To recap: In Part 1 I wrote about my 5xgreat uncle Hugh Percival McCall who ran away from his home in Norfolk County, Ontario, (abandoning wife and children) in 1827 and disappeared for 45 years. When he returned, the town of Vittoria gave him a parade. He was called “one of the world’s great wanderers,” although no one really knew where he had gone. It turned out that he had traveled west along the old Santa Fe Trail, become a trapper aka mountain man in the Rockies, then washed up in Santa Cruz County, California, where he married twice and fathered another brood of children before returning to Canada in 1871. In California he was known as Hugh Pablo McCall.

Part 2 details the early life of Hugh Pablo’s son Daniel McCall (my first cousin 5xremoved, aka Three-fingered Jack), the man who was shot dead trying to rob a train in 1896. I also spend some time on the intriguing background of political and economic unrest in the Central Valley and the tension between settlers and the Southern Pacific Railroad that exploded into spectacular violence in a shootout called the Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880. Mussel Slough was followed by a series of train robberies, one committed by the famous Dalton Gang, more shootouts and prison escapes. Daniel McCall was the last of the San Joaquin Valley train robbers, inspired by the legend of the Dalton boys and a book.

How to rob a train, Plan A

At the time of Daniel McCall’s attempted robbery, March 18-19, 1896 and its aftermath — arrest of co-conspirators, burial, inquest — less than a week all told, he was front-page news in the California newspapers. I have read the accounts in the Visalia Daily Times, the Visalia Daily Delta, the Santa Cruz Daily Sentinel, and the San Francisco Examiner and pulled together a plausible version of events, but beyond plausibility, as with all things relating to the human heart, a vast mystery remains.

Contradictions abound. The McCalls in Santa Cruz are aghast, mystified that the man they knew could stoop to robbing trains. They think he was led on by Si Lovren and the Visalia underworld. There is even a theory that the Visalia sheriff and Southern Pacific train detectives set him up in a sting operation to enhance their reputations. But others are happy to impugn his character. After the shooting, an acquaintance named Joe Arana keeps buttonholing reporters with rumors of lurid earlier crimes that no one else knows about. Most accounts agree the Daniel McCall was illiterate. But one reporter finds love letters he claims Daniel wrote to women in Santa Cruz (my first question is why he finds these letters at all? why weren’t they sent in the mail?).

Almost everything we know about Daniel McCall’s last days comes from his 19-year-old accomplice Obie Britt who betrayed him to the Visalia sheriff even before the robbery took place and then continued to blab about him to reporters and anyone else who would listen clearly trying to exculpate himself and, after that, make himself the center of attention.

Taking it all in, excising the obvious eccentricities, this is the story.

The year is 1895. McCall was sawing logs for a rancher named Ben Hicks just north of Visalia. He lived on Hicks’s ranch in a one-room board-and-batten redwood shack, spending his spare time drinking at Si Lovren’s deadfall saloon in Visalia. He drank too much, but worked hard and Hicks liked him. Three weeks before the train robbery Hicks' buys him a new suit as a bonus.

McCall met Obie Britt at the end of the summer, and in October the two men signed a fresh contract with Hicks. Britt moved into the cabin and they settled into the job. McCall liked to sit with Britt in the winter evenings, regaling him with outlaw tales from Visalia’s recent past, the Mussel Slough shootout, the Evans-Sontag train robberies, and, especially, the escapades of the Dalton Gang. All this was fresh in local memory, and fueled with alcohol, it speaks to motivation. McCall’s wife was dead, things had not gone well, he was already getting old for the life of a manual laborer. It was easy enough for him to blend his personal resentments with the community resentment of the railroad and the robber barons of Sacramento. In his imagination he could see the mansions on Knob Hill and measure the distance from his shack in Tulare County. The dramatic train robberies and brilliant escapes were like a flash of lightning on the dreary plain of his anxious life.

He kept a book by his bedside — The Dalton Brothers and their Astounding Career in Crime — though he couldn’t read. Touchingly, Obie Britt offered to read it to him, McCall returning over and over to the chapter on the Alila train robbery of 1891, dwelling on the details.

One passage explains how to stop a train.

Stopping the train had been easy work. A red light had been procured from the frightened station agent; the wires, both ways, cut down to prevent any communication ahead or behind, and by waving the light in front of the incoming train, in accordance with the railway regulations, the engineer had reduced speed and finally stopped. A second later, two men, wearing long black masks, had jumped on board the engine and covered both its occupants with their Colt revolvers.

Later McCall adapted the red lantern tactic, or intended to. After his attempted robbery, deputies found a lamp and a length of red cheesecloth in his cabin. Much was made of this. They were able to find a matching cheesecloth at Si Lovren’s saloon and the store where a Lovren confederate had bought the cheesecloth — thus linking Lovren to McCall and the robbery.

By January, 1896, McCall was beginning to talk about a robbery of his own. He was talking about it to Britt while they worked in the woods and he was talking about down at the saloon where he encountered an eager audience in Si Lovren and his bartender Charles Ardell (other Lovren retainers later implicated or called as witnesses include a roustabout known only as Frenchy and a “former pugilist,” professional runner, and “all round sport” Billy Ross). In the end, it is not clear who thought up the robbery. Did Lovren plan the whole thing in advance, or did he just encourage and abet McCall. Undoubtedly, he supplied the guns McCall used. And, though he was never convicted in earlier crimes, he was suspected of supplying guns and acting as a fence and money launderer for Evans and Sontag and the Daltons.

Britt and McCall hatched their plans. They targeted Train #20, northbound, on the night of March 18, planning an ambush with that red lantern at 1:09 a.m. two miles south of Goshen near Mill Creek Bridge, six miles west of Visalia. Another logger joined the strike force, a man named John Haynes, a Salvation Army man with a family nearby. Again, this is according to Britt, who claimed he only knew about Haynes through McCall; the three conspirators never actually met in person to finalize their plan.

According to the Visalia Daily Delta (channeling Britt):

As soon as the train stopped Britt was to fire two charges out of his double-barreled shotgun, charged with buckshot, and McCall to fire two shots from his Colt's pistol. This shooting was to terrify the passengers and prevent the curious from getting out of the cars to ascertain the cause of the stoppage of the train. Haynes was to order the engineer to march to the express car door and tell the express messenger to open it, and if he refused McCall intended to blow it open with giant powder. The fireman's hands were to be bound behind him with baling wire. It was intended that McCall should enter the express car, secure the valuables and if necessary to blow open the safe with giant powder. After placing the money in sacks, the engine was to be derailed with giant powder. The engineer and fireman would then have been directed to carry the booty to considerable distance and then told to return to their train. The robbers were then to place rawhide moccasins over their boots and walk home, carrying their booty with them. They were to bury their treasury in the ground, also their arms, ammunition and anything incriminating.

The express car on these trains was a special car owned by Wells Fargo (another Leland Stanford company) for carrying valuables and cash. The “giant powder” mentioned in the newspaper is a version of dynamite manufactured under license from Alfred Nobel in San Francisco by the Giant Powder Company. The tactic of shooting off warnings shots is mentioned in the Dalton Gang book, as is the use of the engineer and fireman to get the express car guard to open the door. McCall was, so to speak, working from a script but improving on the original — the Daltons had failed to bring dynamite and had no way of opening the express car safe without the combination.

How much Lovren and Ardell involved themselves in the planning is difficult to say. Britt hardly mentions them. But the sheriff and his deputies are able to piece together how Lovren supplied the guns after the fact. A few days before the robbery, Lovren sent a Marlin rifle and a Colt six-shooter to a repair shop in Visalia. Then a little later witnesses reported seeing the former pugilist Billy Ross walking back through town with the rifle and pistol. These were identified as the guns in McCall’s possession when he was killed. Lovren also supplied a Parker shotgun and another six-shooter for Britt.

March 18th was a Wednesday. On the Sunday before, McCall and Britt drove out in McCall’s rig to scout the crime scene. Everything was set for the climactic adventure.

The inevitable necessity of a Plan B

McCall’s plan depended on secrecy, but he seems to have told plenty of people what he was up to, especially the denizens of Si Lovren’s deadfall. By Wednesday, if not earlier, Sheriff Merritt of Visalia knew about the robbery. One newspaper reported that “a boy” got wind of the plan and told the sheriff. But mostly Obie Britt took credit, saying that he never liked the plan and didn’t want to participate and so went to the sheriff up to ten days before the robbery (or just before the robbery, depending on his story). The fact that the sheriff knew so far ahead of time and didn’t move to stop the robbery is one of the reasons for suspecting that McCall was set up.

You need to look at the San Francisco Examiner map of March 20, 1896, to get a better picture of what was going on.

The Southern Pacific main line ran down the Central Valley traveling through Fresno and Bakersfield. Visalia is about six miles east of the line. Originally, Visalia was meant to be a main line station, but the town fathers refused a Southern Pacific demand for free land to sweeten the deal; in revenge, the railroad moved the line west hanging Visalia out to dry — another reason why people around Visalia had no love for the railroad.

Goshen and Tulare are on the main line and form a tight triangle with Visalia. Train #20 was traveling up from the south; McCall's original plan, Plan A, was to walk over and ambush the train between Tulare and Goshen. When Sheriff Merritt learned of the plan, he devised a counter plan. His deputies were to sneak out of Visalia in discreet ones and twos as if going about their normal business and rendezvous at Tulare where they would board train #20 and surprise McCall in the act.

But Sheriff Merritt’s security was lousy. The deadfall lowlifes were watching the deputies and clocked the unusual activity. Someone, maybe Lovren, got word to McCall about the sheriff’s trap. A wiser man would have dropped his plans and settled back into the wood chopping business until the coast was clear, but McCall was in a fever. The ambiguous and reluctant Obie Britt counselled deferral, but McCall opted for a dazzling new plan. He would rob a different train.

He, Britt and Haynes would walk from Ben Hicks's ranch the easy 5-6 miles to Goshen and wait for the southbound Train #19 due at about 11pm. He reasoned that the sheriff's entire manpower would be focused on Train #20 leaving all other trains uncovered. Britt described McCall as "jubilant" as they waited at the Goshen station, high on adrenalin for sure. It was a daring riposte. He was on the big board for the first time, acting instead of being acted upon — a seductive feeling for the downtrodden, men at the end of their tether, rebels, and train robbers.

They left Hicks’s ranch on foot at 5 p.m. leaving their red lantern behind. They were missing co-conspirator John Haynes who skipped the robbery to attend a Salvation Army meeting in Tulare with his family. Afterward, he claimed never to have been involved; he said Britt was “off his chunk.”

Fate, ever devious, let me count the ways

Actually, it was a great plan but doomed to failure on account of Fate or bad luck, that shadow that had dogged McCall all his life. While McCall and Britt were skulking at the train station, two of Sheriff Merritt's deputies, Earl Daggett and Vic Reed, young men in their early twenties, met Train #19 as it arrived and caged a free ride to Tulare. They had been alerted to join the posse there and the quickest way was to jump on the next southbound train. They found places to sit behind the engine at the front of the coal tender expecting a peaceful trip.

McCall and Britt were hiding just ahead of the train near the coal depot. McCall was armed with a Colt six-shooter revolver, a Marlin rifle, and baking powder tin full of Giant Powder dynamite; Britt carried a six-shooter, a Parker shotgun, and a sack of extra ammunition, weapons all supplied by Si Lovren. McCall was wearing a canvas coat, blue overalls, and a woolen shirt. Both men had black masks with cutout eyes and red bandanas covering their faces.

As the train started out of Goshen, just as the engine passed, both men jumped out of their hiding places and ran for the cars. McCall leaped for the back of the tender and dragged himself up. What happened next is a bit unclear in detail. Either Britt jumped for the front of the blind baggage car (just behind the tender), then jumped back down, or he didn't jump at all. One of his guns went off — later he said (one of his stories) that he had tried to shoot McCall. But McCall thought it was an accident and yelled at him to be careful. (Alternatively, Britt may have taken a shot at McCall on another occasion altogether. In any case, he was a man not be trusted around guns.)

Putting the conflicting details aside, the upshot was that Britt did not get on the train; he ran straight to the stationmaster and had him telegraph Sheriff Merritt that McCall was on Train #19 and intending to rob it. Not that Merritt now could do anything about it because he was in Tulare waiting for Train #20.

Crucially, McCall did not know of Britt's betrayal. As events shortly proved, he still thought Britt was on the train with him though behind him and out of sight. As the train gained speed, McCall started climbing over the tender. I can't quite envision this process. In general, a coal tender was a rectangular car attached at the back of the engine. It consisted of a U-shaped water jacket or tank and, in the middle, a coal bunker sloped down toward the engine to make it easier for the fireman who shovel out the coal.

I imagine that McCall came over the top of the car, appearing suddenly out of the darkness directly above Daggett and Reed with the engineer and fireman just ahead inside the open cab of the engine. Perhaps he didn't even notice the deputies at first. He yelled out, "Throw up your hands." Daggett and Reed had shotguns but were not ready. Reed tried to swing round and got off a shot that went over McCall's shoulder. McCall shot him once with his Colt in the fleshy part of the upper arm; he was so close that there were powder burns on Reed's hand.

McCall then shot Daggett, a second shot with his revolver. He shouted, "Why don't you shoot?" which has always been taken as a sign that he thought Britt was standing right behind him backing him up. Daggett was badly wounded; McCall’s bullet hit him in the abdomen, went through his lung and ended up lodged just under the skin of his back. But he was able to bring his shotgun up and blast McCall with a full load of buckshot at close range. The shot lifted McCall and threw him off the train.

Meanwhile the engineer and the fireman had scrambled out of the cab and along the engine till they were standing on the cowcatcher with the train racing along at 45 miles an hour. Reed called them back and started attending to Daggett. They decided not to stop the train and look for McCall but to head straight for Tulare where they could get medical help and find the sheriff.

At Tulare, Sheriff Merritt reorganized his posse, sending several men along with the wounded Reed north on Train #20, which slowed and stopped at the robbery site. There they found McCall stretched on his side with one arm flung out above his head. He was still alive but his entrails were hanging out of a hole in his groin. He died shortly after and was brought back to Visalia on the morning local from Goshen. The undertakers Locey, Dungan & Company put his body, "dishonored and horribly lacerated," according the Visalia Daily Times, on display for public viewing. A photograph was taken and exhibited in a merchant’s front window.

A reader misled by books

Deputies pulled in Si Lovren and Charles Ardell as accomplices. Public opinion ran against them, and, fearing that he was about to be lynched, Lovren cut his own throat the next morning. (He was allowed to bring his straight razor, even hand it around for other prisoners to shave, as long as he agreed not to hand it over to one particular man who was not to be trusted.) He was saved to stand trial.

Deputies also arrested Haynes who had the perfect alibi.

They turned over McCall’s cabin, finding the lantern and red cheese cloth, also the black material from which the masks were cut. McCall had dug a hole in the floor and placed a large box therein, a hidey-hole it was theorized for the loot and the guns.

Two of McCall’s brothers, Francisco and Santiago (Frank and James) came up from Soquel for the burial. The only person to drive out to the cemetery with them was Joe Arana, an old acquaintance of Daniel McCall, or so he said, who subsequently gave an interview to the Visalia Delta Times during which he told the story about McCall having shot a man to death “on the coast” only to get off on a plea of self-defense and another about how McCall had originally arrived in Visalia with a notorious gunman named John Keener who was subsequently shot to death robbing a stage in Calaveras.

I don’t know if any of that is true.

I keep thinking about all the stories. What’s missing is the voice of Daniel McCall who could set me straight. I can’t tell if he was a bad man, a desperado like the Dalton brothers in his book, or a romantic working class hero, or a weak man who drank too much and was easily led. When his first plan fell apart, he invented a new and better plan on the spot. He was “jubilant” waiting for the target train. He didn’t know Obie Britt had betrayed him or that two deputies were waiting on the coal tender. When the deputies appeared out of the darkness, he shot them both with his Colt, spectacular shooting with a six-shooter on a moving train.

But he wasn’t famous for more than a week. Train robbing was going out of fashion. No one wrote a book about him, which is maybe what he wanted.

I keep thinking of those long evenings on Hicks’s ranch with the book in Obie Britt’s hands and Obie Britt’s voice droning on about desperate training-robbing men.

If nothing else, Daniel McCall was a reader led astray by books.

[God help me, this is turning into an epic. Since I published Three-Fingered Jack McCall, Part 1, I’ve had to expand and revise the entire California section of that post. And now it seems appropriate to cut this second section in two, so I can concentrate on the robbery in the final part. As many of you may already have discovered, it is often good to check the online version of my posts for revisions (also fixed typos and grammatical inerrancies). I realize most readers will not put up with this abuse, making you go back and forth and reread and then wait. Sigh. As some forgotten great writer once said, “So shoot me.”]

The wanderer, the sorrow & the pity

There are two kinds of wanderers. There are the authentic type of nomad, the desert Arabs of the Mideast and North Africa and the Roma, who travel light but carry everything — family, household goods, and livestock — with them. In effect, they carry their home place on their backs and never leave it. And then there are vagabonds of the west — adventurers, explorers, exiles, malcontents, escapists — who leave everything behind and start fresh in a new land, building a new home place just like the one they left behind. This is the type that colonized the Americas from Europe; also the template for my 5xgreat-uncle Hugh Percival McCall.

Having left his life in Norfolk County behind, he built another in Soquel, California, finding a wife, giving his children the family names. The irony is that he escaped one claustral pod only to construct another, much the same. The only things he carried with him were his restlessness, the desire to escape, to make a life with as little effort as possible, and a few primitive skills — chopping wood, shooting animals. He progressed from cutting down the stately ancient pines of Norfolk to cutting down the stately ancient redwoods of Santa Cruz. He crossed a continent, but never escaped.

Hugh Percival suffered what Baudelaire called “the Great Malady: Horror of One’s Home.” He was a throwback to our hunter-gatherer forebears, before farming, cities, and civilization. Yet wherever he went, he built a home. However you paper this over with talk of nomadism, romance, and adventure, such stories give off a strong odor of what used to be called male chauvinism but what I like to think of as gender thuggery. Bruce Chatwin spent his short life trying to write a masterpiece about nomads, whom he idolized. He failed to write that book, but wrote two wonderful spinoffs about wanderers, In Patagonia and The Songlines. In Patagonia weaves around the adventures of Chatwin’s grandmother’s eccentric cousin Charley Milward “the Sailor” who wrote in his scrapbook under the title This Freedom:

It is the man’s part to sow and ride away; conception is the woman’s office and that which she receives she tends to cherish and incorporate within her. Of her body that function is its glory; of her mind it is the millstone. A man rides away, a tent-dweller, an arab with a horse and the plains about him. Woman is a dweller in a city with a wall, a house-dweller, storing her possessions about her, abiding with them, not to be sundered from them.

No mention here of the detritus, those left behind, and the mutual responsibility for conception.

The irony of Chatwin’s book is how freighted it is with sadness and disappointment. Not happy at home, his wanderers rarely find any but the most fleeting happiness anywhere else. And most of them and their descendants live on in a wan afterlife struggling to preserve memories of home that inevitably fade.

The Madonna of Branciforte & her boy

Daniel McCall was born in Soquel in 1852, following his brothers Francisco and Juan (sons from an earlier marriage), the same year his parents were married. His mother, maiden name Dolores Moxica, descended from one of the original settlers in a secular pueblo called Branciforte just across the San Lorenzo River from the original Santa Cruz mission. Branciforte was founded in 1798 by eight petty criminals — courtesans, brawlers, syphilitics, small-time crooks — and their families shipped in by the authorities from Guadalajara. One of these originals was a carpenter named Jose Vincente Mojica who brought his wife and five children to the settlement. It’s fascinating to see the parallels — at precisely the same time the McCalls were cutting farms out of the forest in Norfolk County, the Mojicas were building huts on a bluff overlooking Monterey Bay. This Vincente Mojica was Dolores Moxica’s grandfather.

The colony failed to prosper; the settlers earned a reputation for laziness, lack of ambition, and lawlessness. There were gunfights, bullfights, and fandangos (and fandango girls). In 1818, threatened by pirates, the Franciscan brothers and neophytes (the name for their Indian converts) at the Santa Cruz mission, hastily fled inland for safety. The excellent people of Branciforte took advantage of their absence and pillaged the mission, even stealing, the story goes, the vestments off the saints statues.

According to my conjectural timeline, Hugh Percival turned up around 1833, and set to work cutting redwoods for the new sawmill on the Zayante Creek. Between 1840 and 45, he met and married a second wife (Anor Haviland, his first wife, was still alive, of course) who died after bearing him two sons. Then he somehow captured the heart of Dolores Moxica who was much younger, and, like Anor, unable to read and write. How this came about one can only conjecture; in later life Dolores seems to have been widely respected as a descendant of pioneers and a pious church-goer. But somehow she ended up with a wandering trapper turned lumberjack much advanced in years.

From 1850 on, censuses show them living in Soquel. In 1860, Hugh Pablo is 69; his wife is listed as 29; and he is farming in Soquel. In 1870, just before Hugh Pablo disappears, the household consists himself, Dolores, Santiago (James), 10, also illiterate, and the baby David, born in May. The rest had flown the coop, though Francisco marries and continues to live in Soquel. His brother Juan seems to have died; nothing more is heard from him. Francisco pops up in a voters list as a “a laborer”; in 1896, the Visalia Times describes him as an upright businessman in Santa Cruz managing a livery stable; in 1910, he is a “teamster.” Reading through the news reports following Dan McCall’s shooting, I get the sense that Dolores didn’t speak English, which means all her children were bilingual (even Hugh Pablo must have spoken some Spanish).

In March, 1896, Dan McCall was 43 years old. He had been married, but his wife had died (in 1894 or “several years ago,” depending on which newspaper you read) leaving him with one son, also named Daniel, 21. The Santa Cruz Penny Press of March 20 claimed he "always regarded as a decent, harmless, though not over bright fellow"…"just the man to be easily made a victim of.” A man named Arana who claimed to know Dan and who accompanied his two brothers to the burial in Visalia told the papers that Dan had shot and killed a man in a dispute over a land claim on the coast, but was subsequently discharged on the grounds of self-defense (no other person mentions this; Arana seems to have been a fund of negative stories). According to the Santa Cruz Daily Sentinal Dan McCall had been a member of the Santa Cruz Hook and Ladder Company and had competed in fireman tournaments. He had joined the Cleveland Club and supported Democrat Grover Cleveland for president. Until his death, he sent his mother money every month to pay her rent. Contradicting Arana’s story about the shooting, one anonymous acquaintance said Dan had nothing to do with guns and might even have been too timid to shoot one.

In recent years it seems he had fallen on hard times. I get the sense he was drinking too much. In conversation he could be a loud talker. He drifted away from Soquel picking up manual labor jobs. In 1888, he was living in Fresno. For the last four years of his life he was in Tulare County between Fresno and Bakersfield (the county contains most of Sequoia National Park and Sequoia National Forest). In 1895, he was chopping wood for a rancher named Ben Hicks, just north of Visalia in the San Joaquin Valley, scene of a series of famous train robberies and shootings. He made his town headquarters at a so-called deadfall saloon run by a man named Si Lovren on the corner of Main and Garden Street. In October 1895, he took on a partner, a 19-year-old newly arrived Texan named Obie Britt, and the two of them signed a fresh contract with Hicks. McCall had a small redwood shack on Hicks’s land, where he kept a rig and two horses.

He was five feet, eight and a half inches tall, with swarthy skin, brown eyes, and black hair. There were noticeable scars on his neck, as though from a fight. He wore elaborate side whiskers to cover the scar.

The Octopus & the Dalton Gang

In 1882 The Wasp, a San Francisco satirical magazine (then edited by Ambrose Bierce), published a G. Frank Keller cartoon depicting the Southern Pacific Railroad monopoly as an octopus. In 1901 Frank Norris published his novel The Octopus, A Story of California, a bitterly realistic account of the struggles between ranchers, wheat farmers and the railroad monopoly in the San Joaquin Valley. Here’s a bit from the climactic shootout (based on the Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880, when seven people were killed in a battle between sandlappers (settlers) and railroad men in the Valley.

But Cutter, Phelps, and the old man Dabney, misunderstanding what was happening, and seeing Osterman leave the ditch, had followed his example. All the Leaguers were now out of the ditch, and a little way down the road, Hooven, Osterman, Annixter, and Harran in front, Dabney, Phelps, and Cutter coming up from behind.

“Keep back, you,” cried the deputy again.

In the group around S. Behrman's buggy, Gethings and Delaney were yet quarrelling, and the angry debate between Magnus, Garnett, and the marshal still continued.

Till this moment, the real estate broker, Christian, had taken no part in the argument, but had kept himself in the rear of the buggy. Now, however, he pushed forward. There was but little room for him to pass, and, as he rode by the buggy, his horse scraped his flank against the hub of the wheel. The animal recoiled sharply, and, striking against Garnett, threw him to the ground. Delaney's horse stood between the buggy and the Leaguers gathered on the road in front of the ditch; the incident, indistinctly seen by them, was misinterpreted.

Garnett had not yet risen when Hooven raised a great shout:

“HOCH, DER KAISER! HOCH, DER VATERLAND!”

With the words, he dropped to one knee, and sighting his rifle carefully, fired into the group of men around the buggy.

Instantly the revolvers and rifles seemed to go off of themselves. Both sides, deputies and Leaguers, opened fire simultaneously. At first, it was nothing but a confused roar of explosions; then the roar lapsed to an irregular, quick succession of reports, shot leaping after shot; then a moment's silence, and, last of all, regular as clock-ticks, three shots at exact intervals. Then stillness.

Delaney, shot through the stomach, slid down from his horse, and, on his hands and knees, crawled from the road into the standing wheat. Christian fell backward from the saddle toward the buggy, and hung suspended in that position, his head and shoulders on the wheel, one stiff leg still across his saddle. Hooven, in attempting to rise from his kneeling position, received a rifle ball squarely in the throat, and rolled forward upon his face. Old Broderson, crying out, “Oh, they've shot me, boys,” staggered sideways, his head bent, his hands rigid at his sides, and fell into the ditch. Osterman, blood running from his mouth and nose, turned about and walked back. Presley helped him across the irrigating ditch and Osterman laid himself down, his head on his folded arms. Harran Derrick dropped where he stood, turning over on his face, and lay motionless, groaning terribly, a pool of blood forming under his stomach. The old man Dabney, silent as ever, received his death, speechless. He fell to his knees, got up again, fell once more, and died without a word. Annixter, instantly killed, fell his length to the ground, and lay without movement, just as he had fallen, one arm across his face.

