Ned McGowan’s War (Conclusion)

When we left off last week, California badman ‘Judge’ Ned McGowan had barely escaped a vigilante neck-tie for his alleged role in the murder of crusading San Francisco newspaper editor James King.

After laying low in Mexico he resurfaced in Sacramento then, with the help of influential friends, arranged for a farcical trial in wide-open Napa County. Once acquitted of complicity in King’s murder, it was time for a new start.

He chose to join the rush to ‘Fraser’s River’ in British territory north of the 49th parallel and, perhaps not unintentionally, beyond American legal jurisdiction.

At Hill’s Bar, site of the first and what would prove to be the richest gold producer of any of the Fraser’s sandbars, he somehow acquired a rich claim and set up court, so to speak, in a saloon with his fellow countrymen and fellow exiles.

To this point he’d done nothing to draw the colonial government’s attention.

But that would change dramatically after Governor James Douglas, from Victoria, appointed George Perrier as magistrate for Hill’s Bar and Henry Hickson as constable. For bustling Fort Yale he named Capt. P.B. Whannell justice of the peace, George Donnellan chief of police.

Both Perrier and Whannell had their own areas of authority; in cases where their jurisdictions overlapped, Douglas expected them to cooperate with each other for the common good. He appears to have been unaware of the spirit of rivalry which existed between the two camps.

Certainly, he didn’t foresee the lengths to which their respective keepers of the peace would go and the role that the infamous Ned McGowan would play.

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PHOTO CAPTION: Hill’s Bar ‘antagonist’ and ‘belligerent,’ Ned McGowan could be a charming rogue—even some of his enemies couldn’t help liking him. —Wikipedia https://archive.org/stream/narrativeofedwar00mcgo#page/n14/mode/1up, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7613976