This site [Frog Lake, following Cree attacks on priests and Hudson's Bay Company employees and family members] was 35 miles northwest of Fort Pitt.

When they returned they were attacked by Cree warriors; one escaped unharmed, one was wounded – played dead then crawled to the 'fort', the other Constable Cowan was killed within sight of Fort Pitt.

Following his discharge from the Mounted Police in 1886 (for reasons of ill health—he was becoming increasingly hard of hearing among other infirmities) Frank was going to embark on a series of lecture talks in the U.S. (as his father had successfully done), but died of a heart attack at a friend's house in Moline, Illinois, the night of his first speech.

However, some of his superiors in the Mounted Police held unfavorable opinions about his overall competence, echoing his father Charles Dickens, who wrote in a letter to his friend on being asked by his son for three hundred pounds, a horse and a gun to set himself up as a gentleman farmer in the colonies, that the consequence of the first is that he would be robbed of it, the second, that it would throw him, and the third, that he would shoot his own head off.

An article in a special RCMP issue of the Canadian history magazine The Beaver called "Francis J. Dickens, An Ordinary Officer" gives a balanced picture, pointing out his twelve years of service during which time many men in the fledgling police force on the plains deserted or were discharged for misconduct.

Grace's Last Case (1984), by William Rushton, in a fantastic plot that includes fictional characters like Jekyll and Hyde and Dr. Watson, Francis Dickens encounters Apaches and (anachronistically) meets the famed cricketer of the title during the latter's team's 1872 North American tour.

The book is a series of fictional letters, a mock document purporting to be a record of Dickens's correspondence spanning his twelve years in Canada, only "edited" by Nicol.

Frank Dickens also appears in the science fiction novel that deals with the NWMP in an alternative history, The Apparition Trail (2004) by Lisa Smedman.