This is essential background for what happened to Dan McCall. After gold was discovered and Mexico ceded California to the United States, settlers flooded the territory, young men looking for gold, desperately poor families, squatters, and rapacious capitalists who quickly scaled up a transportation infrastructure (shipping and railroads) supported by a federal government anxious to solidify its grip on the vast country and none too delicate about the fortunes the railway magnates scooped up while building the nation’s arteries. Typical of the California tycoons was Leland Stanford who came to Sacramento in 1856 and quickly established himself as a mega investor in land and railways. His rise was lightning fast. He became governor, head of the company that built the western section of the first transcontinental railway, founder of Stanford University, and a billionaire (in today’s money).

It was Stanford who claimed the honor of driving the last, golden spike (with a silver hammer) on May 10, 1869, incidentally providing Hugh Pablo McCall with an easy route home to Norfolk County in Canada the following year. It is especially instructive to set Stanford’s skyward trajectory next to Hugh Pablo’s stunted downward spiral. Stanford also supported the state’s genocidal policies against the Indians. I have not dwelt on the fate of the indigenous population in this essay; see my earlier piece on Aunt Hetty McInnes for the grisly details. If ever an institution was ripe for a name-change based on the systematic cruelties of its namesake, Stanford University is at the top of the list.

In order to get railways built both federal and state governments adopted a policy of giving out vast tracts of land to the railway companies to inspire their construction efforts (same as in Canada). This brought the railways into conflict with settlers who may have built farms on land they later discovered was not theirs (the railroads would offer to sell it back to them at “developed” prices they could never afford). In the San Joaquin Valley, the Southern Pacific also manipulated haulage rates, jacking up the rates when wheat farmers were desperate to get their crops to market. The railways had politicians, land speculators, and the law on their side (also a small army of private detectives and thugs). This is what led up to the Mussel Slough shootout, but that was only the beginning of a decade and a half of outlawry and social discontent directed at the Southern Pacific in the Valley.

Another Canadian comes into this, Christopher Evans, a San Joaquin farmer born in Bells Corners just outside Ottawa, who lost his farm when he contracted to sell his crop in San Francisco and the railway wiped him out with an increase in haulage rates. At about this time, he met John Sontag, a young man who had been fired by the railway after his leg was crushed between two rail cars. This was the Evans-Sontag gang responsible for at least four train robberies in the Valley between 1889 and 1892. Their daring crimes and even more daring escapes and shootouts captured the public imagination (a public largely sympathetic to robbing the robber barons) even as the railway detectives and marshals relentlessly hunted them. Sontag was finally shot to death at the Battle of Stone Corral near Visalia in 1893 and Evans captured (badly shot up).

As Richard Maxwell Brown writes in No Duty to Retreat, Values and Violence in American History and Society,

In Chris Evans and John Sontag, California's Central Valley had its own two-man version of Jesse James as social bandit Evans and Sontag gained widespread sympathy for their repeated robberies of Southern Pacific trains in 1889—92. As both glorified and resister gunfighters, the antirailroad lawbreaking of Evans and Sontag was a surrogate expressing the seething resentment against the Southern Pacific by peaceful, law-abiding residents.

Evans was released from Folsom in 1911 and went to live with his daughter in Portland, Oregon, where he wrote a book, an anarchist-utopian fantasy called Eurasia. The action takes place in the year 2000. There is no plot. The narrator arrives in an unknown country governed on socialist principles and proceeds to visit every one of its 13 government ministries plus the national bank and a prison. It begins:

One pleasant afternoon in the month of May, 19—, I launched my boat, and after rowing about half a mile from shore I shipped my oars, stepped the mast, hoisted sail and reclining on a cushioned seat at the stern with my hand on the tiller, I waited for a breeze to spring up, and whilst so doing I fell asleep. How long I slept I know not, for when I awoke my boat was close to shore, and to my' astonishment I was in strange waters.

In 1891, in the middle of the Evans-Sontag campaign, the famous Dalton Gang (more famous for its depredations in Oklahoma and the midwest) popped up in Tulare County. One of the brothers had a ranch near Visalia. On February 6, they robbed a Southern Pacific train near Alila during which the train’s fireman was shot to death in cold blood (the baggage car guard jumped out and disappeared into the brush taking the combination to the safe with him). A year later, the details of his robbery were published in a gory potboiling nonfiction book The Dalton Brothers and their Astounding Career in Crime.

It was this particular robbery and the book that inspired Dan McCall in 1896.

Three-fingered Jack

I recently discovered a new cousin, name of Three-fingered Jack McCall, who died in a shoot-out trying to rob train outside of Goshen, California, on March 19, 1896. It was his first train robbery. Prior to train-robbing he had earned a living as a lumberjack, which explains how he lost two fingers and earned his nickname. His real name was Daniel McCall.

He was born in Soquel, Santa Cruz County, California, in 1852 to Dolores Moxica and Hugh Pablo McCall. Dolores was Old California, descended from early Spanish settlers, remembered in her old age as respectable and Catholic. Hugh Pablo was a restless wanderer, a mountain man, a bigamist, an alcoholic, and a person who could not maintain his focus long enough to succeed at anything. When he arrived in California, he supported himself as an itinerant trapper and lumberjack, a model for his son. He was also my 5xgreat-uncle, born in New Jersey (as so many of my ancestors were), a long-time resident of Norfolk County where I grew up, and a veteran of the War of 1812. His real name was Hugh Percival McCall.

Before I tell you about Three-fingered Jack, I have to tell you about his father.

One of the world’s great wanderers

Useless to ask a wandering man
Advice on the construction of a house.
The work will never come to completion.
-From the Chinese Book of Odes, in Chatwin The Songlines

I’ve always been fascinated by stories of people who disappear, are declared dead, but then, one day, come home again, having lived another life in secret somewhere else and far away. Or folk stories about penniless younger sons who must go away to earn their fortunes, only to return one day rich and accomplished. Or tales of international spies with five passports under different names able to weave amongst their different lives without ever having to settle down and face the consequences.

My bad boy uncle Hugh McCall wrote the book on such disappearing acts when he ran away from home and family in 1827 at the age of 35 only to turn up 45 years later with vague stories about where he had been all that time. His Canadian wife and children being dead, there was no one left to complain of his absence; the village of Vittoria gave him a welcome home parade, and when he passed on in 1874, his death register listed his occupation as “one of the world’s great wanderers.”

There are clearly two ways of looking at this, I think to myself, now that I have achieved an age of wisdom and mature judgment. First, there is the mythic tale of the nomad, sloughing off the tedious responsibilities of civilized life, possessions and attachments, and slipping away into a world of romance and adventure. Think: Jack Kerouac on the road. But on the other hand, the unromantic hand, Hugh McCall abandoned his wife and three small children to the winds. E. A. Owen, the Long Point Settlement chronicler, wrote that “He was possessed of a roaming disposition and was fond of adventure.”1 But he was clearly something of a wastrel and inept. Every money-making venture he put his hand to failed.

And what was he doing all that time away? The story his nephew F. W. Walsh told after the wanderer died is that he made his way as a hunter, something like Daniel Boone, traveling down the Mississippi to Mexico where he took part in a revolution, but picking the wrong side, the “Monarchial” faction, he ended up in a Mexican prison. Some indeterminate time later he teleported to California for the Gold Rush, but typically managed to fail at finding gold. At which point, he turned up in Vittoria in southern Ontario ancient in years but triumphant. (This last part still mystifies me, the apotheosis of the serial loser.)

New Jersey to Norfolk County, the early years

Hugh Percival McCall was one of my New Jersey ancestors, the youngest child of a Scottish soldier Donald McCall (my 5xgreat-grandfather), a Highlander from island of Mull, a veteran of the siege of Louisbourg (1758), the capture of Quebec (1759), and Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763-65). Donald McCall was demobilized in Philadelphia where he met his wife Elsie Simpson, and the two of them homesteaded in a Scottish settlement near Basking Ridge, Somerset County, New Jersey. In total they had nine children, five sons and four daughters. Hugh Percival came late, born in 1793.

By 1797, the family had settled in what would become Norfolk County in southern Ontario, scene of my childhood. They chopped farms out of the bush just west of Vittoria along Young’s Creek a few miles north of Lake Erie. Briefly, Hugh Percival went to school; at least he learned to sign his name. But mostly he grew up wild, already uprooted, the accidental child of older parents (his father was 58 and his mother 46 when he was born) consumed with obtaining the bare necessities on the frontier. He occupied himself in hunting (wolves, 2 shillings a head) and fabulous feats of strength. Once he and his posse challenged each other to lift the grinding wheel in a bark mill (for grinding tree bark to extract the tannins for tanning leather). Owen describes the wheel:

The wheel was six feet in diameter, eighteen inches thick, solid, and made of oak timber. In addition to the weight of this ponderous wheel was that of the propelling shaft, or lever as it was called, around which the wheel revolved. When it is considered that this shaft was about fifteen feet long, passing through the wheel four feet from the outer end where the lifting was done, the difficulty of the task may well be imagined…

Hugh seems to have imprinted not on his father but on his eldest brother John McCall, a large, turbulent, hard-drinking man who, in New Jersey, had owned a slave. According to Owen, the soul of discretion, John McCall “was possessed of a rough-and-ready nature, and was a conspicuous personage in the settlement. He was endowed with a coarse vein of humor, and being an expert hunter, was one of the best known characters of his time.” Thomas Welch, an Anglican and a member of the local land-owning elite, described him less judiciously as an “abandoned Character . . . accustomed to escape from the penalties of the Law in New Jersey, where nothing less than Grand Larceny is laid to his Charge. . . . He is certainly a very bad Man.”2

War of 1812 and after

John McCall owned a boat that he used for trading up and down and across the lake. When the War of 1812 broke out, Hugh Percival was 19 and full of vim. In early August, 1812, Sir Isaac Brock, the British commander in what was then called Upper Canada, organized a party of Norfolk militia, put them in boats at Port Dover, and sailed up the lake to Detroit, which they promptly captured. John McCall’s boat formed part of the armada, fitted with a cannon in the bow, Hugh Percival in the crew.

Norfolk was harried country during the war. Its farms were the bread basket of the British Army, but most of the time the British Army hung back at Ancaster on Lake Ontario and left the farm county open to depredations from the lake and by land. Americans were forever coming over and burning things. My short story “The Battle of Malcolm’s Mills” is a fictionalized account of an incident during the famous McArthur Raid of 1814. Hugh Percival was a sergeant in the Flank Company of the Norfolk Militia, then joined Col. Henry Bostwick's Royal London Volunteers. He seems to have fought in a various skirmishes, most notably at the Battle of McRae’s Farm on the Thames River (roughly where Chatham is today) under the command of Lt. Henry Medcalf in December, 1813.

By late 1813, the Americans had pushed the British out of Detroit and killed the great war chief Tecumseh at the disastrous Battle of Moraviantown in October. The Americans had set up forward posts well inland from Detroit. In December, the militia in Norfolk got wind of a large herd of cattle grazing on the prairie at Rondeau. Medcalf organized a unit, including Hugh, to bring them in. When Medcalf and his men arrived at Rondeau the cattle had disappeared, but a local informant reported that a party of American troops were stationed at McRae’s farmhouse up on the Thames. Though his men were exhausted and cold, Medcalf decided to take advantage of the situation; he had surprise on his side.

The Canadians surrounded the house in the night, shouted for surrender, then poured a volley through the windows. One American was killed, the rest captured. Hugh, in particular, was praised for his energy and bravery. Which was all well and good except that the Canadians retreating with their straggling band of prisoners managed to let most of they escape before they reached the British lines. Whether this was accidental or intentional is open to debate. Evidently, the experience scarred Lt. Medcalf who was promoted to Captain but soon thereafter disappears from the public record.

A marriage of like minds

Meantime, earlier in 1813, Hugh had married Anor Haviland. He was 20 and she was 25, also a wild child, and illiterate. Like the McCalls, the Havilands were Loyalists from New Jersey, with land grants at the north end of Norfolk in Townsend Township (I went to Boy Scouts with Haviland boys from nearby Boston). My genealogically inclined late cousin John Cardiff wryly observed, “Hugh and Aner appear to have been a couple of rascals who probably did the neighbors a favor when they married each other.”3 They had five children: George (b1814), Isaac (b1815, lived only 10 days), Mervyum (b1817, died the same day), Allen (b1818), and Sarah (b1820).

At first Hugh tried farming in Townsend Township near Anor’s parents, but in 1818 his father died, leaving him the family farm near Vittoria on condition that he look after his aging mother. This arrangement didn’t suit Hugh past the first year (or maybe it didn’t suit Anor). He sold the farm to his brother James and put the money toward a boat, following the example of his older brother John. But he wasn’t very good a sailing either. Famously, in 1819 he got caught in the lake ice off Port Rowan with a load of salt. Salt prices rose $2 a barrel in the aftermath. In 1820, Anor took the children and moved back to her parents.

According to John Cardiff, “A heavy drinker, Hugh lost the boat then became a seldom trusted pilot for hire. Several times he drank his commission in the U.S., woke up broke and had to walk home to Aner who yet again took him in and put him to work improving whatever poor housing she had at the time.” Typical of his efforts, according to Owen, “Mr. McCall was awarded a grant of land in the township of Sombra, but he could not tie himself down to the task of improving it.” By 1827, Anor was reduced to squatting on a piece of property in Townsend, making do with handouts from her parents. Hugh Percival exerted himself to make one final effort to earn enough to help her buy the land. “For a time, says Owen, “he engaged in the fur traffic.”

But that year or the next he finally he gave up and lit out for the territory.

Anor moved the remains of her family west to Yarmouth in neighboring Elgin County to a farm her father owned. Her daughter died at the age of 12 in 1832. She remarried, then remarried again and had to take out a restraining order against that man. Her son George died and she stepped in to take care of his wife and children. Then her remaining son died. In 1864, at the age of 76, she died. She was buried next to her daughter.

Hugh Percival not at the Alamo

Until recently, no one really knew what Hugh was doing for the next dozen or so years. The only evidence, such as it was, was contained an a sentence in E. A. Owen’s book and a newspaper memorial written by Hugh’s nephew F. L. Walsh around the time of his death. Owen wrote, “For a time he engaged in the fur traffic. Finally he went to California, and did not return until he had grown old.” Walsh had more to say, but much of it is vague and confusing.

A few years after that war (1812—14) was ended, from not having been successful in maritime pursuits on the lakes and other causes, Hugh McCall left this country and being much of a sportsman, went southward along the then confines of settlements — rifle in hand — surpassing many of the renowned hunters of that time, by the numbers taken by his unerring aim on the famed hunting grounds of the West, until he finally reached Mexico. There he settled and was successful in gaining property for several years, when out of pure philanthropy, as they have since evinced, their affectionate neighbours persuaded the Mexicans that to be politically happy was to do as they had done — become independent. Acting upon this advice, a revolution took place. When the subject of these remarks as well from his Monarchial principles, early inculcated as from a sense of duty, in return for kind offices which had been extended to him by those in authority, he joined the forces in defense of Spanish supremacy. They were discomfited and he with others taken, was forthwith pinioned to be shot; but it so happened that one in authority amongst the insurgents was a Scotchman and he hearing or seeing the name McCall amongst those of the doomed prisoners, came to him and asked him if he came from Scotland, being answered that he was the son of a Scotsman, he calmly remarked, Perhaps it might be as well not to execute that man — his life was spared but not his property. He was hurried far into the interior of the country and retained a prisoner until Mexican independence had been gained, which if a blessing must have been one in disguise as their subsequent history has shown.

After being released from captivity Hugh McCall made his way to California where his efforts to settle himself comfortably promised for a time to be crowned with success , but his plans were again frustrated by the angel of evil omen which had ruined his prospects in Mexico — overshadowing regions West of the Rocky Mountains which caused the mania which seized the many thousands to flock to that country in the hope of getting gold. But this did not benefit the subject of these remarks, quite the contrary.

He continued however to plod on in California in very reduced circumstances from one year to another, until recently when, from bodily infirmity and age, he was induced to return to this country of his youth…4

Walsh had this story from Hugh Percival himself, or from another nephew Simpson McCall (Owen’s information came from Simpson McCall), and it is about as garbled as you can get. By the late 1820s Mexico was already an independent country no longer ruled by Spain. So the words “independence” and “Spanish supremacy” are meaningless. It comprised all the territory that became Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California, as well as the remnant that is modern Mexico. In 1827 American settlers were flocking to Texas, taking advantage of generous land grants by which the Mexican government hoped to erect a civilized barrier against the Comanche. But Mexico had outlawed slavery, which annoyed those American immigrants who wanted to extend their cotton empire into the new lands. These American Texans did attempt to persuade their Mexican neighbors to rise for independence, and some did. The upshot was the Texas Revolution (1835-36), the massacres at the Alamo and Goliad, and the eventual surprising defeat of the Mexican army under Santa Ana (like Hugh Percival, Santa Ana proved inept at almost everything he tried).

Helen McCall Pincombe, the family authority on Hugh McCall, decided he went to Texas, that the political events in Texas roughly paralleled the events described in Walsh’s memorial. She thought he was imprisoned until 1848 when the Treaty of Hidalgo was signed, giving all the country from Texas to California to the United States. His release, so she thought, in 1848 coincided with the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill in California.

For a while, I bought this story, for lack of an alternative. Hugh was a Loyalist and a Tory, an enemy of the American democratic experiment. He was grateful to Mexico for its open-handed land grants. When it came time to choose sides, he threw in his lot with the Mexican government against the American revolutionaries. In other words, he sided with the Mexican government against Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and all those Walt Disney heroes of yesteryear. But then who took him prisoner — the Texans he fought against? And who wanted to shoot him? And why did he end up in a Mexican jail after fighting on their side? In fact, the whole shooting episode sounds invented, a B movie Hollywood script, and the reasons for his imprisonment remain obscure. His settling in Texas is only a threadbare theory.

Hugh Percival becomes mountain man Hugh Pablo

There are no records of Hugh in Texas. Those years are a tabula rasa. But just in the last couple of months I found fresh documents, and, lo!, there he was, now Hugh Pablo McCall living in Soquel, Santa Cruz County, California where he appeared in censuses and voters lists from 1850 to 1870.

In the summer of 1969 I braced myself against the sun and the glittering reflection off the waves on the pier at Santa Cruz little knowing how near I was to Uncle Hugh with only a century between us.

The date of Hugh Pablo’s appearance in California is squishy; a grandson’s obituary published in 2014 says he arrived in 1828.5 The Riptide Newspaper’s Centennial Pioneer Edition of 1950 contains a sketch of the life of mountain man William Ware6, which claims that Ware was “certainly trapping in the great basin by ‘28 for I have the statement of J. P. McCall and others who knew him in the Rockies this year.” The anonymous author goes on to say, “He prob. came to Calif. with [Isaac] Graham about ‘34 from N Mex.” Leon Rowland, in Santa Cruz, the early years7, describes Hugh Pablo as “the old French Canadian who had come over the Santa Fe trail in the middle 1930s.” Years later, Graham’s daughter Mrs. Mathilda Jane Graham Rice confirmed that Hugh Pablo McCall was part of Graham’s brigade of mountain men, along with, amazingly enough, Kit Carson. “Of the company who came to California with him I only remember the name of Trout, McCall, Billy Ware, Henry Nail, a young man Graham raised. The rest I have forgotten. And Kit Carson.”8

Isaac Graham9 was a well known mountain man, turbulent, violent, scheming, rebellious, also a, like Hugh, bigamist who had left wife and children behind; he was born in Virginia but his family moved to Crab Orchard, Kentucky, when he was three; at the age of 20 he went to live with his mother’s cousin Daniel Boone and was present when Boone died in 1821. Graham first appears in Santa Cruz County in 1833, head of a party of trappers and traders, including William Ware, who took the Old Spanish Trail from Santa Fe and Taos. He established a saw mill on the Zayante Creek (modern day Felton) where Hugh Pablo, Billy Ware, others of the mountain man ilk settled and worked as sawyers, lumberjacks and trappers. In 1847, Hugh Pablo built a house for Graham10, and in 1849 he leased the mill with a partner, another mountain man named Gervais Hammond. He also found time to marry a local woman, Dona Maria Vaselas, and sired two sons with her, Francisco McCall (b1846, but according to census figures as early as 1842) and Juan McCall (b1847) (John for Hugh’s black sheep older brother).

These dates contradict theory #1, Hugh Percival going to Texas and participating in the Texas Revolution. Now we have Hugh Percival heading south, self-advertising as a hunter and trapper, somehow finding his way to St. Louis and hanging a right along the Missouri River following all the other hunters and trappers heading into the Rockies. From this point, some men headed along the river toward the northwest hinterlands; others veered southwest from Kansas City along what was known as the Santa Fe Trail because, yes, it ended up in Santa Fe. Brigades of trappers would congregate at Taos and head north into the mountains and the Great Basin. But there was also a southerly route, the Old Spanish Trail, that terminated in Los Angeles. It seems likely that Hugh Percival, within a year of leaving Norfolk County, joined these mountain men, trapping and trading in the Rockies before washing up with Isaac Graham and Billy Ware in Santa Cruz County in 1833.

These mountain men were figures of romance and myth. Think of Robert Redford in the film Jeremiah Johnson (1972), the very image of Hugh McCall I am sure.

But there is also Kit Carson (1940) starring Jon Hall. Kit Carson was perhaps the most famous mountain man and was in Isaac Graham’s 1833 brigade to California with Uncle Hugh. The movie begins with a text preamble: “A century ago, the land from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast Range of the Rocky Mountains was still a mysterious wilderness, its tremendous primeval fastness unexplored except for the wanderings of a few hard-bitten American trappers, among whom Kit Carson was a leader.” No mention of the people already living there.

As an nine-year-old in 1957 I was transfixed by Walt Disney’s mountain man soap opera The Saga of Andy Burnett, learned the two theme songs by heart, dreamed of being a mountain man (the TV show’s politics of misogyny, racism, cultural appropriation, and Manifest Destiny no doubt had a detrimental effect, but I am completely cured now, thank you very much). Coincidentally, Andy Burnett (carrying a rifle made by Daniel Boone) starts in Pittsburgh in 1820, travels down the Ohio, thence to St. Louis, and the Santa Fe Trail, finally launching into the mountains from Taos after a flirtation with the divine Estrella. In my imagination I was following Uncle Hugh without having any idea who Uncle Hugh was at the time.

The Saga of Andy Burnett

The way was long and the desert hot
And many knew fear, but he did not
Danger and dust and honest sweat
All part of the Saga of Andy Burnett

Andy made the trails, opened up the land
Andy gave America a mighty helpin' hand
Andy's on the move, Andy won't rest
Andy Burnett, he's a'travelin' West

Okay, shoot me; I was only nine after all. The other theme song went like this:11

Ladies in the Sky

Blow the wind from the mountains
Ladies proud and high
Blow the wind from the mountains
Ladies in the sky
No lover ever had a sweeter dream
Than I remember by a mountain stream

Lost my heart to the mountains
There I want to roam
Goin' back to the mountains
Where I feel at home
I will be faithful until I die
I will always be faithful to those ladies in the sky.

In the 1840s, Graham and his mountain man cronies are briefly suspected of fomenting rebellion (something like the Texas Revolution). Graham and 40 others are arrested and shipped off to prison in San Blas, only to be returned with apologies and indemnities within the year. Could this have been the seed of Hugh Percival’s wild stories of firing squads and imprisonment? I can’t find him on lists of known participants, so I rather doubt he was directly involved. But he may have been inspired by events to goose his resume (which is what I think he was doing telling stories in Vittoria, always a bit player trying to raise his billing).

Dona Maria Vaselas died after Juan is born. Both boys were living in Soquel in 1850 with a young woman identified as Dolores McCall. For some reason, on the date of enumeration Hugh Pablo was not present. He was, as they say, dividing his time. In 1848-49, he was looking for gold in Calaveras and Stockton with another Soquel settler named Lodge12, who was married to a Mexican heiress, owner of a vast tract centering on Soquel. Someone murdered Lodge in Calaveras; Hugh Pablo returned to Zayante without any gold. He and a friend, Gervais Hammond, leased the old mill from Isaac Graham, but true to form he only ran the mill for two months before selling his share to Hammond. In the same vein, he was named one of two county supervisors in Santa Cruz on September 21, 1850, but resigned on October 14.

The Riptide Newspaper’s Centennial Pioneer Edition13 contains a sketch of Hammond’s later career and his friendship with Hugh Pablo. Gervais (also Jarvis) was

measuring plank for Graham '49; perhaps one of the mountaineers, certainly a man who had a lot to say about his acquaintance with Capt. Graham, none of it good but all disproved in court through which, until his death in ‘54, his tales to the public administrator dragged by the nose the swashbuckling old veteran of many a good scrap. Tho’ Hammond's purpose is not clearly revealed, the testimony adduced in these old cases have added highlights to the history of the west between '28 and '46. He with Hugh Pablo McCall were lessees of Graham's ‘upper mill’ [in] ’50, buying M’s interest in the property later in the year when living in the Santa Cruz potrero; lessee with Hoy of part of Martina Castro’s Soquel Rancho this year; partner of William R. Phipps in a hotel at ‘Watsonville Landing' '52 when with a nephew, James Hobbs, he was living at Soquel, dealing extensively as share-cropper, blacksmith, teamster and woodsman. His estate, represented largely by huge, uncollectable notes, was left almost entirely to his friend, McCall.

Hugh Pablo married Dolores (maiden name Moxica, 1823-1915) on April 3, 1852, and their son Daniel (the future train robber named for another McCall brother) was baptized on October 2. Hugh Pablo was 59, Dolores was 29. A daughter Susannah appeared in 1856, followed by Santiago (James) in 1859, and, surprisingly, another son David in 1870 when his father was 77, all born in Soquel.

Dolores lived to be 93. An obituary in the Santa Cruz Evening News, December 18, 1915, memorialized her as “a member of one of the old time Spanish families and can remember the days of the old Mission Fathers. She was a devout Catholic and worshiped in the old Mission Church.”

The Prodigal Returns

The nomad becomes a farmer, settles down, raises his children, without amounting to much. In 1860, he owned two horses (value $110) and just 37 “improved” acres out of his 160-acre farm (value $555). He fell behind. After being credited with helping to start the lumber industry in Soquel, he drifted into obscurity. His sons become labourers, teamsters, lumberjacks and train robbers. He lived 35 years in California, almost exactly the same amount of time he spent in Canada.

Then something happens. Was it the birth of another son in 1870? Or was he just restless, always restless. Perhaps crucially, the transcontinental railway had just delivered its first batch of east-west passengers to San Francisco on September 6,1869, opening up an easy route home.14

I couldn’t find any mention of his second disappearance in the California records and genealogies. A willed forgetfulness on the part of the family. He last appears in Soquel in the 1870 federal census, occupation farming, and — poof! — he’s gone.

The next thing you know they’re holding a parade for him in Vittoria.

There is always a Bible quote for such occasions.

