Unbridled Lawlessness Was the Order of the Day in Gateway City

When, many, many years ago, I was interviewed by a radio announcer about my newest book, Outlaws of the Canadian West, he expressed amazement that we had ‘outlaws’ in British Columbia. 

In the American Southwest, yes, but north of the 49th parallel? He could hardly believe it. 

I had to convince him that we, too, had our own version of the Wild West.

Nothing like Dodge City, of course; we’re British after all. But we had some real shootin,’ tootin’ desperadoes just like we’ve always seen in American western movies. (We even have the equal of the OK Corral; now there’s a story for a future Chronicle.)  

Take this snapshot of gold rush Yale as captured by our old friend, D.W. Higgins:

 “All was bustle and excitement in the new mining town,” he wrote in 1904. “Every race and every colour and both sexes were represented in the population. There were Englishmen, Canadians, Americans, Australians, Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Mexicans, Chinese and Negroes–all bent on winning gold from the Fraser sands, and all hopeful of a successful season...

“In every saloon a faro-bank or a three-card monte table was in full swing, and the halls [saloons] were crowded to suffocation. A worse set of cut-throats and all-round scoundrels than those who flocked to Yale from all parts of the world never assembled anywhere.

Decent people feared to go out after dark. Night assaults and robberies, varied by an occasional cold-blooded murder or a daylight theft, were common occurrences. Crime in every form stalked boldly through the town unchecked and unpunished. The good element was numerically large; but it was dominated and terrorized by those whose trade it was to bully, beat, rob and slay. Often men who had differences in California met at Yale and proceeded to fight it out on British soil by American methods...”

I’ve already told you of the fatal duel, ‘High noon in Downtown Victoria,’ when as many as 15,000 gold seekers passed through on their way to ‘Fraser’s’  River.

The fact is that a wide-open Fort Yale as described was an aberration but the challenge that faced, first colonial, then provincial authorities, in trying to maintain law and order on the Canadian West frontier was immense.

Which brings me to next week’s Chronicle about a gentlemanly English businessman’s grim experience in trying to manage a store in the Boundary Country in 1897. Newly-born Cascade City had no provincial police officer, just a special constable with no training, and its ‘jail’ was a joke.

So it should have come as no real surprise when Stanley Mayall found himself plagued by a series of burglaries.

 Petty crime, you say? So it began. But not when the shooting started!

See you next week.

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PHOTO: Boisterous, brawling Cascade City in the 1890s; it’s gone now. But it was exiting while it lasted! —Wikipedia photo