The Case of the Wrong Saddlebags

Usually, in a case of murder, the biggest question is the identity of the killer(s). But not always.

One of my favourite pioneer storytellers, D.W. Higgins, whom we’ve met before in the Chronicles, wrote two books during his retirement. Both The Mystic Spring and Passing of a Race were based upon his 40 years as a journalist and newspaper editor during the province’s eventful founding. In the latter book, published in1905, he tells a fascinating tale of a brutal robbery and murder in B.C.’s Cariboo gold fields.

A crime that left him wondering, half a lifetime later, about a man who’d astonished one and all—including ‘Hanging’ Judge Begbie—by going, not just calmly, but almost willingly to the scaffold.

Taking with him to the grave, it seems, the shame of his real identity.

William Armitage, as he called himself then, had earlier used the name George Storm, but neither was the real name of this mystery man whose noble family, Higgins had been told privately and on the best of authority, dated back to William the Conqueror.

 In fact, “it was more than suspected that [he] was closely related to a duke...” How could a man of such illustrious background find himself, half a world from home, facing a hangman’s noose in the Cariboo?

 D.W., with a little help from me, will tell you all about it next week...

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Photo: ‘Downtown’ Barkerville. Of the 10s of 1000s of adventurers from around the world who participated in the Cariboo gold rush, there had to be those who never meant to seek their fortunes by hard work but who chose instead to prey upon their fellows. Thanks to the newly created B.C. Provincial Police and the legendary ‘Hanging’ Judge Begbie, however, serious crime was kept to a minimum. —Wikipedia photo