It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found. Luke 15:32

Here is Part 2.

Here is Part 3.

Slavery was once legal in Canada. This became especially interesting during the American Revolution when masses of people descended from African ancestors surged across the border, some to freedom and some right back into chains. The British had offered freedom for any black person who joined the army to fight the rebels. A portion these were more or less safely settled in Nova Scotia after the war. But many white Loyalists, Americans who sided with the British, also owned slaves and brought them to Canada as part of their personal baggage. Not only that, but there was an active market in Montreal for slaves captured as booty by Indians and Loyalist guerillas raiding in upstate New York and elsewhere.

Checking my genealogy I found two New Jersey ancestors who owned slaves. Of course, I don’t kid myself; there may have been more. The details are brief and enigmatic, but Samuel Cooper Moore, who settled in Middlesex County, New Jersey, and died in 1688, owned three slaves at the time of his death: a 15-year-old boy valued at £29 and two girls valued at £20 and £22 respectively. He was my 7xgreat-grandfather. Captain John Moore (a different Moore family), my 4xgreat-grandfather, is said to have fled New Jersey after the Revolution by foot to the Mohawk Valley. He sent his family, portable property, and slaves ahead by bateau to Niagara, but when he arrived some time later, property and slaves had disappeared. According to New Jersey assessment records, my 5xgreat-uncle Captain John McCall owned one slave before he left for Canada. It seems he left that slave behind.

Am I proud of these forebears? No. Even before I learned about the slaves, I had complicated feelings about my Loyalist ancestors. Do I feel guilty? No. These things happened over a century and a half before I was born. Guilt without responsibility is an indulgence. It is facile and even immoral. But having this kind of story in one’s background comes with a duty of care. One must try to discover the facts and represent them accurately. That’s a long process. And one must try not to repeat the sins of our grandfathers in the present.

All this came as a surprise to me, but shouldn’t have. In the early 1790s, six of the sixteen members of the Upper Canada (Ontario) Legislative Assembly were slave owners. And New Jersey, where so many of my Loyalist forebears once lived, was a major slave state. Slavery began there during the original Dutch occupation, but increased substantially when the British took over and offered up to 150 acres of free land per slave for investors who brought their own workforce (this was aimed at planters in the West Indies). At one point, slaves in Bergen County made up close to 20% of the population.

After and even before the American Revolution, most northern states had passed laws to suppress slavery, some banning it outright and others adopting a gradual approach which began by stopping the importation of new slaves and by limiting the period of slavery. New York, for example, adopted the gradual approach in 1799 but completely outlawed slavery in 1827. New Jersey took its gradual approach seriously indeed. There were still life long slaves on the books as late as 1865 when slavery in New Jersey officially ended.

Upper Canada opted for the gradual approach, too. Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe arrived in 1792 and pressed for an outright ban, but had to contend with an entrenched body of powerful individuals who liked owning black servants. In 1793, just as in New York and New Jersey, a law of gradual emancipation was passed. No slaves were actually freed. No more new slaves could be brought into the country, but slaves already resident would continue to be slaves. Babies born to slave women were technically free, but had to live as slaves until they turned 25. Slaves could still be bought and sold, and there were no changes in regard to the severity of punishment for enslaved people. Still, this meant that slavery would eventually fade away. Thus Upper Canada could claim the honour of being the first British colony to ban slavery.

I was brought up thinking of Canada in sunny terms as the terminus of the Underground Railway, a refuge for escaped slaves. But the legislation of 1793 led to that situation in reverse, slaves in Canada running away to Michigan where slavery was outlawed when the territory was incorporated in 1805. So many Canadian slaves escaped to Michigan that by 1806 there were enough to form a black militia company for the defense of Detroit (against Canada).1

Such are the ironies of history.

As for Norfolk County, the first recorded slave is said to have been a woman named Aunt Molly who arrived with the Loyalist settler Lucas Dedrick in 1793. But this conflicts somewhat with a story E. A. Owen tells about the Bowlby family (also from New Jersey) in his Pioneer Sketches of Long Point Settlement. This concerns a woman named Dinah who came to Norfolk in 1796. I give Owen’s version:

It is said that Mr. Axford Thomas Bowlby's father-in-law was wealthy, and kept a number of colored servants, or slaves, as they were virtually at that time, and that he presented Mrs. Bowlby with one named Dinah. They brought this slave to Long Point with them, and it is said she was the first one of her race that came into the county. Before they left New Jersey, Dinah was as much the lawful property of Mrs. Bowlby as was the horses, and the cow that her father gave her, but if she came into Long Point settlement as such, she must have been smuggled in, for three years previous to this the new Legislature passed a law prohibiting the bringing in of any more slaves, and providing for the final extinction of slavery in the Province. In after years Dinah wanted to marry, and there being no one of her own color here she went to New Jersey, and married. After her husband's death she returned to her old place with Mr. Bowlby's family, and subsequently married a white man, who kept a tavern somewhere in the western part of the county. After her second marriage she used to say that her first husband was much the better man. Dinah was an expert cook and a neat housekeeper, and it is said the sight of a hair in the butter would completely destroy her appetite for two weeks.

Hendrick Nelles, the man on whom my novel The Life and Times of Captain N. is based, brought his family and five slaves when he finally settled in Canada after the Revolution. The date for this seems to be a moving target. Again, I quote Owen.

In the party were the six sons of Mr. Nelles Robert, William, John, Warner, Abraham and Peter and five slaves. They came up the Mohawk River in canoes, thence over a portage into Wood Creek, and again into the Oneida. Finally they crossed the Niagara River and took up their abode in the wilderness, where the old village of Grimsby was afterwards founded.

Aaron Culver, another New Jersey Loyalist2, brought a gang of slaves in the 1790s and settled where the town of Simcoe is today (somehow circumventing the law—though Lewis Brown, in A History of Simcoe, 1829-19293, says they were servants, not slaves).4 I won’t give you here the actual term Brown uses to describe these people because today it is deeply offensive when used by white people; the term “Darkeytown” is bad enough.

Culver is also a distant relation of mine. My genealogy software puts it this way: “son of the father (adoptive) of the wife of the 3xgreat-uncle of Douglas Glover.” This just about breaks my brain but means simply that his adopted sister was my aunt by marriage.

I must interject here my gratitude to Mary Caughill who, as a volunteer at the Eva Brook Donly Museum in Simcoe, sent me a copy of Scott Gillie’s article “Of Buttermilk and Banjos: A Glimpse into the History of Blacks in Norfolk County,”5 which gave me some valuable information and research leads. Gillies was at one time curator of the museum.

These servants or ex-slaves lived in cabins on Buttermilk Hill on the Culver farm, now part of the town of Simcoe. Through some sort of gradual emancipation, they were able to leave the farm by 1825 and settle in the neighborhood of Metcalfe and Head Streets, which became known as Darkeytown. These people formed a substantial community over time, probably absorbing fugitive newcomers from the United States. There may have been as many as 300 black people in Simcoe, close to one quarter of the entire population, by the mid 1800s. They had their own church, the British Methodist Episcopal Church on Chapel Street, established in the 1830s, and, briefly, after aggressive petitioning, their own separate school and teacher (though it had no playground or privy and the teacher didn’t make enough money to own a watch). On August 1, they would celebrate Emancipation Day a.k.a Wilberforce Day, the day the British Empire freed all its slaves in 1834.

Lewis Brown and Scott Gillies lean heavily on a singular document by a former Simcoe resident named Walter Matheson who returned from his home in Vancouver in 1919 to give a talk before the Norfolk Historical Society entitled “Darkest Simcoe Fifty Years Ago” which was printed in the May 22 Simcoe Reformer.6 Matheson’s piece is full of valuable information about the slave descendants living in Simcoe including several character sketches of prominent citizens who otherwise would be forgotten. Matheson is the person responsible for the population estimate of 300 (in 1853, he says). But his account is difficult to read today for his constant use of racist tropes and innuendo.7 For example, he’s the source for the “Darkeytown” term.

And what you get from reading all three is a sense threat and exclusion that was nearly constant for the black people of Norfolk. They petitioned for and built their own school in the early 1850s because, as Brown explained, “coloured children were not admitted to the common schools at that time” (though their parents paid school taxes). And they had their own church, according to Gillies, because “Blacks were known to enjoy more enthusiastic sermons and songs, and preferred a preacher whose customs and accent would be familiar to them. Because of these differences, the Black congregation was encouraged to worship separately.”

Much of this is depressingly familiar for anyone reading the daily news in any North American city today.

The first (and possibly only) person executed by hanging in Norfolk County was a black man, and the story is horrible. He was convicted of stealing from a store (yes, you could hang for that) and the execution was botched—he was still alive when placed in his coffin. E. A. Owen tells the story but gives no date except that it took place while Turkey Point was the judicial centre of the London District (so roughly between 1800 and 1815).

But there was one man hanged on Norfolk soil. It occurred when Turkey Point was headquarters for London District. The criminal was a negro, convicted of robbing a store an act which the law at that time made a felony, punishable by death. The store which was the scene of the robbery, was the second one in point of time started in Long Point Settlement. It was kept by one Cummings, and was located on William Culver's place known in modern times as the old Joseph Culver farm, near St. John's Church, south of Simcoe. After committing the crime, the negro tried to sell some of the stolen goods by peddling them among the settlers. The goods were easily identified, and this led to his arrest. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to be hanged, but before the day for execution arrived, he broke jail and escaped. Sheriff Bostwick offered a reward of $50 for his apprehension. A man named Robert Wood caught him in the cedars on Turkey Point, by first breaking his arm with a rifle shot. The sentence was suspended until he recovered from the effects of the wound. Joseph Kitchen was sergeant of the prison guards at Fort Norfolk at the time of this hanging. He saw the negro put into his coffin, and reported that he was alive when put there.

Matheson reports the murder of a young black man, David Deggs. No date given.

David Deggs, a particularly bright, industrious young man, was for years one of the landmarks at the Norfolk House under George Battersby regime. He was foully murdered by some young men in Brantford, his only offense being that he was a high spirited young fellow who stood up for his rights.

Through the 1860s, black people in Simcoe seem to have been subjected to harassment. Gillies quotes the Erie News of January, 1867.

On Wednesday evening of the last week the coloured residents of the town gave an exhibition in the BME church. The attendance was small, a fact to be regretted when it is to be considered that the object was to raise funds, to assist in paying their minister. The exhibition consisted mostly of recitations by children. To the discredit of our town we have to say the conduct of the audience was most disgraceful. There were several boys and men who had gone there with the intention of conducting themselves in the most rowdy-like manner and we must say that they were most successful in their efforts.

Two years later in 1869, the Erie News reported on another meeting at the BME Church. “A pleasant evening was spent, with the exception of the noise (to their shame, be it said), made by boys who ought to know better."

That same year, 1869, the Dominion Day celebrations in nearby Port Rowan opened with a procession of the Ku Klux Klan.

And until the end of the American Civil War, there was always the possibility that some agent, legal or otherwise, would reach into Canada and pluck a former slave back into the United States and servitude or worse. According to Brown, the Life Henry Tavern in Simcoe was known for being a haunt of slave hunters.

Coming down Young to the corner of Colborne, on the northwest corner stands a big frame hotel. The proprietor’s name is Life Henry and the hostelry was known as the Life Henry Tavern. Like all the old-timers was of quite large dimensions with the customary barn accommodation. It was at this place that the Americans used to have their headquarters when they came over to “kidnap n_____s” who were escaped slaves. While as we know, any citizens of Canada were free on Canadian soil, yet if they could be enticed back to the United States by any means, they would be taken back to their owners again. The practice was to come here, and when they found an escaped slave, invite him to the Henry Hotel, there fill him with liquor, take him to Port Dover and while in an intoxicated condition, put him on board ship and take him out on the lake. In these days just before the Civil War, there was a considerable traffic of this kind. While it caused a panic in our coloured colonies, of which Simcoe had quite a large one, it was very annoying and disgraceful to our white population.

Sometimes these “Yankee Sneaks” as they were called, would be mobbed. In fact the situation became so acute that often disturbances took place and the negro captives would be released from their captors before they could be taken from the shore.

This story does honour to those white people of Norfolk who helped disrupt the kidnappings (the sources don’t give details of the participants). And it parallels another case, a celebrated one involving a fugitive slave named Jack Burton a.k.a John Anderson. Burton and his wife and child were slaves on a plantation in the U.S. In 1853, his wife was sold to another plantation. Burton was caught trying to visit her, and, in escaping, killed one of his would-be captors. He made his way to Canada where he lived and worked under the name John Anderson until finally, in 1860, he was arrested in Simcoe. Legally, he faced a quick extradition to the U.S. and execution. The case aroused people in Simcoe to protest (a lawyer named Tisdale prominent among them). The county jail was surrounded, and the sheriff hastily moved Anderson to the Brantford jail to avoid civil unrest. One local historian, according to Scott Gillies, called this “a Canadian storming of the Bastille.”

The Anderson case, now a public cause, wound its way through the courts until extradition was finally approved. There were demonstrations in Toronto including a near riot outside Osgoode Hall. The provincial Attorney-General John A. Macdonald (yes, that John A. Macdonald) lent his support to the Anderson cause. Eventually, the decision went to the Appeals Court in London, England, where it was overturned and Anderson freed. Anderson subsequently emigrated to England (no doubt he felt safer there) where he wrote his own account of the case (remarkably, it was easy to find; you can read it here).

There is some credit to be given here to decent Canadians who stood up for what was right, even against their own legal system, but the general tenor of the story of black people in Norfolk County is a sorry thing. They settled in the county in large numbers from the outset, but history has virtually ignored them, heaping glory on the Loyalist pioneers instead. Both Gillies and Matheson couch their narratives in terms of progress, the situation for black people always improving (right up to that climactic Ku Klux Klan march). But this seems disingenuous. Gillies writes, “In the years following the Civil War, Norfolk's Black population began to dwindle. The reasons why are uncertain.” Another person might say the reasons are fairly obvious.

The electrifying tale of my Puritan ancestors, how they ended up in New Jersey speculating on land, cheating the government on building contracts, and hosting cock fights at a tavern called The Dark Moon.

My New Jersey Homeland

I just got the results of my Ancestry. com DNA test. I am English and Northern European (Ancestry bangs this group together), Scottish, Swedish (and Danish), and Irish, in order of diminishing significance. This was a surprise to me. I always thought my ancestors came from New Jersey. That’s what I tell people when they ask. I could have been another Bruce Springsteen, if my family had just stayed put.

I am being only mildly facetious. Yes, I am English, German, and possibly French Huguenot on my father’s side. The Scotch and Irish blood comes from my mother. But the people on my father’s side did mostly end up settling in New Jersey until the American Revolution, after which they absconded to Canada because they could see what was coming and didn’t like it (malls, pickleball, Pilates, and Mediterranean diets). Also they wanted to stay loyal to King George because they deeply valued unbalanced, ineffectual monarchs. Ancestry did provide a delightful little migration map of my so-called ancestral communities which shows this.

The dark brown patch containing bits of Massachusetts, Long Island, and New Jersey is my homeland. The blue area hanging over southern Ontario, especially covering the Niagara Peninsula and the Lake Erie shore is where my people went. I have to tell you that having been brought up on history books with maps like this showing, you know, Alexander conquering the world, Genghis Khan conquering Asia, and the Huns sweeping over Europe, etc., one takes a sneaking pride in seeing one’s ancestors made to look like invading hordes or infectious diseases.

The Puritan Connection

These New Jersey ancestors are fascinating. The first I heard about them was from my Aunt Norma, my father’s sister, who one evening told me that my Pettit forebears, before the Revolution, had owned a tavern outside of Trenton called The Dark Moon, famous for its low life clientele and cock fights. This was deliciously salacious considering how upright and proper, even staid, my father’s family had always seemed, especially, dare I say, my aunt.

Also somewhat surprising is the further fact that I am descended simultaneously from two 18th century New Jersey Pettit brothers, one through my grandfather Charles Herschel Glover and one through my grandmother, who bore the delightful name Bertha Ida Belle Pettit. My father’s middle name was Pettit. And, yes, it’s French. Though I am not clear when these Pettits arrived in England prior to coming to America.

They may have been French Huguenots, Protestants who fled from France to England beginning in the mid-1500s, the original Channel-crossing refugees (nowadays they would be waiting to get on a jet to Rwanda). They had Calvinist sympathies and blended well with the Puritans, the sober, down-dressing, non-conforming dissenters for whom the Church of England had not gone far enough in ridding itself of idolatrous Catholicism. Alternatively, they may not have been Huguenots. Genealogists have found people named le Petit living at Ardevora and Philleigh in Cornwall as far back as the 13th century. Nonetheless, they were Puritans at the time in question.

Thomas Pettit (1609-1668) of Saffron Walden, Essex, put his young family (his wife was pregnant) onto the ship Talbot on March, 1630, and, after three months at sea (that’s 90 days on a small sailing ship, crowded with 60 other passengers), they landed at Charleston (later Cambridge) on July 2, 1630. This was just 20 days after Winthrop’s Navy, ships laden with 1,000 Puritan settlers, landed at Salem. Pettit’s wife had her baby on board the Talbot as it lay in Charleston harbor, before she even set foot in America.

Pettit had had to borrow money for his passage from his brother-in-law, a wool cloth maker, a maker of “stays and pays,” as it was called. He indentured himself (i.e. sold himself) to the brother-in-law for three and a half years to work off the debt. But by 1638 he owned a house lot in Boston where the Capitol came to be built and next to the lot where John Hancock built his mansion.

The Puritans had come to America in part to practice religious freedom. But they were a turbulent lot, squabbling amongst themselves about which freedoms they would allow. Some were expelled, others walked away to found new colonies. Roger Williams took his flock to Rhode Island. Thomas Hooker left his church in Cambridge to found Hartford, Connecticut. In April, 1638, Anne Hutchinson was arrested for her dissenting views. Thomas Pettit took her side and promptly found himself arrested for “slander, insubordination, and inciting to riot,” for which he was sentenced to 30 lashes and jail time. My sense is that he was not whipped, that all the accused were allowed to go free if they just left the colony within 10 days.

Pettit, inveterate dissenter and separator that he was, upped stakes and took his family to a new Puritan colony called Exeter, at the Falls of the Piscataqua in New Hampshire. These new refugees founded their own Congregationalist church and even signed a declaration of independence from the Massachusetts Bay colony. Pettit remained at Exeter for nearly two decades, had several children, and became a chief military officer and “inspector of staves” of the settlement. But the Boston Puritans kept up a relentless pressure on the wayward flock and eventually gained control of the land surrounding Exeter, which could only survive by reincorporating itself with the mother colony.

Thomas Pettit took his wife and eight children (other settlers came with them) and fled tyranny once more, this time finding land in Queens County on Long Island, where they named their new settlement, with typical Puritan flair, Newtown. It is now Elmhurst, between LaGuardia Airport and I-495.

In 1657, Pettit was elected town marshal replacing the previous office holder who had been voted out for improprieties in the pursuance of his duties. This caused some domestic havoc since Thomas Pettit’s son Nathaniel (1645-1718) had fallen in love with and married the previous marshal’s daughter. But then Thomas Pettit passed away in 1668, buried there where the jets thunder overhead all the day long.

He was my 7xgreat-grandfather.

New Jersey at Last and the Sussex County mixing bowl

In 1695, this lovestruck Nathaniel Pettit bought 100 acres in what became Trenton, New Jersey, at the junction of the Delaware River and Assunpink Creek, where the state capitol now stands. But then he seems to have gradually moved north to Hunterdon County. It’s not important to go through the various land transactions, which will bore you to death. In those days everyone was a land speculator, busy buying lands from the Indians and the trading them about amongst themselves.

He was my 6xgreat-grandfather.

He had several children, including a son also named Nathaniel Pettit (1676-1768), born on Long Island, dead at 92 in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. I think he was a carpenter by trade. This Nathaniel, too, had several children. Apparently, without smart phones and Internet, these people had a lot of time on their hands. Around 1749, his sons began to move north again into Sussex County, New Jersey, looking for land. But Nathaniel stayed behind (and I will leave him behind, because he is not very interesting).

He was my 5xgreat-grandfather.

But the next generation is fascinating.

Everyone, as I say, moved up to Sussex County and started founding towns and such on freshly surveyed Indian land. Other people moved in as well. The Greens, descended from the original land surveyor Samuel Green, the Moores, and the Glovers, whom I shall write about another time. Sussex County was, in effect, the genetic mixing bowl that resulted in great swathes of my family makeup, but also southwestern Ontario settlement history. These families intermarried before the American Revolution, then exploded with differential loyalties. Famously (in southern Ontario), a host of Greens, Glovers, Moores, and Pettits all migrated to the Grimsby area, along the Forty Mile Creek on the shore of Lake Ontario, as United Empire Loyalists, transplanting a bit of New Jersey in the new land. (See the Ancestry migration map above.) Others, of course, stayed behind.

Nathaniel’s sons, Charles (1730-1806, born in Trenton, died in Grimsby) and Jonathan (1721-1769, born in Trenton, died in Easton, PA), both turned out to be my grandfathers.

It has taken me ages to figure this out. My brain has frozen time after time. I will try to make it simple.

Charles Pettit had a son named John Charles Pettit, who had a son named Charles Pettit (1795-1877), who was my 2xgreat-grandfather and the direct ancestor of my father’s mother Bertha Ida Belle Pettit.

Meanwhile Jonathan Pettit had a daughter Dinah, who married a man named John Moore, and they had a daughter named Deborah who married Jacob Glover (born in Sussex County 1763, dead at Grimsby 1816). Jacob Glover, a Loyalist soldier in Lord Rawdon’s command during the Revolution, was my 3xgreat-grandfather, the direct ancestor of my father’s father Charles Herschel Glover.

All these people were part of the westward migration from Sussex County to Ontario. And for many, the Grimsby area by Lake Ontario was only a stopping place. As their ancestors had always done before, the Glovers, Pettits, and Moores hived off and moved again, ending up in Norfolk County where I was born.

My father described his family as Congregationalists, Puritan’s still, and like many of their forebears, they were farmers and carpenters.

The Dark Moon Tavern

Jonathan Pettit’s Dark Moon Tavern was situated about a mile east of what is now Johnsonburg, between Blairstown and Stanhope, a patch of landscape the Native Americans thereabout called Pahuckquapath but which came to be known locally as Logg Gaol because of, well, the log jailhouse. Jonathan Pettit and a partner contracted to build the jail, and they were meant to add a court house as well, but opted to use the tavern instead. There was also a Dark Moon Road (Route 519) and a Dark Moon Burying Ground (now on private property). In the early 1750s, the hamlet of Logg Gaol was the Sussex County seat.

David Clark in his essay on the Green family, described Jonathan Pettit as “a vertically integrated entrepreneur who was judge, tavern keeper, stage stop-over administrator, and ‘motel’ owner.” My Aunt Norma told me that the tavern consisted of three buildings, two on one side of the road and one on the other to prevent total destruction if part of the tavern caught fire. Local historians think there were four or five buildings, Pettit adding houses as the need for accommodation and municipal services expanded. The original building was double-logged. Outside hung an old-fashioned swinging sign, a black crescent moon on a white ground.

Apparently, the jail was cheaply built, resulting in frequent escapes, despite being rebuilt and having watchman day and night. Many of the prisoners were in custody for debt. When they ran away, the county had to make good their creditors’ losses. The log jail was a money pit.

According to tradition, only one person was ever executed at the jail, a 25-year-old black woman hung for theft.

I leave it to the reader to imagine the understory here, the story of slaves, indentured servants, and the Native Americans pushed steadily from the land to make room for speculative capitalism on the march.

Courts were held at the tavern from November, 1753, to February, 1756. One of the first orders of business at the November 20, 1753, meeting was to hand out tavern licenses and fix the rates for services. (Remember, Jonathan Pettit was one of the judges.)

According to the New Jersey Herald,

As an example, a hot dinner that consisted of three dishes would be charged one shilling; a cold dinner was nine pence; a pint of wine was 18 pence; a quart of strong beer was five pence; or a gill of rum was three pence. Lodging for each person was set at three pence.

James P. Snell in his "History of Sussex County" (1881) wrote that "great inducements for wholesale lodging were also held out in those days, the charges being for one man in a bed, five pence, for two in a bed, three pence each and for three in a bed two pence each."

In addition were prices set for horses with oats per quart penny-half penny stabling horses, one shilling and pasturing horses, six pence.

Eventually, the taint of double-dealing caught up with Jonathan Pettit. In 1756, the Sussex County government and courts moved to Woolverton’s Tavern on the King’s Highway between Easton and New York. According to the Herald, “This move arose from disputes between County Freeholders and Jonathan Pettit, a surveyor and land speculator, who attempted to secure personal and economic benefit from locating the County Seat on his lands.”

Samuel Green, the original Sussex County surveyor, and his family lived in the village of Logg Gaol. During the Revolution, four of his five sons were actually imprisoned in the jail for being Loyalists. His daughter Rebekah Green worked as a bartender at the Dark Moon where (drumroll, please) she met and fell in love with a lonely widower (with young children) named Francis Glover, my 4xgreat-grandfather. The Jacob Glover mentioned above was his son by his earlier marriage. Rebekah Green became Jacob’s step-mother, so not genetically related to me, but when Jacob moved the family to Canada, she went with him, Francis having died.

Perhaps you are getting a sense of the dizzying permutations and combinations swirling around Logg Gaol and The Dark Moon Tavern in the mid-1700s and the curious mass migration of my genetic pod to Canada. And you can also see why I tend to think my roots truly lie in rural New Jersey under the sign of the dark moon (traditionally the three days of the waning crescent moon just as it switches to the new moon, also sometimes called the dead moon).

Epilogue

In early 2005 I gave a reading at Princeton University. A limousine picked me up at the Philadelphia airport. A cheerful, young black woman was driving. We got into a conversation and upon learning that she lived in Trenton, I launched into my song and dance about New Jersey roots and the Dark Moon Tavern. I said I’d love to visit Trenton some day. “Well, you’ve got time. I’ll drive fast,” she said, laughing, and careened off the thruway at the Trenton exit.

There followed a delightful tour of the downtown historic sights, the State House (on Nathaniel Pettit’s land), the Barracks Museum, the battle monument, and much more that I have forgotten, including the neighborhood where she lived. Frankly, I was far more impressed with her good natured generosity and sense of humor than with my ancestors’ contentious and grubby past (don’t you think?).

And I thought then, as I think now, that ancestor worship of the genealogical sort is well and good as long as memory doesn’t give way to false pride. The original Thomas Pettit came to America to live on his own terms, to escape tyranny in whatever form. I can almost admire his radical insistence, his constant removal, because it is principled (truly, I see some of my peripatetic self in him), if I can manage to avert my eyes from the genocidal catastrophe he participated in.

