to the publisher. Our refurbishment of the grave yard is just one of my stories. I was next in Charge of Carcross Detachment and I located and fixed the graves of two members that were attending their fish nets and the canoe overturned and they drowned. The grave file indicated that they could not locate the graves and the former members just dated and signed the page on the file.
I spent two long days days looking and did not locate it at or within a couple miles of the Tagish Post site. I was going up the Tagish River heading back to Carcross and noticed a small grove of poplar trees on a high bank and I stopped and that was was their grave site about six miles from the Tagish Post site. I cut all of the trees down and threw them over the bank. They obviously had cleared the site and it was the the new growth of trees that had attracted my attention. I whipped the grass and moved in some local flowers and replanted them on the gravesites, straightened out the crosses with their names carved lightly in the boards. I returned to Carcross and made headboards like I had made in Dawson City and painted in their details on the headboards. When I picked up the mail there was a directive from Ottawa that the remains were to be exhumed and re-interred in the refurbished grave site in Dawson City. I made small wooden casket boxes to what I thought would contain their remains and painted them black. I talked the new recruit and one of the kitchen staff at the mess and holding cells in Whitehorse for a fishing trip if they could help me dig up the remains. It had to have been prisoners that dug the graves because we were down almost seven feet before we hit the top of the wooden caskets. They went by 'Buffalo Express' up to Dawson City, where they were re-intered."
In August 1990, I shot this Kodachrome of the cemetery, which was getting quite worn again. It was restored again a few years later.