But later generations ceded principle to greed; you can follow the erosion of principle down through the family tree.

I feel terminally contradictory. I love these stories; I’m not sure I like the people.

And nowadays we all live under the sign of the dead moon.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are… F. Scott Fitzgerald “The Rich Boy”

I’ve written about Long Point before,1 mostly because it is a central geographical fact figuring in the lives of many of my Norfolk County ancestors who settled along the Lake Erie shore. They have logged, hunted, and fished there; for 200 years they have gazed at its shimmering mirage-like shadow along the horizon and dreamed. Of course, they can’t log or hunt there any longer, not for more than a century, because most of the Point is owned by a private consortium of wealthy duck hunters, the Long Point Company.

Long Point is that feathery spine of sand jutting into Lake Erie from the shore of Norfolk County where I grew up. It’s a spectacularly wild and lonely place, best seen from the air where you can admire its windswept beaches and serrated marshes. It has been the scene of shipwrecks, prize fights, brothels, lynchings, and unsolved murders. Legend has it that treasure is buried there, guarded by a ghostly black dog. It’s also a unique ecosystem, a haven to migrating birds, which also makes it prime shooting country. In the 1890s, J. T. Lord, of the great merchant firm Lord and Taylor, was reputed to have shot 3,000 ducks in a single season. Such slaughter is unimaginable to me, but does remind a person how many species have disappeared, how many are down to the existential wire, and how the rich can afford to think and feel differently from you or me.

The appalling irony is that without the secretive, super-rich and their Long Point hunting club, the Point might not have been preserved as a pristine wilderness. Left to their own devices the settlers along the north shore of the lake (the public at large) reduced the towering primeval forests to acre upon acre of blowing sand. This is well known, not to be doubted. And my family had a hand in the destruction. Senator Alexander McCall, former mayor of nearby Simcoe, was a timber baron, as was his brother Daniel Abiel McCall in St. Williams, on a slightly lesser scale. Daniel Abiel was my great-great-grandfather. As the St. Williams Conservation Reserve site brutally puts it: “Within 50 years parts of Norfolk County were desert.”2

But the Point, in all its splendor, generally escaped the destruction because it was not accessible to the public. You can see it from the air or from a boat offshore, but you can’t land there. The eastern end of the Point is a federal wildlife sanctuary and at the western end there are some privately owned cottages and a provincial park. But 40% of the Point, 3,240 hectares in all between the wildlife sanctuary and the provincial park, is owned by the private Long Point Company and has been so since 1866 when a group of Canadian businessmen bought it from the federal government for $8,450. In relatively short order, the shares gravitated away from the original owners into the hands of very wealthy Americans, men who went to Groton and Yale, men with familiar names like Morgan and Whitney. Think: Jay Gatsby with a shotgun and a seaplane at the foot of Wall Street waiting to fly him to the marshes of Long Point.

Two books (I think of them as the Old and the New Testament) have supplied the basis of current knowledge about Long Point. The first is E. A. Owen’s Pioneer sketches of Long Point settlement, or, Norfolk's foundation builders and their family genealogies, published in 1898. It is our Book of the Prophets, providing an immense amount of detail about the original white settlers who received land grants between Big Creek and Port Dover after the American Revolution. Though every prominent family owned at least one copy in days gone by (we have perhaps four or five), it is not a trustworthy document. Much is left out and much that is there is legendary. Also it is about the people, not the land. And the people settled the mainland, not the Point (which is actually an island most of the time).

The second source is Harry B. Barrett’s Lore & Legends of Long Point, first published in 1977. This is a lovely book, large format, loaded with pictures, and evocative. As the cover illustration indicates, it’s a bit romantic and concentrates on the glory of the settlers, the myriad catastrophic shipwrecks, the lighthouses, and the days of rum-running across the lake to Erie, PA, and Cleveland (as my mother used to tell it, a boat would leave Port Dover with a cargo for Cuba and return the next day empty). Barrett also wrote about the Long Point Company, polishing the theme that without the Company the Point would have been clear cut and hunted to oblivion by the locals (the strange irony of this argument is that the locals tend to come off as impulsive backwoods yahoos like characters in a Cormac McCarthy novel, which is the opposite of Barrett’s intended message).

The time was ripe (has been ripe for a long time) for a critical look at the history of Long Point. By “critical,” I mean a deeply researched examination of the stories and legends involving the collection and analysis of sources. Stephen Selk’s brand new Lake Erie’s Long Point and the Company that Saved It (just out with Lulu) provides that critical perspective.

By his own count, he spent over 2000 hours researching his book. It’s a labour of love that harks back to his father’s first glimpse of the Point.

As an underprivileged kid he had the opportunity to attend a YMCA camp at Fisher’s Glen in 1932 and 1933. I know he really enjoyed that and I surmise he looked across Long Point Bay one day and said to himself, “Some day I’m going to go over to that island.”3

Eventually, Selk’s father was able to purchase a cottage on a parcel of leased land, later expropriated as part of a new provincial park. But Selk, the son, bought another cottage nearer the mainland, where he now spends vacations. Selk grew up in Toronto. In 1952, he spent a year studying with Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, though he was majoring in chemical engineering. For most of his professional life he was in Washington working as a federal investigator. As seems fitting, the inspiration for his book came inside a library.

I always loved libraries, having spent endless hours perusing the University of Toronto’s vast collection when I was a student. After I retired, a few years ago I obtained a Library of Congress research card. On a lark, while there one day, I typed in Long Point and hit search. I was amazed what popped up. The library has all the local books from the region – even recent ones. And they have others. One from 1932 and it is catalogued as “socially significant” and for good reason. That started my “investigation.”  What’s a retired federal investigator to do?4

Lake Erie’s Long Point and the Company that Saved It is massive, a thick, generous coffee-table book that covers the history of the Point from the formation of Lake Erie a scant 12,500 years ago (not so old after all) to the present. It includes chapters on the earliest indigenous inhabitants, white exploration, and, eventually, settlement by the United Empire Loyalists, refugees from the incipient United States. All this replete with gorgeous and sometimes rare old photographs, facsimile documents, and quotations (he managed to track down several privately published volumes by Long Point Company members, exceedingly rare and sometimes still under copyright restrictions).

From the first, the Point was preserved from the pioneering free-for-all by class and privilege. British army officers liked to hunt on the Point, and thus it was never included in the initial land grants. In 1866, the Point was put up for auction and purchased in parcels (for between 50 and 70 cents an acre) by seven individual wealthy Canadian investors who turned out to be acting together as a syndicate. They quickly filed for incorporation as the Long Point Company with a capitalization of $50,000 (a hundred shares at $500 each), a value that was totally invented at the time. Several of the founders put their shares up for sale, marketing them aggressively in the U.S. John Lord, mentioned above, a British citizen living on an estate in New Jersey, became a shareholder in 1869. In 1877, Louis Cabot of Massachusetts bought shares, followed by a who’s who of American super-wealth. By 1883, when Prince George hunted as a guest of Sir Hugh Allen (he shot 82 ducks his first day and 59 on the second), the Point had become private playground for the rich and the celebrated.

There is some irony in the book’s title, though Selk is careful not to editorialize — the Company has deep pockets and sedulously guards its privacy. Nonetheless, he manages to lay bare many of the tensions involved in such an enterprise, not the least of which is the fact that descendants of the people who settled the north shore of Lake Erie, as well as the wider public, are barred from a gloriously beautiful nature preserve on their doorstep. The rich-poor divide runs like a four-lane highway through the story. The locals acted as punters, guides, and gamekeepers, while the visitors blasted away at migrating birds. There is a chapter on “Artists and Artisans” that includes a section on the carving of decoys, which the locals raised to the level of a minor art form, at the service of the shooters out on the Point. Over the years, the Company has skillfully managed to dance away from the ever present threat of expropriation — it keeps its head down and profits from the legend that it takes care of the land better than the government could.

Selk fills the later chapters of the book with details of share transfers and tales of the rich eccentrics who came to Norfolk to shoot. This is highly entertaining material in the way all inside tales of the lives of the rich and famous are entertaining. But as you read deeper and deeper into the book, the charming local lore and the long list of eccentric characters begin to accrete a sense of foreboding and resentment. A deeper story emerges, something to do with wealth, privilege, and privatization of the wilderness. The rich are not like you or me. They can keep the pristine bits of what's left of the world to themselves.

Several members of the Long Point Company were also members of other hunting and fishing clubs, little metaphorical (and sometimes literal) island sporting enclaves preserved from the locals and largely from government interference. Examples Selk writes about include the exclusive Jekyll Island Club located on an Atlantic barrier island on the coast of Georgia with a beach along the ocean side and inland-facing marshes where the duck-hunting took place. The club was founded in 1886. Another is the collection of three salmon-fishing clubs — the Ristigouche (sic) Salmon Club, Camp Harmony, and Kedgwick Lodge on 26 miles of the Restigouche River in New Brunswick. The first rough building at Camp Harmony went up in 1885, replaced in 1895 by a stately lodge built by Stanford White. In each of these places a similar culture thrived comprised of new rich, eccentric locals and guides, rustic art, and massive kills.

This practice of snapping up chunks of wilderness and preserving them exclusively for the wealthy has taken a new twist nowadays as the gap between the super-rich and the rest of us expands. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t notice a story about venture capitalists and Hollywood celebrities buying up huge tracts of Montana5 and conflicting over access to the locals. Or rewilding schemes in Scotland (meaning ordinary people stay out). Anders Holch Povlsen6, a Danish entrepeneur, is now the largest private landowner in the Highlands. Rewilding, preserving, etc. are becoming watchwords for exclusivity and wealth. But the question remains whether or not the preservation of nature by and for the wealthy is a higher value than giving access to people in general to what’s left of the world’s natural beauty.

Stephen Selk does not, as I say, engage in this debate. He only lays out the facts. The last 60 or so pages of his book consists of biographies of Long Point Company members with the sources of their wealth, long lists of companies and board memberships, on the face of it a bit dry yet immensely powerful as an aggregate. And you mentally contrast this with the anecdote about Selk’s father, the little boy at the YMCA camp for poor city children at Fisher’s Glen, gazing across the bay at the shimmering dream of Long Point.

My great-grandfather, a storekeeper-poet in the village of St. Williams on the north shore of Lake Erie, killed himself in 1914 with an overdose of laudanum at the age of 51. He had been accused of alienating the affections of a neighbour’s wife and a court case was imminent. I wrote an essay about this, which you can read here. 1

That essay is a product, a distillation, and an interpretation. So much lies beneath. So much remains unknown, perhaps unknowable. John Brock died in March, 1914. Some time after that the facts of the case went underground. Brock’s official cause of death was “opium poisoning,” but his wife Sarah lived to 101 claiming he died of diabetes. My grandmother, his daughter, who was 18 at the time of his death, never said a word to contradict this.

Shame and silence ruled small town Ontario in those days. There were strict and narrowly defined social codes. Accusations of irregular behaviour ruined lives. My grandfather had two teenage daughters with reputations to preserve. Today, the Kevin Spaceys of the world can cheerily go to court and defend their sex lives by endlessly talking about their sex lives. In 1914, the mere suggestion of appearing in court to answer for unseemly acts was catastrophic. Suicide doubled the stigma. Even in the 1990s, when I interviewed elderly people in the village, their reluctance to speak — “We don’t talk about those things” — was tinged with a strange fear.

In 1987, by the usual circuitous routes secret messages take to find their intended recipients, my mother got wind of the story, not the whole story, but a partial, biased version. “Why, Jeanie! I thought you knew!” I’m sure she longed to race over to her mother’s house in Simcoe and get the truth but was afraid to break the glass bell of secrecy so long preserved. Finally, she appointed me as go-between.

It was August. My grandmother, Kathleen Ross, born Kathleen Brock2 in St. Williams in 1896, was 91 and still living alone amid her gardens. I sat with her in the parlour off the kitchen, great windows giving onto the gardens, floor-to-ceiling bookcases. When I broke the uncomfortable preamble of small talk and family gossip with the question, she seemed relieved. Then it all came tumbling out, rueful, incensed, affronted, bitter, and full of love.

She was 18, the court case was impending (within the week). He came home from work, she said, kissed his two daughters, and repaired upstairs to what was called the “school room” where he sometimes gave language lessons to village children. Later, he was restless, getting up from bed and wandering out of the room, then back. Sarah, his wife, said, “John, are you drunk?” Which seems comical but makes sense given that laudanum is a mixture of alcohol and opium, the alcohol taking effect before the opium kicks in. Then it began to dawn on the household that something terrible was wrong.

A doctor was sent for but seems not to have arrived in time. One story I heard is that a daughter of his accuser, a trained nurse, was the first medical person to arrive. Another story is that the men of the village gathered in the wide hallway and took turns forcing him to walk up and down. Nothing availed. At some point, my grandmother crawled into bed beside him and held him, pleading, “You can live if you want to.” She remembered him at the table writing the night before and it twigged in her mind that he had been writing a suicide letter, so she asked him where the letter was and he said or somehow indicated that it was under the pillow, and she got it. Then he called out, “Sarah, Sarah.” His wife’s name, his last words before dying.

My grandmother had once memorized the entire text of the suicide letter, but now she only remembered lines from a poem he had quoted and a sentence about not being able to drag his wife and daughters through a trial of this kind. The poem was Robert Burns’s “To a Mountain Daisy” (I have the copy of Burns’ poems that Aunt Maggie owned, probably the copy he read), easy to identify from my grandmother’s slightly forgetful recitation.

Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate,
                                full on thy bloom,
Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight,
                                Shall be thy doom!

But the letter had disappeared. My grandmother’s memories were unbearably tantalizing, a garbled semblance of the real thing. Where did she think it had gone? Oh, she didn’t know. She thought cousin so-and-so had kept it. I phoned him that night, but it was well and truly gone. I couldn’t quite credit how woefully inept my family was at keeping its own history straight. Though perhaps the ineptitude was intentional at some level. What a shame culture fears is exposure of any sort. One does not want to be talked about.

Maybe five or six years later, I hit upon the idea of tracking down elderly people who had been living in the village. There wouldn’t be many; it was a tiny village to begin with and most would be dead. But I am the kind of researcher who is always saying let’s try this — you never know. I was living just outside Saratoga Springs, NY, at the time. I went back to the farm in Ontario frequently and started haunting the local old folks homes. Mostly I got more names to track down. I even started doing cold calls, sitting up of an evening in my study, dialing St. Williams numbers. Mostly, I got nothing. None of the people I talked to had lived in the village in 1914. There were no stray bits of gossip. But it was pleasant talking to them and listening to their memories.

Victor and Ione Leedham came up on my list. I dialed their number and an elderly gent came on the line. I had to explain who I was and what I wanted three or four times. I could almost hear his mind struggling to readjust for context, drawing lines between a voice on the phone and something that had happened 80 years before when he was a boy.

“Oh, no,” he said. “We don’t know anything about that.”

I felt a twinge of excitement, but also the usual frustration. I could tell from his voice that he knew what I was talking about, knew something, but he was never going to open up to me. I persisted. I went through my spiel again, emphasizing that it was my family story and implying that I had some right to whatever he might recall. Not harsh or argumentative, but insistent.

“I was a boy,” he said. “I don’t remember anything about it.”

“What about your wife,” I asked. “Do you think she’d remember anything?”

“The wife,” he said, as if I had just reminded him. “Oh no. She doesn’t remember anything.” He paused, then, thinking. “The wife, she has a letter —”

My adrenalin started to pump. Life is poetry. Repetitions are full of meaning. I had not mentioned anything about letters. The word “letter” came from somewhere else, a deeper level of our shared reality.

“Your wife has a letter that has something to do with my grandfather?” I prompted.

But he was going backward, away from me. “No. No, I don’t think there’s a letter.”

“Victor,” I said, “would it be okay if I talked to your wife?”

Ione came on the line, just as gentle and mistrustful as Victor had been. “Oh, no,” she said. “I was only a little girl. I was four years old.”

But there was something in her voice, something in the torque of the entire conversation (that perhaps I won’t be able to get across here), that told me I had lucked into a magical convergence.

“Victor said something about a letter, that you have a letter.”

“Oh, no. There isn’t a letter.”

“You’re sure,” I asked.

“Oh, yes.”

And then I made this little speech, which even at the time I thought was brilliant. It was clear to me that somehow we were talking on multiple planes at once, we were talking about what we were not talking about, the taboo and unspeakable, and we all three knew it.

“Ione,” I said, “if you did have a letter, is there any chance I could see it? If I drove up there, would you let me look at it?” I was careful here not to ask for the letter itself, feeling intuitively that that would be a step too far. Once again, the important communications were unspoken.

“There isn’t a letter.”

“But would it be okay if I did drive up and stop for a visit? Not right away. But at some point?”

Two months later, I drove over from the farm to the Leedhams’ little house on the outskirts of St. Williams. They were a sweet, white-haired couple, a bit shy, but comfortable and easy with one another, as if they moved in sync in the same space, as it were. There wasn’t any need to tell my story again. Ione came to the door with papers in her hand, John Brock’s original suicide letter and photocopies she had made for me to take. I held the letter in my hands, knowing I would never get another chance, but also content with that.

We chatted. I was still nosing around. Her father had been a butcher. They lived “across the street” from the Brocks (looking at old village maps, I have never been able to figure out exactly where she meant). But how did she get the letter? It was in her family Bible. Maybe she had more to say on that than she said — that was ever the nature of our conversation. I still have a difficult time imagining how the letter got from my grandmother’s hands in March, 1914, into the Ione’s family Bible across the street, a family totally unrelated. But then nothing could be more bizarre than my actually finding Ione and the letter anyway.

I said goodbye. It was generous and kind of her to let me see the letter. In our talk, she had reiterated the taboo. “We don’t like to talk about things like that.” Almost superstitious, fearful of cosmic consequences. Both Victor and Ione are dead now. I hope their daughters kept the Bible and the letter.

Here is a copy of the letter. Ione’s photocopy turned the original one-page (signed on the back) into two pages and cut off a few letters on the right. I also darkened the text. Brock, obviously under pressure, misquotes the Burns poem. A. J. Aker is the man bringing the complaint against him. Kelly is W. E. Kelly of Kelly and Porter in Simcoe, Aker’s lawyer. Slaght is Brock’s lawyer.

In 1669 two intrepid Sulpician priests, Francois Dollier de Casson and René de Bréhant de Galinée, were sent up the lakes from Montreal on a missionary expedition to the Ottawas. They, along with seven companions, arrived at what is now Port Dover in October, and as the hunting was good, they opted to over-winter there. We know all this because de Galinée kept a journal, which is a great read. They killed and smoked deer and bear, gathered walnuts and chestnuts, made wine from wild grapes, and generally speaking spent an easy and contented winter. (I do think of them every time I stop at the Arbor for a foot-long hot dog).

After setting up a commemorative cross over-looking the lake and claiming the land for King Louis XIV, they broke camp on March 26, 1670, “the day after Annunciation.” As you may have guessed, this was a bit early in the season for happy canoeing along the Erie shore. The wind flummoxed them. After making only a few miles on the 26th, they pulled for shore and made camp for two days. But someone forgot to secure de Galinée’s canoe, which blew out into the lake and could not be retrieved. This was a mess, since now they had too much gear and too many men for the canoes in hand.

They split into two parties, a canoe party and a land party, the land party setting off immediately. But then they hit what is now Big Creek, a labyrinth of marshes at its mouth, steep banks and deep spring freshets higher up. They struggled inland along the east bank looking for a ford or a convenient tree fall, but found none. Finally, they made camp for the night, deciding to retreat to the mouth the next day and build a raft. This is precisely when the most interesting thing happens. Here is de Galinée’s description.

We slept that night on the bank of this river, about two leagues from its mouth, and it was at this place that we heard towards the east voices that seemed to us to be of men calling to each other. We ran to the river bank to see if it was not our men looking for us, and at the same time we heard the same voices on the south side. We turned our heads in that direction, but at last were undeceived, hearing them at the same time towards the west, which gave us to understand that it was the phenomenon commonly called the hunting of Arthur. I have never heard it, nor have any of those who were of our company, which was the reason we were deceived by it.

The hunting of Arthur is a branch of an ancient north European story complex often called the Wild Hunt or der wilde Jäger. The nub of the myth is that some hunter, warrior, nobleman, or demigod commits an unpardonable sin and finds himself cursed to spend his days hunting in vain, despairing and alone.

Here are stanzas from “The Wild Huntsman” by Gottfried August Burger.

The Wildgrave flies o'er bush and thorn
With many a shriek of helpless woe;
Behind him hound and horse and horn,
And, "Hark away, and holla, ho!"

With wild despair's reverted eye,
Close, close behind, he marks the throng,
With bloody fangs and eager cry;
In frantic fear he scours along. —

Still, still shall last the dreadful chase
Till time itself shall have an end;
By day they scour earth's caverned space,
At midnight's witching hour ascend.

This is the horn and hound and horse
That oft the lated peasant hears;
Appalled he signs the frequent cross,
When the wild din invades his ears.

The wakeful priest oft drops a tear
For human pride, for human woe,
When at his midnight mass he hears
The infernal cry of "Holla, ho!"

Usually, the Wild Huntsman hunts alone, except perhaps for a horse and a dog, but often his entourage expands into a host of warrior retainers (see the painting at the top of the post), and instead of those mournful hunting cries, lucky observers hear the clang of swords and battle axes, battle cries and the screams of the wounded and dying men. There is a warrior version of the legend called Charlemagne’s Hunt, which is the basis of that wonderful John Irving short story “The Pension Grillparzer,” the writing of which is the best part of his novel The World According to Garp. In her dreams, the grandmother observes tired, dusty knights riding up to the hotel well for water. It is a dream of death.

She saw the soldiers, or dreamed them, twice more while they stayed there, but her husband never again woke up with her. It was always sudden. Once she woke with the taste of metal on her tongue as if she’d touched some old, sour iron to her mouth — a sword, a chest plate, chain mail, a thigh guard. They were out there again, in colder weather. From the water in the fountain a dense fog shrouded them; the horses were snowy with frost. And there were not so many of them the next time — as if the winter or their skirmishes were reducing their numbers. The last time the horses looked gaunt to her, and the men looked more like unoccupied suits of armor balanced delicately in the saddles. The horses wore long masks of ice on their muzzles. Their breathing (or the men’s breathing) was congested.1

This story has bears, circuses, Vienna, and a large goofy family. It contains the seed of everything Irving wrote from then on. It has always seemed eery and beautiful to me, better than all the rest.

But this is a tangent. What also surprised me about de Galinée’s account was 1) it happened in Norfolk County where I grew up, and 2) the casual, almost off-hand way he accepts the existence of the ghostly company. He’s never heard this phenomenon before, but he has no reason to doubt it, and accepts it as fact.

Here is a photo of me in a canoe on Big Creek, trying to replicate de Galinée’s experience. Notice that like de Galinée and his friends, I found the canoeing difficult.

I wouldn’t have paid nearly this much attention to de Galinée’s story if the phenomenon hadn’t manifested in Norfolk a second time 150 years later. Not exactly in Norfolk County, but near enough. In 1829 and 1830, a particularly pernicious case of witchcraft and haunting occurred in a Scottish settlement on the Chenail Écarté on Lake St Clair. Such was the fame of Norfolk’s famous witch doctor, Dr. Troyer, that a mission was sent to engage him in expelling the demons. A farmer named John McDonald, much afflicted by the witches, undertook the journey. At a place called Longwoods just north of the Thames River, he encountered the same unholy host, this time in a more militant form.

Witchcraft accompanied them through the Longwoods, a stretch of about thirty miles of forest, north of the Thames, without a single dwelling on the road, and in which they had to pass the night. McDonald was terrified by the melancholy wind stirring the tree-tops, owls hooting, wolves yelping, then the heavy tramp, tramp of a vast multitude, inarticulate voices of men, crashing of boughs and snapping of twigs, and then the rush of some great unseen host. Soon there was the sound of combat in the air with an opposing multitude, followed by groans of the wounded and shrieks of the dying.2

This time the observers had no idea what they are hearing. To them, it was just more witchcraft. Unlike de Galinée and his friends, they had lost touch with the conscious thread of their own culture. But it still inhabits their dreams, their imaginations. To me, credulous and romantic as I am, the fact that they don’t know what they are hearing makes it more probable that they heard something of the like. Either that, or these old stories were being told in the long cabins of southern Ontario, settler to settler, mother to child, long after people stopped paying enough attention to write them down.

Sadly, we don’t hear these things in Norfolk any longer. It’s all farms and suburban sprawl and gaudy mansions along the lake shore. But on moonlit nights, I still stand under the tulip tree in the backyard and listen.

When I was a boy, my mother gave me an illustrated Robinson Crusoe, subtitled “Retold for Little Folk,” published by Charles E. Graham & Co. in New York (no date). It was a very thin book that had been given to my father when he was a boy. The cover shows Crusoe and his dog on the beach looking surprised. Crusoe is dressed in animal skins, more suited to the Arctic than the Caribbean. Next to the picture is the silhouette of a foot, Friday’s footprint in the sand. That footprint shows up in my novel Elle.

At the northern headland, where the island comes to a point like an arrow aimed downstream toward the Atlantic, the snow is scuffed and creased. Perhaps another vagrant seal has landed, I think. I kneel to make a closer investigation. Such is the power of the mind that initial assumptions can colour the evidence of our eyes. I think again, yes, a seal. But there, clear in the moonlight, is a left footprint and a right footprint, and they seem to walk about bipedally, which is fairly unusual for a seal (though, admittedly, my knowledge of seal lore is limited). They emerge from the water though, like a seal. But here I detect a long keel line in the snow. So, I say to myself, this seal arrived in a boat and walks around on his hind legs. I’ll wait. I’ll make an ambush. He’ll come back. We’ll eat like kings and queens.

Elle is delirious from cold and starvation, not to mention the fact that she is pregnant. She thinks the human footprints are a seal, which she can eat. Later, dragging herself along on frost-bitten feet, she follows the tracks, briefly seeing her encampment, the graves of her friends, and her hut through the stranger’s eyes (in keeping with the shape-changing theme of the novel). Eventually, she meets a native man named Itslk who lives with her for a while before wandering off again on his own. All this is an intentional parody of Robinson Crusoe and the man named Friday who begins their relationship by kneeling and placing Crusoe’s foot upon his head as an act of submission. It is a great imperial moment. Itslk is just the opposite. If anything, he dominates Elle; but for the most part, he doesn’t care much one way or another. “By the way, I don’t like to mention it, but you are so ugly it will be difficult to sleep with you.”

Here is Defoe’s footprint moment from the novel—no humor, no ironic inflection. A bit pompous.

It happen’d one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz’d with the Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the Shore, which was very plain to be seen in the Sand: I stood like one Thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an Apparition; I listen’d, I look’d round me, I could hear nothing, nor see any Thing, I went up to a rising Ground to look farther, I went up the Shore and down the Shore, but it was all one, I could see no other Impression but that one, I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my Fancy; but there was no Room for that, for there was exactly the very Print of a Foot, Toes, Heel, and every Part of a Foot; how it came thither, I knew not, nor could in the least imagine.But after innumerable fluttering Thoughts, like a Man perfectly confus’d and out of my self, I came Home to my Fortification, not feeling, as we say, the Ground I went on, but terrify’d to the last Degree, looking behind me at every two or three Steps, mistaking every Bush and Tree, and fancying every Stump at a Distance to be a Man; nor is it possible to describe how many various Shapes a frighted Imagination represented Things to me in, how many wild Ideas were found every Moment in my Fancy, and what strange unaccountable Whimsies came into my Thoughts by the Way.

I can’t recall comprehensively, but I am not sure any of the critics noticed this fairly obvious literary reference when they wrote about Elle.

As a boy, I idolized Crusoe. He flooded my imagination. I prowled the woods with my dog, pretending to be shipwrecked, constructing huts and animal pens, lying in wait for cannibals. My little brother, skinny and pale, threw himself into the role of Friday with gusto. I was well into adulthood before I realized I'd only read part of the book, the child's version, the slave trading and sugar planting redacted. For example, this passage from the novel didn’t make it into Robinson Crusoe Retold for Little Folk. This is just a few pages on from the footprint scene and Crusoe is ruing the day he left his plantation in Brazil to fetch new slaves from Africa. His Original Sin, as he puts it, is not be content with what he had and the gradual growth of his sugar cane operation (as he says, he could have bought more slaves locally). In the time wasted on the island, he could have been

one of the most considerable Planters in the Brasils, nay, I am perswaded, that by the Improvements I had made, in that little Time I liv’d there, and the Encrease I should probably have made, if I had stay’d, I might have been worth an hundred thousand Moydors; and what Business had I to leave a settled Fortune, a well stock’d Plantation, improving and encreasing, to turn Supra-Cargo to Guinea, to fetch Negroes; when Patience and Time would have so encreas’d our Stock at Home, that we could have bought them at our own Door, from those whose Business it was to fetch them; and though it had cost us something more, yet the Difference of that Price was by no Means worth saving, at so great a Hazard.

Robinson Crusoe is part adventure story and part business novel, the first business novel ever written, a manual for the new rising middle class. Defoe invents the entrepreneur as a figure of romance, with all his talents and virtues, ingenuity, self-reliance, technical acumen, and his trust in bills of exchange. When I was young, it was universally marketed as the supreme role model for young people. Strangely enough, it still is.

Adaptation of the story of Robinson Crusoe for children. Relates how the shipwrecked sailor makes a new life for himself on the island, crafting shelter, food, and clothing for himself from the few tools he rescued from the ship and what he is able to find on the island. Living on the island for over twenty years before he is finally rescued, he reinvents almost everything necessary for daily sustenance. Suitable for ages 8 and up. 1

A shipwreck. A sole survivor, stranded on a deserted island. What could be more appealing to children than Robinson Crusoe’s amazing adventure? 2

For more than 270 years, readers everywhere have been fascinated by the young fool who ran away from wealth, security, and family for a rough life at sea and came to his senses too late, alone on a tropical island. Alone except for cannibals, that is, and God. Robinson Crusoe's adventure takes place on a remote island. Adjusting to the primitive conditions, he learns to make tools, shelters, bread, and clothes. More importantly, he becomes a Christian.3

Yet slaves and plantations saturate the narrative (not to mention loads of savages and cannibals). “The first thing I did,” says Crusoe, upon setting up shop in Brazil, “I bought me a Negro slave.”

So there I was, a southern Ontario farm boy unwittingly channeling a ruthless sugar magnate and slaver, the message loop so convoluted I still cannot completely wrap my mind around it. When that unlucky storm sinks Crusoe’s ship, he is sailing to Africa to buy slaves to populate his plantation — I didn’t read that part. This bifurcated mind, with its roots in ignorance or denial, is a characteristic of the slaving world. In the novel Crusoe speaks often of trust, as in one businessman trusting another, the basis of credit, but when a little boy helps him escape pirates, Crusoe promptly sells the boy.

The ur-businessman of English literature is competent, ingenious, able to use technology to bend nature to his will, loyal to his friends and business partners, and a slaver. Is this why we, as a culture both admire and fear the rich, the capitalists? We admire their ingenuity and capacity to organize technology and money, but we distrust their ultimate ethical allegiances. Jeff Bezos will build a giant super yacht while battling to keep wages down and prevent workers from forming unions in his warehouses. Robinson Crusoe redivivus.

I am not an advocate of book-banning, but it’s mysterious to me why the book banners don’t seem to have gone after Robinson Crusoe. Is it because the book has come to be thought of in many circles as the first modern novel, the seed out of which everything else grew? And if we ban it, erase it, we have to erase everything that grew from it? Do we have to erase ourselves? Do we really know who we are?

I ask this about myself. What effect did incorporating Crusoe into my boy-self have on me? I didn’t know about the slave part, but I surely knew about Friday and the foot-on-the-head incident (I think my brother actually enacted this—I can just barely call it to memory). And surely the slaves make Crusoe the man he is, even if they are absent in the pages I read. Later, I read the novel all the way through and saw it in a different light, with the slaves, killings, race-based betrayals, and imperialist memes, totally ripe for parody. But that’s two versions of my self: the one who saw himself as Robinson Crusoe and the adult version, still a work in progress.

Do we really know ourselves? How aware are we of the influences that shaped us?

As for Robinson Crusoe, and all the versions I possess, it’s a good book to keep around, reminding me to be wary of old certainties and versions of the truth, to be alert to influences I don’t suspect (what seems welcome, exciting, and easy is often the most insidious), and always, always, to strive to know myself and the world around me better.

Robinson Crusoe started out being a model for a little boy and ended up being the model of something else altogether.

Bruce McCall died on May 5 at the Calvary Hospital in New York of the effects of Parkinson’s disease. He was a brilliant career advertising man, but most famous for his cover art and humour pieces in the New Yorker and National Lampoon. A satirist and cartoonist extraordinaire, he specialized in a style he called retrofuturism. He was also a cousin of mine. According to the genealogy app I use, he was my fifth cousin once removed — I have no idea what that actually means other than the fact that we’re both descended from a prehistoric Scottish soldier named Donald McCall (1735-1818).

McCall’s early years were spent in Simcoe, ten miles along Highway 24 from our family farm. From 1942 to 1947, he lived at 101 Union Street, at the corner of Talbot Street, just two blocks from where my mother grew up at 286 Union Street. She was a teenager when he was born in 1935, but she remembered him and his family because they lived across the street from her Aunt Jean Jackson.

Here is McCall recalling the Jackson house. This is one of his sunnier memories of Simcoe.

The substantial Jackson house sat on a hill directly facing our peeling stucco home across Talbot Street. Daredevil kids lugged their sleds up to the Jacksons’ front lawn, then dived downhill belly-first on the sleds. A Flexible Flyer, with glass-smooth steel runners, was the ride of choice. Victory went to the sledboy who eked out energy enough to keep his momentum as he reached Talbot Street and his path flattened out. — How Did I Get Here?

Mostly he remembered Simcoe and Norfolk County in delightfully scathing terms.

No Ontario town was ever nominated to be sister city to Florence, and there were good reasons why Simcoe was among the nonstarters. Scottish conservatism is as close to the opposite of Florentine culture as can be imagined. Piano lessons and church choirs sufficed as culture, which otherwise had no role in the life of the town. — How Did I Get Here?

McCall escaped from Simcoe and Canada as soon as his art and wit could take him. But like many people with unhappy childhoods, he carried his past with him, providing fodder for two funny, bitter memoirs, Thin Ice, Coming of Age in Canada (1997) and How Did I Get Here? A Memoir (2020). In other words, even late in life he could not resist gnawing over the old bones.

Of the two books, Thin Ice is preferable. He starts with the ancestors, the McCalls, a populous brood of hard-drinking, illiterate Scots who, like all Loyalists who retreated to Canada after the American Revolution, came to think too well of themselves as evidenced in the family Book of Genesis The Genealogy and History of the Norfolk McCall Family and Associate Descendants, 1796-1946 by the estimable Delbert T. McCall — also a cousin — which opens with a dedicatory poem.

Dear were the homes where they were born,
Where slept their honoured dead;
And rich and wide, on every side,
Their fruitful acres spread;
But dearer to their faithful hearts
Than home, and gold, and lands,
Were Britain’s laws, and Britain’s crown,
And grip of British hands. 

As McCall acidly observed, “A drunk, profligate, slow-witted, or deviant McCall never appears in Delbert’s circumspect family chronicle. They are an unfailingly pious, sober, civic-minded line…” Such antecedents, real or imagined, are, of course, cloying, suffocating, and frustrating to a boy yearning for the sleek modernity of the shining metropolitan paradise to the south.

McCall’s parents married young and had six children in the howling gale of the Great Depression. They never had much money, never owned their own home. From 1943 on, his father lived mostly away from home for his work, leaving his wife alone with the brood. She reacted by retreating into drink, leaving the children mostly to their own devices. She died in 1957 at the age of 49; his father died two years later, also at the age of 49.

As a boy, McCall could only register his parents’ misery in his own misery. But later he came to see how badly things had gone for them. In high school, they had been a bright, witty, gilded couple, who started two magazines, The Mudslinger and The Ratcatcher. They were “Simcoe’s version of a smart set,” with trips to New York where they took in Broadway shows. “Nascent Jazz Babies they were, bright young things, flaming youth headed out of torpid Simcoe to find their destiny in the larger world, where they belonged.” But lack of birth control slaughtered their dreams, and it was left to the next generation, their writer son, to take the path they had missed out on.

The day their firstborn son and responsibility arrived to stay, in 1931, must have made it seems as if a line had been drawn across their lives—a line that marked an abrupt end to their carefree ways, their precocious dreams, youth and optimism and happiness itself. — Thin Ice

Despite the tragedy and disappointment of his parents’ lives, some of their flash and ambition survived in Bruce McCall. That and the inspiration supplied by the bundles of the New Yorker they read and kept in the house. Think of their dark, rattle-trap rambling house on Union Street, with the absent father and evanescent mother, in dour, conservative Simcoe, concealing this vein of ore from a completely other world. Reading the New Yorker at the age of nine, “I had stumbled upon the outskirts of a strange but clearly advanced civilization.”

From there, it wasn’t straight line to writing regularly for the New Yorker. Only in retrospect does it seem so. Suffice it to say that the boy Bruce McCall found solace from his domestic misery in drawing, in making up fantasy worlds. With a pencil and a blank sheet of paper, he was in control. Then one day, miraculously, people started paying him for his quirky inventions. And he was able to live far away from the sad scenes of his youth.

I am writing this because people in Norfolk County read my newsletters and perhaps need reminding. In 1999, I got in touch with Bruce McCall and solicited a story for the annual Best Canadian Stories, which I edited at the time. I didn’t mind that he had mostly turned his back on Canada except to make disparaging jokes. To me, that actually made him even more Canadian, ultra-Canadian. We have an entire mini-literary tradition of disparaging Canada. It’s a cottage industry. If he had kept his mouth shut, he’d have been less Canadian. In putting him in Best Canadian Stories, I wanted to mark the fact that he had become one of our foremost authors. The form — satire — is not popular in Canada; Canadians go to the United States to perform their satire. But you can see where it came from. Growing up in Simcoe in the Depression, fantasy and comedy were the survival kit, the New Yorker was his lifeline.

Here is Adam Gopnik’s obituary in the May 15 issue — “Remembering Bruce McCall, Satirist and Compleat Canadian.”

Here’s that song I mentioned a while back.1 It deserves a spot by itself. (Sound file and video at the bottom.)

My son Jonah and his friend Sam Hagen formed a band in 2012 called Hold Your Breath. This is a song they recorded at the time. Jonah wrote it. Sam on rhythm guitar. It’s such a beautiful, simple thing, but also written with humor and easy wit. It speaks of youth and carefree pleasure and nervous first love and that moment when a kid teeters between being a child and a teenager. It is so simple and relaxed you hardly notice the cunning of the structure and the beauty of the lyrics. I especially appreciate that he managed to get in the phrase “regurgitated worms” and make it fit the line. It is so pleasing when I writer takes a wild chance on a word like that. Little touches make a work non-ordinary.

The first verse/refrain consists of just five words. Such precision and restraint. Actually, I suppose it’s not exactly a refrain since it only occurs once right at the beginning. But something like…

I am so happy.
I am so happy today.
I am so happy.
I am so happy today.
I am so happy
Today is the day.

There are three body verses, each a little scene, a complete scene, a story even, with a simple rising emotional arc from one to the other (I keep using the word “simple” because I continue to marvel at the precision and cleanliness of the conception, the lines of writing). First, a nest of baby “birdlets,” second, a high school dance in the clouds, third, a fantastic teenage gettogether, the continents (my goodness) hanging out at North America’s place, ending with that vision of all difference dissolving into that vast, singular, mega-continent, Pangea, which in the context becomes a symbol of youth, affection, love, and fun. In effect, in each verse the image-symbols get larger and LARGER until they compass the entire WORLD.

Each verse ends with a turn back to the refrain —

I am so happy
Today is the day.

As you listen, take note of the emotional panel. Again, the technique is simple, never exaggerates, but precise. First, the wild joy of the birdlets because tonight “they will not starve.” Then the “nervous” cloud asking another cloud to the high school dance. (All Jonah has to do is mention “nervous” and the act of asking a person to go out, and the dance “in the school cafeteria” and the emotion is there.) And, finally, the lovely, youthful exuberance, the charge that comes when Australia decides to join South America and North America. As you listen (says he, wanting for words), feel the emotional shifts, the rising joy.

Between the high school dance and the teenage continents hanging out there is a verse of scat singing, a rhythmic fill-in meant to delay the ending.

And then at the end, a final verse, an ending — “So let’s be happy…” Once again, the emotion is not just named but presented — “these bright summer days / are great for ice cream…”

This sound file is the recorded version.

This video is a September, 2012 performance.

The furniture around the house where I grew up radiated messages. Every piece had a story. For my mother, each chair, table, ottoman, plate, or sideboard was a mnemonic device, a memory place inside her farmhouse memory palace. As a kid, I was bored and annoyed by all this and paid scant attention. Luckily, she had the prescience to hire someone with a video camera to come in and film her talking about her favourites. And eventually I started taking notes. But it’s not the same as having her here. Much has been lost, which is the nature of life. Sigh.

The McNeilledge serving table sits in a corner of the downstairs drawing room, called after its maker, a Scottish sea captain who settled in Port Dover on Lake Erie in 1829 and tried to become a farmer. He wasn’t very good at farming, so he left that to his wife and son and started sailing again. Restless, he produced a book of charts and sailing instructions—Sailing directions and remarks accompanied with a nautical chart of the north shore of Lake Erie (1848). Here is an extract from the book:

It used to be an old rule, in running for Port Dover in the night time, before the harbor or lighthouse was built, and it will be well to mention it here, in case of thick weather, &—let ut be ever so dark, steer west and keep your lead going, now and then, and strike hard bottom occasionally on your starboard hand; then haul off and get in muddy bottom, and keep so until you see the land right ahead; and when you think you are near enough by your own judgement, you can come to anchor in 2, 2 1/2, or 3 fathoms, and you will be at the anchorage a little above the harbor, with good holding ground.

He drew and painted, curious text-art water colours of ships he had sailed on with little snippets of memoir underneath.

Then in 1873 at the age of 83, he wrote a last entry in his voluminous diary1, walked down into a ravine behind his house, and killed himself. That last entry read: “I last saw my mother on July 12, 1806, when I left Scotland expecting to be gone 3 or 4 months. I was shipwrecked, and did not return to Scotland for 40 years.” During the era when I ran the magazine Numéro Cinq, I published a poem about McNeilledge by my friend Karen Mulhallen. She begins with those lines from the diary, then limns the sad nostalgia of the expatriate Scots, shipwrecked, she writes, in a loghouse town by the lake.

They were all shipwrecks, maddened, these men,
gathered in that village in the wood, dreaming of prosperous towns,
perchance a great city, other civilizations…

McNeilledge made the table of cherry wood, with elegantly carved medallions and curlicues, not ornate or showy. The polished wood glows when the afternoon light hits it. It sends messages. As I run my fingers over the shapes, I can’t help but think about the man who created them. He was only eight years old when he shipped out of Greenock in 1806 on a ship captained by his father. He eventually became a captain himself, sailed around the world, fought off pirates, was shipwrecked, as he says. He married a Philadephia doctor’s daughter, Mary Ann Elizabeth Thum, in 1819. There is a painting of her at two, holding a bird, in a laced-trimmed white mobcap, with a necklace bearing the initials "ME" on the pendant.

Chad Fraser, an author who knows more about McNeilledge than I do, wrote of those years:

His exploits are the stuff of seafaring legend: he first went to sea as a cabin boy at the age of eight, was shipwrecked on Long Island in 1807, saw the Duke of Wellington in Lisbon, and even caught a glimpse of Napoleon Bonaparte, the deposed emperor of France, in exile on the island of St. Helena in 1817. Even what he might have considered the more humdrum aspects of his time at sea are thrilling by modern standards. The captain covered huge swaths of the globe, sailing to ports as far afield as China and running a naval blockade off Buenos Aires. And, for good measure, he endured robbery and plunder at the hands of pirates on the storied Spanish Main.2

Eventually, he let his brother Colin convince him to leave the sea and settle in Port Dover, where he started out working as a bookkeeper for Colin, which must have been a terrible comedown for an adventurous man in his thirties used to the great trading ports of Europe, America, and the Far East. Within a few years, he had bought a farm north of the village. He called it Greenock after the place where he was born. In his diary, he called his wife “Mrs Mc”. He had a dog named Watch.

My mother bought the table at an estate sale in 1951. There’s even a story about that. I think of my mother and her mother, Kathleen (Brock) Ross3, as a pair of estate sale rottweilers. On this occasion, they showed up together at a sale at Lulu (or Loula--I seem to have spelled it different ways in my notes) Jackson's house on Colborne Street in Simcoe. Somehow my mother had gotten wind of the McNeilledge table. I don't know what made her so determined to buy it (I wish I had her here to ask). But in 1951, my brother Rodger was still a baby, so she was stealing time away from him just to be there. The sale was open air, buyers and kibitzers standing on the lawn in front of the veranda, where each item was displayed in turn. The day wore on, the hours stretched uncomfortably, and finally my mother was forced to leave. But she gave my grandmother strict instructions about the table. It was the last item brought out onto the veranda. The auctioneer called out, "Who will give me $10?” My grandmother shot up, made a pre-emptive bid of $25, and took the table home. As my mother said, "No one bid against her--very few people ever bid against Nonnie."

In my notes, I see that my mother remembered McNeilledge4 as “a celestial navigator.”5

This is a satellite family story. You know how it is. When you marry someone, you fuse two genealogies, which, if mapped on the page, look like butterfly wings stretching out, left and right, to infinity, or at least a couple or three generations. You not only fuse the genealogies but also the family stories.

One of the stories I heard growing up was about my great-uncle-in-law William Penhall who died in an avalanche on the Wetterhorn in the Swiss Alps in 1882 at the age of 23. William was born in Hastings, England, the son of a doctor. His younger brother Richmond Penhall immigrated to Canada in 1901 and settled in Port Dover. In Port Dover, he and his wife had a son named Douglas Penhall. The Glovers had a small cottage in Port Dover. At some point, Douglas Penhall met my father’s sister Norma; I imagine them eyeing each other on the beach and exchanging flirtatious small talk standing in Lake Erie. They married and Douglas Penhall became my uncle-in-law and his Uncle William, the unlucky mountaineer, became my grand uncle-in-law (or something like that).

One evening in 1987, Uncle Doug (when I was growing up I was called Little Doug and he was Big Doug) told me the kernel of the story. This is from my diary.

Doug started talking about his Uncle William who died at 23-4 in 1882, August, in an avalanche on the Matterhorn. He had been the first to climb a particular face of the Matterhorn and was studying medicine at St. Bartholomew's in London after graduating from Cambridge. There is a couloir named after him. D's parents married in 1890, his 3 brothers and sister were born in England and he was born here in 1906 (his birth registry has 1806 crossed out and corrected).

As usual, I didn’t pay too much attention to this story at the time, and, writing it down, I bungled some of the details. I was much more interested in another uncle who had come to Canada in the 1880s and joined the Northwest Mounted Police serving on the Prairies during the Metis and Cree rebellions. I tried to track him down, but the trail petered out quite quickly for lack of crucial information. His name, for example. But trying to trace his family background led me back to the story of Uncle William, the intrepid. I guess they were both intrepid. It was an intrepid, very English family.

I think I hadn’t quite believed Uncle Doug. I remembered reading about Edward Whymper conquering the Matterhorn as a kid. I even remembered snippets of that 1938 film The Challenge about Whymper and the Matterhorn. It was an amazingly awful story, a sign of the suicidal amateurishness of the early mountaineers. Whymper and his six friends and Swiss guides climbed tied together with thin rope (like a bell-cord someone said afterward) and long handled ice axes. They wore what we would call tweed sports jackets over sweaters, high woolen socks, and hob-nailed boots. They spent two sleepless nights on the climb, but did eventually get to the peak. One of the party, however, was a neophyte. He had never climbed before. Going up was fine, but he seems to have gotten spooked going down. One of the guides climbed below him, placing his feet on the ledges. The film shows this quite well. Nonetheless, they slipped, guide and young mountaineer. All seven were roped together. Two more fell, then the rope broke, which saved Whymper. (He was accused of cutting the rope, but later exonerated.) The four falling climbers didn’t die immediately. Whymper described seeing them sliding on the scree, holding their hands out to try to slow themselves. Then they disappeared one by one over a cliff face.

This was in July, 1865. Whymper wrote a book about it. This inaugurated what was called the first Golden Age of mountaineering. Uncle William, born in 1858 in Hastings, read Whymper’s book and caught the mountaineering bug. He liked the idea of being first, of conquering peaks and finding new ways up peaks. He was the son of a doctor. He went to one of those British public (private) schools and then to Cambridge University, graduating in 1881. He first climbed the Matterhorn in 1877 by Whymper’s northern route and was disgusted by the proliferation of fixed ropes, broken glass, sardine cans, and other climbing detritus. But in 1878, he was already competing with other climbers to bag untried climbs in the Alps. That year he and his party claimed the first ascent of the west face of Zinalrothorn.

Getting to the top of the Matterhorn meant climbing up ridges; they look like buttresses leaning up against the triangular faces. Between the ridges, the mountain was sheer rock cliffs and ice. Whymper took the north ridge in 1865, and the ridge on the south went the same year. The much more difficult Zmutt ridge on the west had yet to be climbed. In September, 1879, a man named Albert Mummery had assembled a team to tackle Zmutt (I know, I know: Mummery, Zmutt, and Whymper sound like I made up the names), but Uncle William Penhall, racing over from Cambridge and quickly hiring two Swiss guides, was simultaneously ready to ascend. Uncle William, just twenty years old, jumped in ahead of Mummery by a day and almost got up the Zmutt, but a barrier of icy rock teeth stymied him. Discouraged, he descended, meeting Mummery along the way, then turned around at 10pm and started climbing again. The next day, September 3, Mummery and his team, using ropes, scaled the teeth and pushed on up to the peak. But Uncle William was not to be defeated. While Mummery was going up the ridge, William had climbed to the right of the Zmutt and attacked icy cliffs straight on, a much more difficult route. Looking down from the ridge, Mummery could see him inching up the mountainside. William reached the peak a little over an hour after Mummery who had already begun the descent. Mummery had his first ascent up the Zmutt, and William had his own first by a different route.

This fierce, but gentlemanly competition is described by Stephen Venables in his book First Ascents. Please note the brandy, beer, and wine consumed by Mummery and his party.

His rival, William Penhall, was first on the ridge, getting to the top of a prominent row of pinnacles called “The Teeth” before retreating. A day later, Mummery arrived with his guide Alexander Burgener, to bivouac at the foot of the ridge. With their two assistant guides, they made a jolly party, enjoying “a heterogeneous mixture of red wine and marsala, bottled beer and cognac.” They set off long before dawn, climbing quickly to the Zmutt’s prominent snow ridge and over the jagged Teeth. Then they saw what had defeated Penhall – steep, smooth, slabs, veneered with verglas. Later Mummery described Burgener in action on this section: “It was obviously practicable but it was equally obvious that the slip of one meant the destruction of all who were roped to him.”

No-one slipped and the four men eventually completed the first ascent of the Zmutt Ridge. Looking across to their right, they saw Penhall in hot pursuit, climbing alone up the Matterhorn’s West Face – a truly futuristic route up a notoriously dangerous wall which has rarely been repeated.

For his feat, Uncle William had part of the mountain named after him, the Penhall Couloir.1

Four days later, on September 7, Mummery and Uncle William combined to make the first ascent of the Durrenhorn. Perhaps William had discovered he liked Mummery’s hard-partying style of mountain climbing.

William Penhall published his own account of the climb in an essay called “The Matterhorn from the Zmutt Glacier” in a contempory climbing magazine, Alpine Journal. As he makes clear in the essay, he wasn’t alone. He had two enthusiastic guides, Ferdinand Imseng and a local chamois hunter Louis Zurbrucken, and a porter. And though they didn’t get much sleep during their nights out, they did have time to brew some mulled wine. William and Imseng were wary of giving out too much information and tried to keep their plans for the ascent secret. They told the others that they were going chamois hunting, but the fact that they didn’t bring any guns gave their game away. On the 3rd of September, the day of the final climb, they could hear Mummery’s party to the left and above them.

In August, 1882, Uncle William was back in the Alps (I simply don’t have any information about his adventures between 1879 and the summer of 1882) ready to conquer the Wetterhorn. As always, William seems to have been in a hurry. He arrived in the village of Grindelwald where he met up with a climbing friend, F. J. Church. They hired two guides, Andrea Maurer and Rudolf Kaufmann. Snow was forecast for the mountain in the coming days, and William decided not to waste a night sleeping while the weather closed in. He and Maurer left their hotel at about 1am on August 3rd. They were expected back that afternoon, but when they didn’t appear, search parties were organized for the next day. Some of their belongings were discovered at a climbing hut with tracks leading higher up, then disappearing. Later, their bodies were found, evidently crushed by an avalanche just below a ridge called the Willsgrat leading to the peak. William and Maurer were buried together in the village cemetery.2

I tell you all this because it’s a good story, not to draw conclusions. Uncle William was an enthusiast. Nowadays, he’d be jetting around the world to bag difficult technical climbs, still looking for firsts. Or he would be doing even less sensible things like base jumping. It was the peak of the Victorian era, the heyday of British imperialism. As a young English doctor-in-training of his race and time, the world was his to play in. The young mountaineers hired the Swiss villagers as guides and porters in much the way modern climbers use Sherpas to conquer Everest. It was fun, risky, and adventurous, but you sense the dark themes underneath.

I myself have no taste for this. I can confess to one regrettable incident when I attached myself to a small fir tree on a snowy ridge going up the Lions outside of Vancouver (really, I could see death on both sides of the trail, and it was the last tree, nothing but snow and rock ahead). I could not be persuaded to let go and carry on with the hike until a troup of middle school girls went skipping by and shamed me.

And, of course, there is that other regrettable incident when two friends and I attempted to climb Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks during a blizzard. I recall that my jeans froze solid over night, but we had whisky. When another climber tried to bunk down with us in the lean-to, my friends, worried about the whisky supply, sent him away into the snowy night.

Yes, one only has to think a little, and so many regrettable incidents come to mind. Mostly connected with snow and mountains.

Go up into Gilead, and take balm... Jeremiah 46:11

Uncle Walter’s Pelican

On April 16, 1874, my 2x great-uncle Walter McInnes shot a white pelican at Turkey Point on the Lake Erie shore. White pelicans are large soaring birds, with the second longest wingspan of any North American bird. They are not rare, but to see one as far east as Turkey Point was unusual. Walter took the bird to a taxidermist and had it stuffed, keeping it in his house in Vittoria until he died. Then his daughter Myra got the bird, and I had the pleasure of seeing it one day in the 1960s when my mother took me for a visit. I can still remember the tall, dignified shape in the living room corner, amid the Victorian clutter.

Walter’s pelican was locally famous and something of a joke. In the mid-1980s, my grandmother dryly observed, “It seems it was just last year there was another white pelican at Turkey Point, and they mentioned that this one didn't get shot.”

To be fair, killing and stuffing birds was the usual thing in those days. In the family farmhouse, we have a large glass case full of songbirds stuffed and arranged by Walter’s St. Williams nephews, Walter and Bruce McCall.

Snapshots of Uncle Walter

Walter McInnes was born in Vittoria in 1842 and died there in 1919. His parents were well-to-do Scottish immigrants who came to Canada in 1836. His three eldest sisters were born in Scotland.

The first image I have of Walter is of a little boy sitting on a fence, dangling his legs, watching his eldest sister Henrietta (Hetty)1, newly married, leaving home for the long ocean trip to Gold Rush California in 1856. He was thirteen. By this time the family had moved one mile west of Vittoria to a frame house called Aberfoyle, with dormers on the roof, a wide central hallway, and a grand piano. They had a governess to educate the children.

He went to high school at the Simcoe Academy. The first year he walked back and forth to Simcoe (seven miles each way), after which his father bought him a pony. Once, returning home, he mistook a bear for one of his dogs. This was according to my grandmother, who couldn’t provide any more detail.

After graduating from the Academy, Walter went on to the University of Toronto Medical School. Walter was religious (his father was Old Kirk, as they were called in Scotland) and perhaps a bit of a prig (or simply just unused to the ways of a big city), but he decided that one of his professors was “dissipated” and that the situation was not good for him. He transferred to McGill University.

On February 22, 1864, he wrote a letter to his sister Ann (McInnes) McCall who was living in St. Williams, married to the storekeeper and lumber entrepreneur Daniel Abiel McCall. He says that lectures will soon be over, that studying medicine is not as much fun as you might think, and would Abiel save three mink skins, “prime and of the same colour,” for a hat for next winter.

In 1865, he graduated from McGill and went to Saginaw, Michigan, to live with another married sister and practice medicine. Two years later, the sister died. Walter returned to Vittoria with her body, and stayed on.

In 1874, he shot the pelican.

Walter practiced out of his home in Vittoria, and at night people would come banging on his door to rouse him, and off he would go on horseback or by buggy or sleigh. He kept dogs that would range ahead driving stray cattle off the road, a necessity as he was apt to fall asleep during long night-time rides. One night he was ambushed by robbers. A man leapt out of the dark, grasping the horse’s bridle. Another held a lantern up to the doctor’s face. “This is not the man,” he growled. And they let him go.

Later in life he bought a farm three miles west of Vittoria where he grew medicinal plants such as garlic and goldenseal, which, the story goes, he had learned about from the First Nations people living in the neighborhood.

Gilead Lodge & Bella Vista

My grandmother boasted that Walter was a crack shot. Learning to hunt and shoot was a natural outcome for people who grew up on Lake Erie’s north shore. The spits, bays, and marshes were natural habitats for migrating ducks, geese, and swans. Hunting clubs were organized to protect certain shooting grounds for hunters with money. Even today much of Long Point is still owned by the Long Point Company, a combine of very wealthy (mostly) Americans who fly in to shoot, spending their nights in the rustic “Cottages” on the Point, only accessible by water. Hunters slaughtered vast numbers of birds in the 19th and 20th centuries. Decoy carving became a local art form. Men made seasonal livings as hunting guides, punters, and market hunters. More birds were killed than ever could be consumed, most were packed and shipped by rail car to Toronto where they were served at the city’s restaurants.

In the 1890s, Walter had two dogs Gypsy and Phanto (my grandmother, born in 1896, remembered the dogs). She passed down a lovely photo of him taken in his hunting clothes with his shotgun and dogs, sitting in front of his house in Vittoria.

His favourite hunting spot was the marshes at the back of Turkey Point on the Lake Erie shore. In 1891, he built the first cottage—unpainted board and batten walls, gable roof, a relatively narrow verandah, the structure built on timber piles—on the beach at the point and called it Gilead Lodge, a beloved summer refuge and playground for his six children through the years.

I don’t really know why Uncle Walter called his cottage Gilead Lodge. Gilead is, of course, a Biblical reference. (In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the Republic of Gilead is a grotesquely puritanical Christian offshoot, but this doesn’t have anything to do with Walter’s cottage in 1891.) In the Bible, Gilead is a geographical designation, hill country in what is now Jordan. Gilead is a combination of two Hebrew words that mean something like a hill of testimony or a heap of stones of testimony. There is also phrase “balm in Gilead” that comes down from Tyndale’s translation of the Bible, denoting a healing potion that may have been an export from those hills of Gilead. I like this reference as a source for the name, a healing potion, a healing place, a refuge from his professional cares.

Walter’s older sister Ann, as I mentioned, had married a store clerk-turned-lumber-entrepreneur, Daniel Abiel McCall (I wrote about their courtship in an earlier post2). They lived in nearby St. Williams just west of Turkey Point. Abiel died at 61 of diabetes in 1893, leaving Annie disconsolate. In 1895, to cheer her up, Walter built a second cottage, Bella Vista, just down the beach from Gilead Lodge.

Both cottages were built with lumber from Daniel McCall’s planing mill and furniture factory in St. Williams brought by boat across the Inner Bay. The cottages were at the western end of the habitable beach frontage, to make the trip shorter (the western end, my grandmother said, instead of the “popular end” where the village grew up).

On August 14, 1895, the family held a celebratory open air concert at Bella Vista to inaugurate the new cottage. I have a partial program, scribbled in pencil “for Maggie.” It began with a rousing performance of “Take Back the Engagement Ring” sung by someone known only as A.G. Followed by

• a recitation by M. A.

• a reading by R. McInnes (Uncle Walter’s son Robert, born 1885)

• a reading by F. Mabee (not sure who this is, but the Mabee family were the first white settlers at Turkey Point and built the first cabin under the bluff where the village is now)

• a speech “on cats” by W. F. McCall (born 1864, son of Ann McInnes McCall, Uncle Walter’s sister for whom Bella Vista was built)

• a recitation by Jessie McCall (born 1883, another niece, daughter of Uncle Walter’s sister Sarah McInnes McCall and her husband Senator Alexander McCall)

• a recitation by M. Dawson (May Agnes Dawson, born 1881, daughter of Uncle Walter’s sister Georgina McInnes Dawson)

• a recitation by A. Griffian

• a recitation by Katie Jolly (Kate and Ed Jolly, below, I think, were the children of Nathaniel Jolly, a cabinetmaker in the McCall Furniture Factory in St. Williams)

• speech by J. Brock (my great-grandfather John Brock who married Ann McInnes McCall’s daughter Sarah)

• Irish Song by Grandma (not sure who this is)

• speech by Ed Jolly

That’s all that remains of a lengthier list, a charming little thing, with all the nieces and nephews performing.

Turkey Point & Walter, the Naturalist

Turkey Point is a triangle of marsh beneath a high bluff, forming the eastern cusp of Inner Bay. A spine of sand, a much smaller version of Long Point to the west, guards the marsh from the Lake Erie waves. The Turkey Point beach with hot dog stands and motels along the street at the back was one of my favourite haunts as a kid, smaller, sleepier, and friendlier than nearby Port Dover. I used to camp in the Provincial Park on the bluff and spend my days on the beach.

Here is my go-to map of Norfolk County with Long Point at the bottom. You can see Turkey Point inside the orange outline that delineates the area where my McCall and McInnes ancestors settled.

And here are satellite maps courtesy of Google, so you can get a better sense of the unique geology and environment. Inner Bay is a shallow (gradually filling in) annex of the much larger Long Point Bay.

Like many hunters, Walter McInnes was a great observer of nature and the land over which he hunted. He was also a notable public speaker and used to get invited to give talks. I don’t know the dates (not preserved on the newspaper tearsheet I have copied), but at some point he delivered a paper to the Historical Society entitled, simply, “Turkey Point,” in which he spoke at great length about the formation and ongoing development of the marshes, about the Attawanderons (used to be called the Neutral) who used to hunt there and the settlers who came after. My copy of this paper is unfortunately incomplete, but here is a taste.

At the extreme southeasterly limit of lot number thirteen, in the Township of Charlotteville, the high bank of Lake Erie makes a bend almost east and west for a few hundred yards and then follows a course of a few degrees south of west. This bend forms a bold bluff of about one hundred and fifty feet in height. Its base is traversed by a small stream of pure water, fed by springs from the side of the high bank, near the angle farthest from the lake shore.

The base of the bluff is the apex of a triangular piece of land, comprised of marsh, swamp and a narrow strip of upland, bounded on the east and south by water and on the west and north by the high bank.

From the base of the bluff to the extreme southerly point of this parcel or tract of land is about three miles, and from this point to its northwest angle is about two miles, and from there along the base of the high bank to the bluff is about three and a half miles.

This strip of land is known as Turkey Point. The marsh on the west is called the Back Marsh and the marsh on the east and south is called the Front Marsh.

It received its name from the early settlers on account of the great number of wild turkeys that used to roost in the hemlock and cedar trees along the bank, on the ridges and in the swamp adjacent _______. Here the wild turkey had every environment suited to its wants, abundance of shelter and protections from its natural foes, and abundance of food from the seeds of the black oak, beech and maple trees near by. During the summer season, they fed on the seeds of the June grass and on the grasshoppers; in the autumn on crickets, so numerous in the open glades of the plains to the north. The Indians were accustomed to burn off in the spring the dead grass and leaves over these plains, so that the grass would grow the thicker and afford better grazing for the deer.

In the early days of the pioneers, the settler, with his wife and family, used to drive in their wagons along the bay shore to the end of Turkey Point, and fish by driving their wagons out into the water a short distance. With a long cedar pole they could cast their lines into the channel, known among them as the Deep Hole, and in this way the extreme end of Turkey Point was called Deep Hole Point. The northwest angle of this parcel of land, at the coast line, in front of lot number four, was called Goose Roost, because wild geese used to roost there. A line drawn from Deep Hole Point to the most northerly point of Ryerson's Island, called Mohawk Point, is the division between the Outer and Inner Bays of Long Point.

In the geological formation and structure of Turkey Point, we find lake sand and shells of fresh water bi-valves and gastropods, proving clearly that it has been formed by lake sand, by the waves of the adjacent waters and by the winds. When an east wind prevails, the waters are driven up the lake, and the water level is lowered in the bay. The waves washing and breaking on the shore, form sand bars a short distance from the shore, and the first west or southwest wind that follows, returns the waters and carries the sand some distance towards, often upon it, adding several feet, in places, to the shore, and which, in some instances in my own recollection, have formed a sand bar across a smaller inlet or outlet, and which sand bar afterwards became the shore proper, to usurp, gradually, in the same manner, more of the water's domain. The space of shallow water so separated from the bay, afterwards filled up, and is now marsh, gradually becoming dry land.

The ridge that forms the western boundary of the upland of Turkey Point is the widest and highest, and at one time was covered with valuable walnut, elm, bass wood and maple trees. At the present time, one of the most productive sugar bushes in the county is on this ridge. It has never been deprived of its natural conditions by drainage or by cultivation. This same ridge, forming as it does the back bone of the upland of Turkey Point, was the barrier that led to the formation of the marsh in the rear. It was formed at a time when the water level of the lake was much higher than at present. That part of the bay on the west of this ridge, extending to the base of the high bank, was thus sheltered and protected from the motions of the waves, and no doubt, at one time, was a bed of wild rice, but it had emptying into it the debris and soil brought down by the small streams and springs of the adjacent upland, and this formed a suitable bed for the growth of bull rushes, which displaced the wild rice; then among the rushes, the wire grass (marsh grass) grew in tufts, and those tufts of marsh grass grew large enough to afford a suitable soil for other water grasses and plants.

The seeds of the quill reeds or corn grass, carried by the wind or the currents of the water, lodged here and grew to as large rhizomes as their parents, and formed the foundation of the marsh, to be again, in turn, displaced by other water grasses and sphagnum moss, and from time to time received, during high water, and coating of fine sand and mud, held in suspension by the waves, and carried outward over the marsh, and also deposited in the open water and rice beds. In this way then our marshes form and extend. Wild rice will grow only in inundated pounds. It must receive this coating of wind_____ _____ will not grow in shut up in the stagnant water ponds. The water courses of our marshes gradually become more narrow and sluggish, encroached upon by the marsh grass and other water plants, filled up by the sediment deposited from the waves and high water, during wind storms, until they disappear, leaving an open pond here and there, drainage basins, so to speak, for the water of melted snows and rains. As the water level became lower, these ponds gradually disappeared, till only a few of the larger and deeper ones are left.

In his speech, Walter admits to his fair share in the cataclysmic hunting practices of his day. Later, he became more and more conscious of the damage that was being done. In the end, he begins to sound like a modern-day eco-conservationist, mourning the losses.

Man is acknowledged to be the most destructive of all animals and his powers of destruction increase in proportion to his knowledge and civilization.

In our own time and generation we have seen the American bison, the buffalo of the plains, disappear, and their place taken by domestic cattle, sheep and horses, and many of us have hunted and killed, and, for the last time, have seen the passenger pigeon. Turkey Point was ___ of their roosting places. White fish are not unknown in the waters of the Inner Bay, though the early settlers called the bar, a short distance from Deep Hole Point, White Fish Bar, on account of the numbers of white fish they caught there. So much, then, for the filling up of the beautiful bay. In place of the white fish, we have the carp, properly styled the water hog, fit to be used as food only when partly boiled in vinegar, and then roasted.

Many varieties of birds and water fowl, at one time plentiful on Turkey Point, are now no more, other of them are rapidly decreasing in numbers, but on account of their natural habits are now difficult to exterminate because they lay their eggs and hatch their young in those regions near the confines of the midnight sun, where only the hardiest of the mammals can live during the whole of the year and where these water fowl, many of them rivalling in plumage the choicest specimens of the tropics, find a home of rest for the pleasures and benefits of connubial love and maternity, and where the black snake, the wamper and turtle are not.

But even there the canvas back, red head, widgeon and mallard ducks though their hiding places are so remote and so secure, on their southern flight, as they come to their feeding grounds on our bays and marshes, are met by the market hunter, with his pump gun, in his skeg boat, and with a string of one hundred wooden decoys, are slaughtered in vast numbers and sold. Yes, sold, and then place in cold storage of the most modern design to be served in our fashionable hotels and cafes to appease the insatiable appetites of their patrons and visitors, who in many instances are the [missing line] proper companions in the process of extinction, but from opposite causes.

The End of Things

Walter’s eldest son Norman, also a hunter and lover of nature, studied medicine at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1897. He tried to branch out on his own, but was sickly with tuberculosis and finally returned to Vittoria to practice with his father until his death in 1906 at the age of 31. My grandmother (born 1896) told me an amusing story about seeing Walter and Norman together.

I remember Norman in the early 1900s. Jean [her sister] had an abscess on her neck and Norman came with Uncle Walter. They were going to lance it, and Aunt Emily took me across the road to her place. But I wanted to go home, I wanted to see what they were going to do, and she promised me that she'd take me. But she slipped out, and by the time I got there, Uncle Walter and Norman were just driving out. So I missed it.

The good doctor himself died at the tail end of the 1919 flu pandemic. He worked his heart out through that disastrous time, saving every one of his patients except for the last, a young man with a wife and children. This broke Walter, and he succumbed a few days later. I have a copy of his death record; he and his patient appear on the same page.

In later times, the village ran Ordnance Drive along the beach, separating Gilead Lodge from the lake. Gilead Lodge became 55 Ordnance Drive. Google Maps did a drive-by in August, 2016, by which time the cottage had been modernized and renovated, losing much of its charm, the front veranda replaced by a walled-in porch, the plank walls covered with siding. What once had looked like a substantial frame building was now dwarfed by much larger two and even three-storey beach-front houses in a contemporary mode. Last November, my cousin Michael Hunter, who lives in Turkey Point, reported seeing dump trucks hauling construction detritus away from the site. (Later in an email, Michael mentioned he had an electrician friend who had worked on the place some years before. “He said the bottom supporting timbers were original and hell to drill through because they were so thick.”) Having stood for 131 years, Walter’s hunting camp on the Lake Erie beach was no more.

But 1832 was a bad year.

This is the story my mother used to tell. The official versions, always fluid, tell it slightly differently and obviously with more detail.

My great-great-grandfather John Moore Glover (1792-1857) operated a blacksmith shop in Round Plains1, Norfolk County.2 He was married to Rebecca Beemer. Rebecca’s sister Mary Margaret had married a man named Henry Sovereign (Sovereene, Sovereen). These surnames represented extended Loyalist families who left the Thirteen Colonies after the American Revolution and relocated on land grants in the area. Henry and Mary Margaret lived on a farm next door to their brother-in-law John Glover. In 1832, they were 44 and 39, respectively, and had 11 children. Besides farming, Sovereign made a living as a so-called shingle weaver (means shingle maker).

According to my mother, Sovereign “was always a little odd. One day when he was a boy, he took too much butter, and his mother reprimanded him, and he lost his temper and he never ate butter again for the rest of his life.”3 This is comical, of course. But the point is that he had a bad temper and later drank too much. In 1819, he shot someone’s horse to death and was sentenced to hang (apparently, they took horse-shooting seriously in those days). But the sentence was commuted, and Sovereign went back to farming, making shingles, and producing children.

But early on the morning of January 23, 1832, he appeared out of the dark at the Glover door, bleeding and distraught, claiming to have been attacked by marauders with charcoaled faces, fearing they would harm his family. John raced through the snow and discovered the bloody corpses of Sovereign’s murdered family.

My mother said that John Glover was the first witness on the scene, but the official line is that Sovereign went to a neighbour named Serles. John Glover figured, officially, only as a witness at the trial. I like my mother’s version, but who knows?

There are a handful of journalistic accounts of the day, but the one I like the best appeared in the The Evening Post in New York, a little over three weeks later (February 15) under the byline of a “Rev. Mr. Ryerson.” The byline suggests Egerton Ryerson, the Canadian preacher, writer, and educator, whose name has come into disrepute of late because of his advocacy for an early version of residential schools for indigenous children. Ryerson was born in Norfolk County in 1803. In 1832, he was a Methodist circuit rider, political advocate, and magazine editor. I was never before aware that he had a sideline as stringer for newspapers in the U.S. But I can’t find another “Rev. Mr. Ryerson.” If the writer is Egerton Ryerson, well, all the more intriguing.

But I digress.

Ryerson got his evidence from Mary Beemer’s father and brother. One assumes (hopes) he got his information in person. The scene he describes is horrific, the position and condition of the bodies implying a sequence of events, Sovereign slaughtering the baby (throwing it into the fire) and another child first, then the mother and the other children racing into the night, only to be hunted down and killed one by one in the snow. The mother may have died last because that is where the broken knife blade was found.

The principle evidence, I am informed, was a neighbor, who lived between a quarter and a half a mile from the place where the murder was committed. He stated that on Monday moring, the 21st instant, some time before day, Henry Sovereign, the father of the murdered family, came to his house, slightly wounded in the breast and left arm, saying that there were murderers at his (Sovereign's) house and that he was afraid or expected they would kill his wife and family. The neighbor, in the company of Sovereign, came with all possible haste to the place. The first object tht attracted his notice on his arrival, was a little infant about three or four months old, burning on the fire, one of its legs was burnt off nearly to the knee, the back part of its head was consumed, and its body was much burnt. Near the hearth lay another child in a state of insensibility. This I believe is not yet dead, although it is not expected to survive. By the side of the door was another, in a sitting or squatting posture, having been struck on the head with a bludgeon or some large instrument, which occasioned instant death. A fourth was found out of doors at the corner of the house, lifeless, and bleeding on the ground. About a rod from the house, in a path which led to an old hovel, was seen a fifth in the same state. Nearly a rod farther in the same path was found a young woman, about 17 years of age, a corpse. In the yard in front of the hovel, lay the mother and another little boy close together, weltering in their blood. Close by the mother was observed the blade of a knife all bloody. It was found on examination, that she had received a blow on the back of her neck, which fractured her skull and dislocated her neck bone, and had also been stabbed in the pit of the stomach, so as to pierce the vitals, and divide one of the large arteries, which bled most profusely.

Sounds a bit like something from a Cormac McCarthy novel, say Outer Dark. Oh yes, oh yes. Remember this?

The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly.

No one seems to have believed Sovereign’s story about the black-face gang. There were no tracks leading away from the scene. And he had a reputation as a violent man, a horse killer and drunkard. Though he maintained his innocence to the very end.

My cousin Daniel Brock wrote Sovereign’s entry The Dictionary of Canadian Biography with the advantage of having access to later news accounts and trial testimony. He points out that there was a three-year-old daughter in the house who slept through the whole catastrophe and survived (along with three other siblings who were away from home).

A blood-stained jackknife, believed to have been used by Sovereene [the spelling in Dan’s DCB entry] to inflict wounds on himself, was found in his vest pocket; another weapon, a beetle or maul used to split wood in the making of shingles, was discovered, gory and almost covered with human hair of different colours, concealed between the straw and feathers of a bed in the house. Following his arrest and an inquest, Sovereene was transported to the London jail. Prior to the assizes, London had been ravaged by cholera and most of its residents had fled. Only nine grand jurors were present for the opening of the court and bystanders were recruited to fill out the jury. Sovereene was tried on 8 Aug. 1832. After retiring for less than an hour, the jury found him guilty.

In 2006, the Simcoe Reformer published a lengthy article about the Sovereign murders (See Tragedies** Colourful Family Histories / Norfolk History on Rootsweb4), covering much the same research as Daniel Brock, but giving more detail from contemporary newspapers and trial transcripts.

Henry was immediately considered the prime suspect, an article in the Upper Canada Herald says. Constable John Massacer went to the scene of the crime knowing Henry's reputation to become violent when drinking.

As he arrested Henry for murder, Massacer found a bloodied jack knife in Henry's pocket, which Henry claimed was blood from his own wounds (during the trial, Dr. John Crouse said the wounds on Henry's chest were self-inflicted). In a later search of the house, some of Henry's clothing saturated with blood, brain tissue and hair were found.

The transcripts include testimony by my great-great-grandfather John Glover, though the snippet the Reformer quotes is neither dramatic nor revealing. Kind of meh.

Another witness, John Glover, said "the prisoner and his wife did not live happily together," and added Henry "had no quarrel with any person in the neighbourhood."

Sovereign was hung in public in London on August 13 at noon. I have seen accounts that claim up to 3,000 people flocked to enjoy the spectacle, but Daniel Brock says that due to cholera ravaging the city only about a tenth of that number actually turned up (and I trust my cousin’s research).

The St. Thomas Journal described the scene:

To the utter astonishment of the anxious crowd . . . he was found still persisting in his protestations of innocence -- declaring as it were in the open face of time and eternity, that an innocent man was about to die . . . at about half past twelve the drop fell, and there hung between Heaven and earth the body of him who, we believe, were unanimously condemned as deserving death.

I have noticed some of Sovereign’s descendants (descendants of those surviving kids) on genealogical sites wondering where he was buried. Daniel Brock says that the body was handed over for medical dissection and that the remaining bits (according to legend) were buried at the pioneer cemetery in Oakland.

Aside from his lame testimony at the trial, my 2xgreat-grandfather doesn’t seem to figure in the official accounts. But in my mother’s version he is the first to arrive on the murder scene, and Ryerson mentions Mary Margaret Beemer’s “brother” being on there. This might have been her brother-in-law John Moore Glover. In any case, it’s enough to know they were closely related and neighbours. The seven children who died were Elizabeth, Effy, David, Julia, Susan, Job and Polly. Anna, the three-year-old, slept through the murders unnoticed. Three other children were away from home and also survived. John Glover and Rebecca Beemer’s children were first cousins, contemporaries, and playmates. My great-grandfather Jacob Glover5 was only 15 when his cousins were all but wiped out next door.

It’s worth noting the brutal situation of women in this story. Mary Margaret Beemer, Henry Sovereign’s wife, was 39 when he stabbed her to death. She was married around 1809, at the age of 17. She had birthed at least 11 children (11 were alive at the beginning of 1832). The marriage sounds just awful, her husband a drunk, occasionally violent. A pregnancy every other year. Pity her.

I should also make clear that all these people were Americans, refugees from the Thirteen Colonies after the American Revolution, either born in (mostly) New Jersey or the first generation born in Canada after arrival. Most had fought on the British side during the war and found themselves no longer welcome in their former homes. They were given land grants, first on the Niagara Peninsula near Lake Ontario, then in Norfolk County and along the Lake Erie shore (the Long Point Settlement). In 1832, the farms and buildings had only existed for a mere thirty or thirty-five years.

The land they settled was largely empty of people, a hunting ground for the Mississauga, an Algonkian-speaking people who lived for the most part closer to Lake Ontario along the Credit River. The Mississauga themselves were immigrants, newcomers who had drifted down from the Upper Lakes to fill the void left by the Petuns, Hurons, and Attiwandarons (the so-called Neutrals) who had once thrived in numerous villages from Georgian Bay down to the Erie shore before European diseases and invading Seneca warriors blew them away. The Attiwandarons, for the most part, disappeared, survivors joining the upstate New York Iroqois. The Hurons and Petuns, the ones who remained, went west to become the Wyandotte or east to Montreal to seek the protection of the French where they still live.

It is a land steeped in blood and cruelty, dense with phantom peoples and forgotten stories.

Ann McInnes was born in Scotland on November 28, 1834, at Auchteraw Farm near Inverness. So she was just turning 19 when Abiel wrote this letter. Her family had come to Canada in 1837 or 38, when she was perhaps four. At first they lived in a frame house in the village of Vittoria near the shore of Lake Erie, but after her father came into an inheritance in 1845, they moved to a larger place about a mile west of town. They called this house Aberfoyle, and in later times it was notable for the grand piano in the large central hallway. The farms around them were owned by McCalls and Dawsons, and the McInnes daughters married into the neighbourhood.

Abiel McCall was born on December 9, 1831, in his family’s homestead (so he is being a bit cheeky playing the old man to his little girl Annie, being less than three years older). He was descended from a Scottish soldier who fought with James Wolfe at the capture of Quebec, was subsequently demobilized, married (in Philadelphia), and settled in a Scottish community in New Jersey. During the American Revolution, he took the British side, as you might expect from an old soldier, and he and his sons and families left for Canada as refugees. They received extensive land grants in Charlotteville Township (around Vittoria) and prospered and took up arms again against the Americans in the War of 1812. Abiel, born into a more peaceable generation, apprenticed himself to a storekeeper in Vittoria, then branched out on his own, building a store in St. Williams. The carpenters are, in fact, finishing up his store as he writes to Annie.

A note as to direction. Abiel uses “up” and “down” to indicate direction in his letter. It took me a dog’s age to realize that, living by the lake, these people used a kind of nautical language to locate themselves, either up or down the lake. Up the lake is west, towards Windsor and Detroit. Down the lake, is east, toward Buffalo and Niagara. So when Abiel says he is going “down” to see Ann, he means traveling east from St. Williams. (At least I think I got this right.)

Abiel is a bit loose with his periods and capitalizations. Apparently, he had no conception of the paragraph. But his flirty posturing is quite sweet. He went on to become one of those 19th century self-made entrepreneurs, branching out into the timber business, then setting up a planing mill and furniture factory in St. Williams. He would make buying trips to New York and Montreal from time to time. He even owned a share in a lake boat called the Bay Trader. But things began to go south during the Depression of 1873. The factory burned down and was rebuilt. Then burned again (and was rebuilt). He died in 1893 of diabetes at the young age of 61. Ann died in 1900 at the age of 65. The house they built in St. Williams in 1867 remained the center of family life well into the 20th century. My mother had fond memories of spending her summers there with her grandmother and great-aunts.

St. Williams November 3, 1853

don’t be angry at this from you — Abiel

My Dearest Annie,

I received your kind letter today and am very much pleased to think that you had a little spare time to think on a poor fellow like me that has no person to care for him except it is you. You say you hope I had a pleasant ride home on Monday morning well I had for I took it on foot & alone as the girl went to get married. I got up in the morning before five o’clock & walked over to Vittoria before daylight and went to work for an hour when the Captain [Captain Daniel McCall, Daniel’s father] come and I helped load him up with goods and we started but he went so slow that I started on foot and walked all the way home before ten o’clock beating the Captain nearly an hour. I don’t know as I can tell you anything that will interest you as it is out of your Latitude way up here in the woods. I cannot tell yet whether I will be down on Sunday or not if I get a chance you may be sure I will improve it but you must not be disappointed if you do not see me as I have no horse up here and don’t know where to get one. And if I should come down I don’t know as I would dare come to see you for I have been there so much lately I am afraid it will make a talk. but I think I will try it once more and see how it will do and if the folks talk much I will try it again. Dear Annie you must think I am a fool to be writing such nonsense for to take up your valuable time trying to make [out?] but it is your own fault for you said I must write so I thought there was no use writing without I said something and as I never talk a great deal but nonsense I have to put a little in my letter You say that I must burn your letters but I will have to disobey you in that but I will be careful that no person sees them. You can either keep mine or burn them or make curl papers of them just as you think propper [sic] my dear little girl I don’t know how to tease you as I have not got you here to tickle you so I must bother you some other way. I guess I will write you such a long letter that it will make you as mad as you can be before you get halfway through reading it. If Mrs Mc [I think this means his mother, Mrs. McCall, but this is only conjecture] and the intended Mrs D F should come up tomorrow I will send this down with them if not I will send it by the Post on Saturday or Monday. I will save you some tisue [sic] paper if I can find any if I had known it a month ago I could have had a good lot by this time as I have used up a lot for wrapping paper. I have been inquiring for beeswax but I have not got any yet but am in hopes that I can before Mrs. Mc Comes up. Well I guess my yarn is pretty well spun out but if there is anything more comes in my noddle before I send it I will leave a little room for it. I hope you are well for I am as well as can be expected for a man of my years as I am getting old now I can’t expect to feel as well as I used to when I was young like you. If I do not get down on Sunday you can tell Miss [Bell? possibly a sister, Isabella] goodbye for me if you like don’t do it if it will make you blush for I want you to keep all your blushes for me it makes you look very pretty as it is getting late I will wish you good night perhaps I will be wiser in the morning to finish this little note. You sent such an awful long letter that it took me nearly one minute to read you must have used nearly a Quire of paper a bottle of ink & a dozen pens. I must stop soon or I will have to take another piece of paper to sign my name on I have said good night once and then something come in my head and run out at the point of my pen but I will stop soon or else I will not be up before breakfast and if I should lose that I would be cross all day well I must stop and say good night once more before if I don’t you will never get done reading I don’t know what the reason is but I have got a going writing to night [sic] and don’t know when to Stop just the same as when I get down to your place [I] don’t know when to go home but I have got on the last page and will have to go to bed so I will say good I was going to say night but thought I would not just yet as I am not very sleepy but I know you will be before you cipher all this out unless you commence early in the morning and keep at it all day and then you may get done by night. I received a paper from some of the good folks they will please receive my thanks as it is the first paper I have had in months or more. I shall have to got to Hamilton in about a week or ten days for to get some more goods but I am in hopes I will see you before I go if I do not something very extraordinary must happen so I will day good night X I put a full stop there and commenced again I thought I had something to say but have forgotten it again good night. Friday morning as it looks like a fine day I expect Mrs. Mc will be up so I thought I would write a few more lines to let you know that I am alive yet but can’t think of half as much as I could last night the carpenters make such a noise over my head that I cannot think much but I am in hope they will soon be done and then somebody else will have a chance to make a noise but I hope it will not be quite as loud as the carpenters make. I think that I had better stop as my paper is getting pretty near used up and I will either have to take another sheet or begin and cross it. If I don’t come down on Sunday you must write next week about Thursday or Friday if you have time if you have not time why I suppose you cannot. Well I persume [sic] I have bothered you as much as if I had been with you half an hour writing so much nonsense but I know my dear little girl will consider where it come from and forgive me if I will promise not to do it again. I have not been to any more huskings this week I have not been out of sight of the [store?] since Monday morning so you see I as great a runabout as you are I think that I will draw my observations to a close as I am [not?] very good at writing crossways be sure and write if I don’t come down I will answer it that is if you want me to I will now say goodbye until I hear from you or see you and believe me ever yours until death does us part

D A McCall

Tyrone Power was my godfather. Not really my godfather, a sort of a spiritual godfather. He threw the fairy dust that made my father, however briefly, into a leading man, a bon vivant, a catch. He blessed my parents’ marriage, he made me possible.

At the beginning of 1947, my father and mother had not yet met. There was a one-in-a--gazillion chance of my ever coming into existence. The odds were against me. My mother was in Toronto, freshly demobilized after the war, and finishing her undergrad degree in psychology. My father was a farmer near Waterford (in Norfolk County). Winter was his off season, and somehow he colluded with the town doctor, a man named Winston Sutherland, to gallivant off to Mexico for a month at the end of January.

I know little about this trip except for the important bit. They seem to have gone to Mexico City. I have a blurred photo of the Temple of the Moon. But they ended up in Acapulco where they caught sailfish.

Now, you have to imagine this story as three distinct plots, three independently moving parts. There was my mother in Toronto. There was my father in Acapulco with Doc Sutherland. And third, there was the great American movie actor Tyrone Power also in Mexico, filming a romantic adventure movie Captain from Castile (let’s just say it’s about Spanish conquistadors, Indians, the Conquest of Mexico, and would not be made today). Power was filming at various locations, vectoring toward Acapulco where the production was to wrap up in February (Acapulco was going to stand in as Vera Cruz, and the Pacific was going to stand in as the Atlantic). My mother didn’t know about my father and my father didn’t know about her and Tyrone Power didn’t know either of them. But they were all moving in sync, in some mysterious and rather elegant dance.

Then one night my father was having dinner in an Acapulco nightspot with Doc Sutherland. He was tanned and fit and possibly wearing the sombrero he’s wearing in the photo above. I doubt he brought the sailfish with him. There was a mix up. Fate stepped in. The waiter gave Tyrone Power’s dinner to my father (yes, they had managed to get to the same restaurant) and Tyrone got my father’s. My mother told me this story a couple of months after my father died. It was perhaps her way of explaining things, me, the marriage, etc.

Here’s my diary entry from that night. “July 15 1984 Jean was watching Saturday Night at the Movies and there was Tyrone Power and Jean Peters in Captain from Castille. Well it turns out that they were filming this in Acapulco in 1947 when Murray was there. One night the waiters gave Murray Tyrone's dinner by mistake and they met. After that they would chat and have drinks together at the bar.”

Something magical happened. There was Tyrone, the famous movie star in a doublet, and my father, in his sombrero, about the same age, sitting at the bar on the beach at Acapulco, and it gave my father a lift (also he had caught a sailfish, another life-changing experience). He came home to the farm with elan and brio.

Shortly after, March maybe, Murray and Jean met at the Officers' Mess at the Armoury in Simcoe (HQ of the Norfolk regiment; in those days, most everyone had served), and he charmed her (possibly channeling Tyrone). "He was so tanned and handsome," she said.

Two years later, she told the same story to my then girlfriend, still emphasizing that trip to Mexico. “Aug 31 1986 P tells me about a talk she and Jean had about how she and Murray met: How he was just back from Mexico and on a high from that trip, feeling very full of himself, witty, etc.”

So then this happened:

Okay, as it turns out, long before I learned this story, I had a thing aboout Tyrone Power, mainly because of a movie called The Black Rose, which I saw one breathtaking afternoon on our black and white TV.

I liked the movie, of course, because of Tyrone Power’s swashbuckling ways, but mostly because growing up I was pathetically sentimental, and the scene at the end when two taciturn Mongol warriors turn up improbably at the castle in England and deliver Tyrone’s long lost sweetheart (he lost track of her in China, force of circumstance). The camera shifts to the girl (the French actress Cécile Aubry), so excited to see Tyrone (after the problem in China) that she is bouncing on her toes with anticipation.

For an Ontario boy of, say, 13, living on the farm, the vision of Cécile Aubry in Oriental costume bouncing on her toes for love defined the quintessence of romance, what I have been looking for ever since.

This led me to read the book, The Black Rose, a novel by Thomas B. Costain, a writer who happened to have been born in Brantford, just fifteen miles north of the farm. Costain was a best seller of popular historical romances, a cross between Walter Scott and G. A. Henty, and really hard to read today. I read several Costain novels, hoping to recapture the Cécile Aubry moment. This never happened. But reading those historical romances may have had a side effect when it came to my own historical novels, Elle and The Life and Times of Captain N. Both are about as anti-romantic as you can get. Anti-Costain. Anti-Tyrone Power. Who can understand the reversals of the heart and mind? What I loved as a boy morphed into its opposite when I turned to writing.

But still, once again, thank you, Tyrone.

The last little nugget I can draw from this obscure story is that Jay Silverheels, the Canadian actor famous for playing Tonto in the Lone Ranger TV series, also appeared in Captain from Castile. This surprised me, as most things do. He is not credited (he didn’t receive credit for most of his movie work). He played a character called Coatl. I think he’s meant to be an Aztec. Luckily, Jay Silverheels (not his real name) had a sense of humor about being an Indian actor having to play pretend Indians all the time (and not getting credit).1

If you remember a couple of substacks ago I included a Norfolk County map that showed the Six Nations Iroquois Reserve in the northeast corner, maybe four miles from our farm. Jay Silverheels was born and raised on the Reserve, a neighbor almost. So really Mexico at that time, February, 1947, was just packed with Canadians from Norfolk County, and they all knew Tyrone Power.

I really don’t know what to make of this.

My own brush with Hollywood was minimal. In 1979, I was an extra in the Michael Douglas movie Running. It is a truly awful movie about a hapless marathon runner who falls down at the Olympics and limps to the finish last but is somehow triumphant. I am in the scene meant to represent the start of the Olympic trials. I tried to stand as close as I could to Douglas, and kind friends have said they were able to spot me, though I never have. Somewhere in that sea of faces is me, but I can’t find him.

M, my partner, says she saw this movie when she was very young and that’s probably why she fell for me, some unconscious deep memory of me on the movie screen came back to her when she met the real me, and she saw…Tyrone Power.

This is a good metaphor for life, I think. Nothing but chance, coincidence, and really bad movies, which, only afterward, begins to look like Fate.

I am still under the gun for deadlines, so this will be light and short.

Because of the research I have been doing for a book, I now get regular little email “hints” from Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org about possible family members or records relating to them. Inevitably, this leads me to sorting through my notes and reminding myself of things I already knew but have forgotten. So just now I stumbled on some notes my mother took after she discovered the still-living daughter of great-uncle Pierce Glover. This was Anna Cora Glover, who had married a man named Hendershott, and lived in the nearby village of Wilsonville1. Anna Cora still owned several pieces of furniture her father had built. “Oh, they all made things,” she said, speaking of the Glovers.

I knew this in a general sort of way, having grown up amid other bits of furniture and the family legends. By the mid-1800s, the Glovers were mostly clustered in farms near the hamlets of Windham Centre, Vanessa, and Scotland. My great-grandfather Jacob Glover (1817-1899) was a farmer, carpenter, and cabinet maker. He built the Methodist (later United) Church in Vanessa, where he and my parents are buried, along with masses of other relatives. The building was destroyed in the tornado of 1979 and rebuilt out of brick. The brick version was condemned at some point, and lay unused for years. The last time I was in the church was the day of my father’s funeral in 1984. My mother’s interment ceremony took place outside.2

I have a wooden box full of Jacob’s woodworking tools, forged in Auburn, New York. He built the tall pine, white-painted wardrobe in my parents’ bedroom, where my mother’s dresses used to hang, redolent still of their scent. There is also a pine utility cabinet he built, used for storing games and toys.

But the prize Jacob Glover relic is a little black rocking horse named Rainbow that he built for my grandfather Herschel Glover (1871-1945). As long as I can remember it has stood in what we always called the “big living room” and generations of kids have ridden him. Norfolk County in the 19th century was well-known for its furniture-makers, books have been written about them, but Jacob Glover’s name has never been mentioned3. He was a stealth craftsman.

Besides Jacob’s work, we have several bits and pieces of furniture that descend from my mother’s side, the McCalls of St. Williams, who owned McCall and Company4, an impressive woodworking factory on Queen Street. It was founded by Daniel Abiel McCall (1831-1893), my great-great-grandfather, a shopkeeper’s apprentice-turned-entrepreneur.

Daniel McCall didn’t build things himself, but he accumulated a team of fine woodworkers, many artists in their own right. One was a man named Curley Wolven. We have a little Curley Wolven table in the “big living room,” carved from a single round of walnut, scalloped around the edges, and signed underneath.

But most of the McCall pieces are anonymous. My mother would say, “That came from the factory.” They are scattered around the house where I grew up, mostly unnoticed by me at the time and often coming to grief in spectacular ways due to the presence of small boys. (Once, I brought a lovely McCall chair and matching ottoman to live with me. But after Jonah broke its leg5, I took the ottoman back to the farmhouse to be restored and protected. Even Rainbow is not what he once was.)

What is most fascinating about this ottoman is that it’s a copy of piece of Scottish furniture brought to Canada by my great-great-great-grandfather Andrew McInnes (1809-1891). Andrew immigrated in 1836, but he made one extended trip back to Scotland in 1847 to secure an inheritance, so I am not sure when he brought the furniture. More than likely it was the 1847 trip when he had some spare cash. I like to imagine him racing around Edinburgh, shopping for chairs and tables and the grand piano that always stood in the spacious central hall of their home in Canada. He had wealthy aunts, uncles, and cousins whose style he no doubt wished to emulate.

The McInneses settled in Vittoria, in the midst of McCall country. The families intermarried (Daniel Abiel McCall married Annie McInnes, one of the daughters; his cousin Alexander married another), and the McCalls adopted several pieces of McInnes furniture as models for the factory. This was as per the usual colonial settlement pattern. Newcomers tried to replicate their former homes; high style and taste emanated from the Old World.

Here is another McInnes-McCall pair, a so-called slipper chair.

There is more to tell, but I’ll stop for now. After my mother died, I had a dealer come in an evaluate the furniture for insurance purposes. Not surprisingly, it was not worth much. The fad for collecting has passed, houses are smaller, and apartments are better served by Ikea products. But this evaluation only threw into relief the different ways people value objects. These bits of furniture are more valuable as mnemonic devices, objects to tell stories with, than they are on the market. A sobering thought, as memories fade.

More than that, it’s just something to be in the presence of a past that you can identify and imagine. So and so made this rocking horse, rested in this chair, served tea on this table, lived their lives among the objects, just as I do today. We are not so far apart after all.

1

Here’s a map to help you visualize where all this is. We’re in Norfolk County, Ontario, along the north shore of Lake Erie, pretty much due north of Erie, PA. The Glovers settled in Windham Township at the north end, the area circled in light blue. The farm where I grew up is just outside the blue line, a red star marks the spot. Notice how close we are to the Six Nations Iroquois Reserve in the upper right corner of the map. Nearer the lake, stretching from Vittoria, where Andrew McInnes settled, to St. Williams, is the area settled by the McCalls and McInneses. The McCalls and Glovers (and the Iroquois) were United Empire Loyalists who left the United States (New Jersey, to be precise) after the American Revolution. The Glovers were New Connexion Methodists and Congregationalists. The McCalls were Scots, descended from a Highland soldier who fought with Wolfe at the Battle of Quebec in 1759.

As if by fate, my mother and father met exactly between the two familial homelands, at the Officer’s Mess in Simcoe after the Second World War. I like to think of them as two sturdy veterans decompressing at the bar suddenly noticing one another and thinking…

3

My cousin William Yeager published the definitive book on Norfolk County furniture makers. The Cabinetmakers of Norfolk County, The Norfolk Historical Society/Fanshawe College, 1976.

This is a text I originally posted on my magazine site Numéro Cinq. It has more context here at Out & Back and might therefore find a better audience. Or not. I have, for example, published here some of the essays and stories I wrote based on Norfolk County and St. Williams stories, some derived from quotations included in this collection. I have linked to those posts at the bottom.

My mother’s forebears, McCalls and McInnises, settled in the cradle of Long Point Bay on the north shore of Lake Erie in the 1790s and early 1800s. I grew up about 20 miles away, still in Norfolk County, at the edge of the Great Norfolk Sand Plain about a 200 metres from a long low hill, the remnants of the Great Galt Moraine, a glacial deposit left at the end of the last Ice Age. (There is something about growing up around geological features called “Great” that tends to inspire delusions of grandeur.) I was raised on tales of the old days from my mother and grandmother, stories that infected me with the family collecting mania and a fanciful feel for the countryside which to me is steeped in drama, blood, superstition and comedy. Over the years I’ve been gathering a library of texts about Long Point and Norfolk County.

I have used Norfolk County folklore and history in several pieces of fiction and nonfiction. “A Flame, a Burst of Light” is short story about prisoners of war returning from a disastrous prison camp in Ohio in 1814. It was originally published in The New Quarterly and is included in my book of stories Savage Love. “The Sun Lord and the Royal Child” is a short story about the scandalous behaviour of archaeologists, the Neutral, and the Southwold Earthworks. It was originally published in Ninth Letter and reprinted in Savage Love. “Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm’s Mills (now Oakland, Ontario, November 6, 1814″ is about the 1814 battle. You can find it in my book A Guide to Animal Behaviour. “Turned into a Horse by Witches” is about Dr. Troyer, the famous Long Point witch doctor, and is also in A Guide to Animal Behaviour. And, of course, some of the scenes in my novel The Life and Times of Captain N. take place on the Lake Erie shoreline. The character Hendrick Nellis is based on the real Hendrick Nelles. The character Mary Hunsacker is based on Mary Sitts who is buried in the pioneer cemetery in Boston (Norfolk County).

Here is a brief version, something to give you a taste of the mystery and beauty of the place. The order is roughly chronological, but for emphasis and poetry I have slipped elements in where they don’t belong. The texts by various McCalls and McInnises are family documents.

A Geography of the Soul

Just off Grubb Reef the wheelsman turns the ship fourteen degrees more to the southeast to clear the Southeast Shoal Light which stands on the reef formed by Point Pelee as it slopes down into the lake. Once safely round this point, the ship sails out into the open lake, and heads northeast (the course is ENE 1/8 E) straight across the middle of the lake for Long Point, 133 miles away. Lake Erie, Harlan Hatcher.

Viewed from a distance the Point appears as an attenuated tree-clad fringe on the horizon. The great outer portion is almost uninhabited, for as yet no road penetrates its wild seclusion. George Laidler, “Long Point, Lake Erie: Some Physical and Historical Aspects.”

On de Gallinée’s map of 1670 this spit is grossly indicated and named “Peninsula of Lake Erie” (Coyne, 1902). On a map dated 1763 (Charlevoix, 1766) it is indicated as “Long Pt.” Later it was known as “North Foreland” (Smyth, 1799). The peninsula is now generally known as Long Point. L. L. Snyder, “A Faunal Investigation of Long Point and Vicinity, Norfolk County, Ontario”, Contribution No. 4, Royal Ontario Museum of Zoology, Transactions of the Royal Canadian Institute, 1932.

The interpreter Etienne Brulé is believed to be the first White to have contacted the Neutral. This probably occured in 1615-16 when he accompanied a party of Huron journeying to seek military aid from the Andastes in Pennsylvania against the Onondaga. The Hood Site: A Historic Neutral Town of 1640 A.D. National Museum of Man Mercury Series Paper No. 121.

From Haldimand county westward the shore of Lake Erie takes them form of three big scallops with as many big sand spits at the apexes. The centre of the scallops are marked by high bluffs which are constantly shifting inland. Conversely the spits are gradually extending farther out into the lake using the sand made available by the erosion of the shore.

It is not surprising to find the longest of these spits built off the shore in Norfolk county opposite the great Norfolk sand plain; Long Point, as it is called, is built from the west at the eastern apex of the biggest scallop. A smaller spit built from the east is growing out to meet it, threatening to confine a section of the lake that even now is called Inner Bay. The conformation of Long Point is clearly apparent from a map. It is fabricated loosely from a succession of sand bars which run at an angle to the long axis of the spit. Marsh or open water appears between the bars. The Physiography of Southern Ontario, L. J. Chapman and D. F. Putnam.

The presence of pre-ceramic sites in Ontario has been established. On typological grounds, as well as characteristics of sites, there appear to be at least two branches or, possibly, time levels involved. In the Lake Erie periphery are small sites, usually located on high clay knolls and at elevations of 775 feet or higher. On such sites the emphasis is upon scrapers, with very few projectile points. A Preliminary Report on an Archaeological Survey of Southwestern Ontario for 1950, Thomas E. Lee.

The first aborigines to occupy southwestern Ontario were probably Mound-Building Indians who had reached their peak chiefly in Ohio and had trickled from there into the peninsula about the time of Christ. They were a people of high culture. Though no mounds attributed to them have so far been found in Norfolk County, nevertheless many of their artifacts have been found there. These people disappeared just as mysteriously as they had originated. “The Indian History of St. Williams” (unpublished typescript), Clayton McCall, 1960.

When they reached Lake Erie, they saw it tossing like an angry ocean. They had no mind to tempt the dangerous and unknown navigation, and encamped for the winter in the forest near the peninsula called the Long Point. Here they gathered a good store of chestnuts, hickory-nuts, plums, and grapes, and built themselves a log cabin, with a recess at the end for an altar. They passed the winter unmolested, shooting game in abundance, and saying mass three times a week. Early in spring, they planted a large cross, attached to it the arms of France, and took formal possession of the country in the name of Louis XIV. This done, they resumed their voyage, and, after many troubles, landed one evening in a state of exhaustion on or near Point Pelee, towards the western extremity of Lake Erie. La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, Francis Parkman.

We slept that night on the bank of this river, about two leagues from its mouth, and it was at this place [Walsingham Swamp] that (we heard toward the east voices that seemed to us to be the voices of men calling to each other. We ran to the river bank to see if it was not our men looking for us, and at the same time) we heard the same voices on the south side. We turned our heads in that direction, but at last were undeceived, hearing them at the same time toward the west, which gave us to understand that it was the phenomenon commonly called the hunting of Arthur. [Next day they cross Big Creek and drop down to Long Point.] Narrative of de Bréhant de Gallinée, Easter, 1670.

N.B. This is fascinating. In 1670, they observe in the skies above Norfolk, evidence of the legendary Arthur’s Hunt, a mainstay of European myth since the Dark Ages. -dg

Probably the best known site long considered to be Neutral was called the “Southwold Earthwork,” located about seven miles north of Port Stanley…Its leading physical characteristic was its “walled” construction, and when an ossuary was found there, it seemed further to fit into the Neutral pattern. The Neutral Indians, A Source Book, Gordon K. Wright.

The location of the Indian villages near the north shore of Lake Erie, and the absence of any indication of the Thames River, coupled with its fairley accurate knowledge of the Lake Erie tributaries, would seem to point to a highway of Indian travel, nearly coinciding with the present Talbot Road, — which latter, as we are told by early settlers, followed an Indian trail. (Cf. Mitchell’s map of 1756 or 1757, and Galinée’s Journal.) N. D. des Anges, Alexis, St. Joseph, and St. Michel would be all on or near this main trail, except the first, which would be on the trail from Brantford to Port Dover. According to Sanson’s map, Alexis coincides with the Southwold Earthwork; it is the only village on the map answering the description of Tsohahissen’s village. “The Country of the Neutrals from Champlain to Talbot,” James H. Coyne

We coasted along the North Coast of the Lake of Erie, being favour’d by the Calms. Upon the brink of this Lake we frequently saw flocks of fifty or sixty Turkeys, which run incredibly fast upon the Sands: and the Savages of our Company kill’d great numbers of ’em, which they gave to us in exchange for the Fish that we catch’d. The 25th [August, 1687] we arrived at a long point of Land which shoots out 14 or 15 leagues into the Lake; and the heat being excessive, we chose to transport our Boats and Baggage two hundred paces over-land, rather than coast for about thirty-five Leagues. Baron Lahontan, 1687.

Drive along the backroads of the Carolinian zone, hemmed in by Lakes Huron and Ontario along its ends, and Lake Erie to the south, and at first the woods may not strike you as all that different from those further north. Sugar maple and beech are common, and other familiar species such as basswood, ash, and oak occur in abundance as well. But look a little closer, and you begin to see other trees — sassafras, tulip tree, pawpaw, red mulberry, sour gum, wild crab. Some species, with names like cucumber tree and Kentucky coffee tree, seem very much out of place in the Canadian arboreal roster, for their main distribution ranges far to the south, even reaching to the Gulf of Mexico.

Look at the shrub layer and you see even more southern specialties — stoneroot, running strawberry bush, wild yam vine, bittersweet, and bladdernut. And as Paul Catling of Agriculture Canada points out, the southern flavour adds spice to other plant groups as well, even sedges and grasses, and aquatic plants such as yellow lotus…

This distinctive vegetation also affects the wildlife of the Carolinian zone. Several birds reach the northern limit of their breeding range here, including Acadian flycatcher, Carolina wren, blue-grey gnatcatcher, red-bellied woodpecker, and yellow-breasted chat. Bill Judd of London, a naturalist who has explored the woods of that area for decades, reports that over 50 species of insects and spiders are restricted in Canada to the Carolinian zone. Even fish are affected by the climatic factors that control the vegetation — southern species such as green sunfish and lake chubsucker reach their Ontario limits in this region.

From the cattail marshes and sandy spits of the Lake Erie shoreline through the hardwood swamps and arid dunes of the townships further inland, Carolinian Canada presents a diversity of habitats, all sharing a southern affinity. But it is from the trees that the name Carolinian is derived. Originally the term was applied to the forests of the coastal zone along the Carolinas; then, in his 1898 classification of U.S. life zones, C. H. Merriam extended the zone into southern Ontario. The term is now seldom applied to the broad belt of eastern deciduous forest that stretches between the Appalachians and the Mississippi valley; it is only in Ontario that its common use has continued. Ron Reid, “Exploring Canada’s Deep South,” Seasons, Summer, 1985.

The Louisiana of today is but a single State of the American republic. The Louisiana of La Salle stretched from the Alleghenies to the Rocky Mountains: from the Rio Grande and the Gulf to the farthest springs of the Missouri. The boundaries are laid down in the great map of Franquelin, made in 1684, and preserved in the Depot des Cartes of the Marine. The line runs along the south shore of Lake Erie… Parkman.

The true Iroquois, or Five Nations, extended through Central New York, from the Hudson to the Genesee. Southward lay the Andastes, on and near the Susquehanna; westward, the Eries, along the southern shore of Lake Erie, and the Neutral Nationa, along its northern shore from Niagara towards Detroit; while the towns of the Hurons lay near the lake to which they have left their name. The Jesuits in North American, Francis Parkman.

The Attiwandaron occupied that part of southwestern Ontario which lies south of an imaginary line drawn from Goderich on Lake Huron to Oakville on Lake Ontario. In addition they had four frontier villages east of the Niagara River and claimed a small area west of Lake St. Clair. A recapitulation of various early estimates of the Attiwandaron population shows that 35,000 is the most likely figure.

In 1640, when the first overall attempt to evangelize the Attiwandaron was made by the sending of Fathers Brebeuf and Chaumont from Huronia, a journey of six days was required to reach the nearest village. The two priests put the total of Attiwandaron villages at 40…

In Ragueneau’s Relation of 1644 it is recorded that in the previous year the Attiwandaron threw 2,000 of their warriors into the lands of the Mascoutin beyond the Detroit River. They captured a large town and raided the country. 800 captives were dragged home. Yet in the winter of 1650-51 — following the destruction of the Petuns and Hurons in 1648-49 — the Five Nations of the Iroquois were able to completely annihilate the Attiwandaron by throwing 1,400 picked warriors against them. Clayton McCall.

The Attiwandaron (“people with speech a little different” as they were termed by their kin the Hurons) formed the van of the Iroquois migration that first entered Canada, via the Detroit River circa 1200 A.D. (an apparently accurate estimate of the period by Parker the historian). They were the mother nation of the Iroquois, and were so well satisfied with the peninsula that they chose it as their permanent home. The Petuns and Hurons to the northward (from and including the Bruce Peninsula to Lake Simcoe), the Five Nations of the Iroquois in what is now New York State and the Iroquois tribes temporarily living along the St. Lawrence in Cartier’s time were all offshoots. As the professional archaeologists in Canada still have the obsession that all the aborigines of this country are the descendants of primitive Siberian tribes who crossed over to North America via Bering Strait, they have made practically no effort to find a different origin for the Iroquois. But the Smithsonian Institution (of Washington, D.C.) has shown that the earliest known Iroquoian sites are in Arkansas, and that slightly later ones are in Missouri, Indiana and Ohio. This would indicate a northern thrust for corn-growing areas — corn having been considered of the utmost importance by the Iroquois (in its parched state having been the ‘iron rations’ that enabled the Five Nations of the Iroquois alone to conquer more territory than did the ancient Romans). My study of the ‘horned-serpent’ legends of the Iroquois has positively convinced me that the Iroquois came northward from Mexico. Furthermore it is my opinion that they could be the lost Toltec who are known to have disappeared from Mexico in 1064 A.D. McCall.

In 1625 Brulé returned to Neutral territory and lived there until the following year, visiting the towns west of the Niagara River, but probably not those east of the river. The Neutral Indians, A Source Book, Gordon K. Wright.

Journeying southward five days from the Tionnontate towns, the forest traveller reached the border villages of the Attiwandarons, or Neutral Nation. As early as 1626, they were visited by the Franciscan friar, La Roche Daillon, who reports as numerous population in twenty-eight towns, besides small hamlets. Their country, about forty leagues in extent, embraced wide and fertile districts on the north shore of Lake Erie… Parkman.

Attiwandarons, Attiwendaronk, Atirhagenrenrets, Rhagenratka (Jesuit Relations), Attionidarons (Sagard). Parkman.

Still a different concept of the early days of the Neutrals is to be found in the traditional story of them. According to tradition, they were the parent member of the Huron-Iroquois stock, since it was a Neutral maternal family which transmitted the title of “Mother of Nations” — “Djigohsahse,” who was said to be the lineal descendant of the first woman on earth.

Although the Jesuits recorded that the Erie Nation was known as the Nation of the Cat, it is interesting to note that Morgan learned from the Iroquois of his day that the Neutral Nation had long been known to them as the Cat Nation. Morgan wrote: “It is a singular fact that the Neuter Nation, who dwelt on the banks of the Niagara River, and who were expelled by the Iroquois about the year 1643, was known among them as the Je-go-sa-sa, or Cat Nation. The word signifies ‘a wild cat’: and, from being the name of a woman of great influence among them, it came to be the name of the nation.”

At two days’ journey from them [the Cheveux Releves or High Hairs or Ottawas] in a southerly direction, there is also another tribe of savages, who produce a great quantity of tobacco. These are called the Neutral nation; they number four thousand warriors and inhabit a district westward of the lake of the Onondagas from eighty to a hundred leagues in extent. These however assist the Cheveux-releves against the Fire People, but as between the Iroquois and our tribe they are at peace and remain neutral. Samuel Champlain, Works.

The bedrock that underlies this part of Ontario is some of the youngest in the province, dating from only 500 million to 350 million years ago. The older shales and limestones surface along the Niagara Escarpment, but the bedrock is exposed in only a few other places, notably on Pelee Island and at the Oriskany sandstone site west of Cayuga. Beneath the glacial debris that covers most of the zone are bands of sedimentary rocks, rich in nutrients that give rise to fertile soils.

The tracks of recent glaciation were left be a series of advances into the Ohio valley over the last million years. As the final set of glaciers withdrew from southern Ontario about 12,000 to 14,000 years ago, it did not move smoothly. Instead, it split along the central highlands of southwestern Ontario and withdrew in two main lobes — one in Lake Huron, the other in Lake Erie. The Erie lobe actually retreated in a southeasterly direction, melting back from the highlands into the Lake Erie basin. Where the glacier hesitated, it left a series of parallel moraines along its front. These moraines now form low hills in the central section of the Carolinian zone, as well as in a few other isolated spots.

As the glacier melted, it released enormous quantities of water, which pooled in a series of glacial lakes. The westerly counties of Essex, Kent, and Lambton were covered for a time by Lake Whittlesey, which smoothed the ridges of the till and deposited clay in the hollows. Later, glacial Lake Warren covered almost all the Carolinian zone, forming the clay plains of Wentworth as the fine suspended sediments settled out of its murky waters. Where the rushing waters entered these lakes, sand deltas were built up, which created the sand plains now found in Norfolk and eastern Kent counties.

As the glaciers ploughed their ponderous way to and fro over Canada, the vegetation patterns followed, retreating southwards before the ice, surging north again in periods of warmth. Fossils of 100,000 year old trees and other vegetation found in the sand beds atop the Don Valley brickyard in central Toronto show that Carolinian species existed in Ontario in the final mild period between glaciers. But at the time of the last glacier, most of these species had retreated to warmer climes of Alabama. Nor did they return immediately, for the first colonizers of the newly created landforms were the grasses and sedges of a tundra community, soon followed by a forest dominated by spruce. In this habitat, mastodons and woolly mammoths roamed. Fossils of these giant elephant-like beasts have been found in close to 80 locations in Ontario, all in the Carolinian zone or just to the north. Reid.

Scholars have not previously recognized or fully appreciated the magnitude and complexity of historic Neutral Iroquois society. Indeed, in comparison to the extensive research paid to the Hurons and to the League Iroquois, the Neutrals, who were once the largest early 17th century Iroquoian grouping, variously have been downplayed, misinterpreted, or even ignored altogether. “Tsouharissen’s Chiefdom: An Early Historic 17th Century Neutral Iroquoian Ranked Society,” W. C. Noble, Canadian Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 9 (No.2) 1985.

Yet this people were abundantly ferocious, and, while holding a pacific attitude betwixt their warring kindred, waged deadly strife with the Mascoutins, an Algonquin horde beyond Lake Michigan. Indeed, it was but recently that they had been at blows with seventeen Algonquin tribes. They burned female prisoners, a practice unknown to the Hurons. Their country was full of game, and they were bold and active hunters. In form and stature they surpassed even the Hurons, whom they resembled in their mode of life, and from whose language their own, though radically similar, was dialectically distinct. Their licentiousness was even more open and shameless; and they stood alone in the extravagance of some of their usages. They kept their dead in their houses till they became insupportable; then scraped the flesh from the bones, and displayed them in rows along the walls, there to remain till the periodical Feast of the Dead, or general burial. In summer, the men wore no clothing whatsoever, but were generally tattooed from head to foot with powdered charcoal…

Southward and eastward of Lake Erie dwelt a kindred peoople, the Eries, or “Nation of the Cat.” Little besides their existence is known of them. They seem to have occupied southwestern New York, as far east as the Genessee, the frontier of the Senecas, and in habits and language to have resembled the Hurons. They were noted warriors, fought with poisoned arrows, and were long a terror to the neighboring Iroquois. Parkman.

This tradition, apparently, can be traced back to about 1625 A.D., the year Etienne Brulé visited there. Brulé, so near as we know, was the first European to visit the area and to be entertained by the Neutral Indians who lived there at the time. Although the details of Brulé’s visit were never recorded, relationships must have been reasonably cordial, for shortly after his visit, one of the local damsels bore him a daughter. By the time she reached her early 20s the girl had attained some prominence in the community. She had become what a less strident age would have called a medicine man; and at her early death, when she was buried in the village cemetery…, the tools of her profession were buried with her. Three of the sucking tubes which she used in the curing ceremonies were carefully placed in the grave, just above her left shoulder…

For example, Grave No. 9 contained the bodies of 57 individuals — 26 adults and 31 sub-adults. One of the adult females, incidentally, was the medicine woman mentioned above, whom we suspect might be the daughter of Etienne Brulé. All that we really know, of course, is that that timing is right, and that she is half-European. For the gross morphology of her skull — that is, its general appearance — is distinctly European, while her dentition, with equal assurance, is Indian. Grave furniture for No. 9 consisted of seven sucking tubes, four turtle shell rattles, four clay vessels, one antler comb, two lumps of red ochre, some animal bones which probably had some ritual significance, 20 copper beads, 274 shell beads and 421 glass beads. “Some Bones of Contention”, W. A. Kenyon.

The immediate post 1638-40 smallpox period saw the Neutral Iroquois population depleted by half, and perhaps as much as two-thirds. Noble.

The term Neutralia, which was coined in St. John’s, Newfoundland,in 1972, replaces the name Attiwandaronia coined by Harris in 1895… Noble.

The Indians, it is well known, ascribe mysterious and supernatural powers to the insane, and respect them accordingly. The Neutral Nation was full of pretended madmen, who raved about the villages, throwing firebrands, and making other displays of frenzy. Parkman.

Demons in troops appeared before him [Brebeuf], sometimes in the guise of men, sometimes as bears, wolves, or wild-cats. He called on God, and the apparitions vanished. Death, like a skeleton, sometimes menaced him, and once, as he faced it with an unquailing eye, it fell powerless at his feet. A demon, in the form of a woman, assailed him with the temptation which beset St. Benedict among the rocks of Subiaco; but Brebeuf signed the cross, and the infernal siren melted into air. He saw the vision of a vast and gorgeous palace; and a miraculous voice assured him that such was to be the reward of those who dwelt in savage hovels for the cause of God. Angels appeared to him; and more than once St. Joseph and the Virgin were visibly present before his sight. Once, when he was among the Neutral Nation, in the winter of 1640, he beheld the ominous apparition of a great cross slowly approaching from the quarter where lay the country of the Iroquois. He told the vision to his comrades.

“What was it like? How large was it?” they eagerly demanded. “Large enough,” replied the priest, “to crucify us all.” Parkman.

“Last summer,” writes Lalement in 1643, “two thousand warrior of the Neutral Nation attacked a town of the Nation of Fire, well fortified with a palisade, and defended by nine hundred warriors. They took it after a siege of ten days; killed many on the spot; and made eight hundred prisoners, men, women, and children. After burning seventy of the best warriors, they put out the eyes of the old men, and cut away their lips, and then left them to drag out a miserable existence. Behold the scourge that is depopulating all this country!” Parkman.

Their turn was now come, and their victims found fit avengers; for no sooner were the Hurons broken and dispersed, then the Iroquois, without waiting to take breath, turned their fury on the Neutrals. At the end of the autumn of 1650, they assaulted and took one of their chief towns, said to have contained at the time more than sixteen hundred men, besides women and children; and early in the following spring they took another town. The slaughter was prodigious, and the victors drove back troops of captives for butchery or adoption. It was the death-blow of the Neutrals. They abandoned their cornfields and villages in the wildest terror, and dispersed themselves abroad in forests which could not yield sustenance to such a multitude. They perished by the thousands, and from that time forward the nation ceased to exist. Parkman.

…In his letter to a friend in Angers, written on July 18, 1627 from the Huron Bear tribe village of Toanchain and after his three-month stay in Neutralia, Recollet monk Joseph de la Roche recorded: “This man [Tsouharissen] is the chief of the greatest credit and authority that has ever been in all these nations…It is unexampled in the other nations to have a chief so absolute. He acquired this honour and power by his courage, and by having been many times at war against seventeen nations who are their enemies…” Noble.

At this juncture, certain sections of the traditional oral account can be introduced. It has been remembered that Tsouharissen was an only child of the respected and renowned woman Tahinya, who died shortly after his birth. Although of noble lineage and the highest ranking turtle clan, he was reared as a commoner. Early in his childhood Tsouharissen exhibited special talents, including an edetic memory, adult knowledge, a quick inquiring mind, and intuitive abilities. It is remembered that when he was asked as a child what his spirit wanted, he replied, “I want to know how the Sun comes to me in the morning — I wish to have a piece of the Sun to carry with me always.” This astonishing request was finally fulfilled when Tsouharissen was introduced to the elderly, renowned Cherokee priest-chief Tsouhahachonka who came north to see this boy wonder and arrange for his religious training. Eventually, the child-man guided the elderly priest as instructive companion on a journey northward (probably Lake Superior), where: “on the eastern face of a mountain top, at the first rays of the rising sun, he cracked open the rock face and a piece of pure crystal glass fell to the ground. The child picked it up, and it is said that when he held it up to the Sun, sparks flew from his hand. The priest bowed to this child-man — this one with the memory — this leader of the people. The priest bowed to the holiness of the reincarnate of the Sun Creator.” (Anonymous 1983-84)

After his years of religious training, Tsouharissen became an all-powerful warrior-priest-chief of his people. The oral account clearly indicates that the Neutrals did not dissociate the concepts of priest and chief in him, and the honorific title of Tsouh signifies his high priestly status. His name, arissen, means “the Sun’s Child.” Noble.

The oral tradition relates that Tsouharissen had multiple, concurrent wives: his first three were politically ascribed marriages, while the fourth was a genuine matter of love (Anonymous 1983-84). The first wife, a local Neutral lady of the highest ranked turtle lineage, bore him one male child and two females, but none showed exceptional abilities. The second wife was a Cherokee woman renowned for her “fleetness of foot,” and she bore him two female children. The third wife, an Algonkian from northern Ontario, was blessed with a remarkably retentive memory and intuitive abilities; she had two daughters. Tsouharissen’s fourth wife was a beautiful young Tuscarora lady whom he brought to Neutralia in late spring, 1641, after the Jesuit departure. This wife gave birth to a daughter, born in the same winter month (January) as Tsouharissen; she became his favourite child, and when she exhibited intellectual, intuitive, and religious abilities, Tsouharissen chose this youngest daughter to succeed him as paramount Neutral chief, just as his own female cousin had been chief of the Cherokee (Anonymous 1983-84).

It is recounted that Tsouharissen’s first wife became so jealous of the fourth wife and the intended succession that she murdered the youngest daughter. In total grief and embarrassment, the fourth wife went into the woods and committed suicided. Enraged and grief-stricken at this atrocious act, witnessed by some men returning from a hunt for new born deer, Tsouharissen assembled and put to death the first wife, all her family, her brothers and sisters, their husbands and wives and their brothers and sisters and all their children. The entire royal lineage was eliminated…

Cyclical instability associated with succession has been noted to be a chronic problem in many chiefdoms, and the historic Neutral Iroquois case serves to underline the fragility and importance such matters have for successful perpetuation of a chiefdom. In this case, Tsouharissen’s tragic domestic affairs fragmented and destroyed what might otherwise have become an ongoing powerful native social order. As it was, the Neutral chiefdom finally collapsed in 1653 at the hands of the League Iroquois, some seven years after Tsouharissen’s probable death in 1646. Noble.

After the expulsion of the Neutrals, what had been their country remained an unpeopled wilderness, being described on the French maps as “the Iroquois beaver ground.” Owen.

While it is true that the Great Lakes are tideless they may be regarded as inland seas because of the immense areas they present to stormy winds. Over long periods they are subject to fluctuations in level of several feet, chiefly owing to variation in the annual rainfall. This variation, the contour of the coastline, the strong winds and the currents that they produce account for extensive erosion at some places and the emergence of land at others. Currents sufficiently strong will carry sand and gravel in suspension and deposit it when retarded by shallow waters or a projection of the land. The gradual accumulation of sand borne by wind and water will give rise to shoals and beaches further along.

In course of time shore processes reduce the smaller irregularities and tend to straighten old shorelines by building spits out from the land and bars across bays, thus gradually closing them with a nearly continuous barrier beach of loose waste. A relatively abrupt change in shoreline direction turns a longshore current out into the lake and forms a flying spit. At first the bar is narrow and ridge-like, then it lengthens and broadens. As the apex advances into deeper water its progress is slower, so giving time and opportunity for storms to modify its extremity. In general the apex tends to turn inwards because of currents from the deeper water offshore. The broadening and hooking encloses a number of lagoons between the inner bars that are built up at successive intervals. These dry up and in time become covered with drifting and deposited waste.

When streams from adjacent uplands flow into the waters on the inner side of a spit its growth on that side is materially aided. Silt and debris discharged into a lake or bay will distribute most of its coarse deposit along the shore. Nearly all the fine will be carried out and settle in deeper water. Waste deposited below the wave base will gradually accumulate in front of the mouth of the stream and build up a shallower level. This forms a suitable bed for the growth of marsh grass, bullrushes and other freshwater plants, usually taking the form of a delta. Their thickening roots become a matted and tangled mass that holds sand and mud carried by the water, whose reduced circulation is sufficient for a time to encourage the growth and extension of the grasses. The intervening water courses gradually become narrower and more sluggish as they are encroached upon by the grasses and the sediment deposited by the waves and high water. Later they disappear, leaving ponds here and there, and when the water level recedes they become dry land.

Sand blown forward from a beach will gather into drifts like waves and ridges a short distance from the water’s edge. These dunes sometimes present a cliff-like face. Strong inshore winds create an updraft in front while the air above the crest blows almost horizontally. Near the edge, where the drafts meet, vortical whirls rotating inwards are produced and cause the conveyed sand to accumulate close behind. Sand dune slowly overwhelm the marshes and woodlands on the lee side or earlier-built portions of bar or spit. George Laidler, “Long Point, Lake Erie: Some Physical and Historical Aspects”.

This version is taken from a book also unnamed, written by a Detroit Wyandot, P. D. Clarke, who is said to have obtained most of his information from an old woman of the Big Turtle clan of Wyandots at Amherstburg.

It commences, “About the latter part of the first decade of the eighteenth century, a war party of Wyandots started down Detroit River in twenty canoes, accompanied by two canoes manned by Chippewas, for Long Point, where they expected to find some Senecas.”

At Long Point they discovered “footprints in the sand, which, they supposed, might have been made by a party of Senecas.” Soon “the whole party of Senecas made their appearance round the point, and the greater portion of them pushed directly into the lake.” Immediately the Wyandots eft their moorings and manoeuvred for position. When the Senecas realized they could not surround their foes and drive them ashore, “both parties prepared for the impending attack.”

Then followed a sharp exchange of threats, given in full, between the opposing chiefs. After this “the Wyandot chief donned his conical-shaped panther-skin cap, and addressed a few words to his followers reminding them of their wrongs and how some of their nation were destroyed in the east and the north by the Senecas and their allies; meanwhile, dropping little by little, bits of tobacco and some substance from his medicine bag into the deep beneath him, invoking the god of battles to be with them during the approaching struggle.” Before his rite was ended, “came a shower of arrows, as thick as hail, from the enemy, accompanied by some rifle bullets that whistled over their heads.” The fire was returned “with barbed arrows and firearms,” thus ending the first phase.

As Clarke’s language is so picturesque, the story is best ended in his own words, as follows: “But one regular volley was exchanged, for they were soon at close quarters with their tomahawks. Shouts after shouts mingled with the savage yells of both parties rent the air, and rendered the deadly conflict doubly horrible. The surface of the blue lake was tinged with the blood of the combatants. The battle lasted but a short time. The Senecas were killed to a man. Not a Wyandot was slain.” C. M. McCall, “An Early Indian Naval Battle Off Long Point,” The Simcoe Reformer

At the extreme southeasterly limit of lot number thirteen, in the Township of Charlotteville, the high bank of Lake Erie makes a bend almost east and west for a few hundred yards and then follows a course a few degrees south of west. This bend forms a bold bluff of about one hundred and fifty feet in height. Its base is traversed by a small stream of pure water, fed from springs from the side of the high bank, near the angle farthest from the lake shore.

The base of the bluff is the apex of a triangular piece of land, composed of marsh, swamp and a narrow strip of upland, bounded on the east and south by water and on the west and north by the high bank.

From the base of the bluff to the extreme [southerly] point of this [ ] tract of land is about three miles, and from this point to its northwest angle is about two miles, and from there along the base of the high bank to the bluff is about three and a half miles.

This strip of land is known as Turkey Point. The marsh on the west is called the Back Marsh and the marsh on the east and south is called the Front Marsh.

It received its named from the early settlers on account of the great number of wild turkeys that used to roost in the hemlock and alder trees along the bank of the ridge and in the swamp adjacent thereto. Here the wild turkey had every environment suitable to its wants, abundance of shelter and protection from iots natural foes, and abundance of food from the seeds of the black oak, beech and maple trees near by. During the summer season, they fed on the seeds of the June grass and on the grasshoppers; in the autumn on crickets so numerous in the open glades of the plains to the north. The Indians were accustomed to burn off in the spring the dead grass and leaves over these plains, so that the grass would grow thicker and afford better grazing for the deer.

In the early days of the pioneers, the settler, with his wife and family, used to drive in their wagons along the bay shore to the end of Turkey Point, and fish by driving their wagons out into the water a short distance. With a long cedar pole they could cast their lines into the channel, known among them as the Deep Hole, and in this way the extreme end of Turkey Point was called Deep Hole Point. The northwest angle of this parcel of land, at the coast line, in front of lot umber four, was called Goose Roost, because wild geese used to roost there. A line drawn from Deep Hole Point to the most northerly point of Ryerson’s Island, called Mohawk Point, is the division between the Outer and Inner Bays of Long Point.

In the geological formation and structure of Turkey Point, we find lake sand and shells of fresh water bi-valves and gastropods, proving clearly that it has been formed by lake sand, by the waves of the adjacent waters and by the winds. When an east wind prevails, the waters are driven up the lake, and the water level is lowered in the bay. The waves, washing and breaking on the shore, form sand bars a short distance from the shore and the first west or southwest wind that follows, returns the waters and carries the sand some distance towards, often upon it, adding several feet, in places, to the shore and which, in some instances in my own recollection, have formed a sand bar across a small inlet or outlet, and which sand bar afterwards became the shore proper, to usurp, gradually, in the same manner, more of the water’s domain. The space of shallow water so separated from the bay afterwards filled up, and is now marsh, gradually becoming dry land. “Turkey Point”, W. J. W. McInnes

Monday (August) 24th — Embarked at 5 o’clock with a strong wind at N.E. Sailed at a great rate. Sea very high, especially to Point Bass (Point a la Biche on French Maps, now Turkey Point), off which came a canoe of Mississengeys, nine in number, all naked. They only came to get something; then returned. At Point Bass, it makes a great bay, through which we sailed about ten miles to Grand Point, where we were obliged to row and sail through bulrushes and a great meadow, to the bank which divides the lake; makes the Great Point the passage or carrying place, which is now cut open a little by Major Gladwin; is not above forty yards across…

Tuesday 25th — …At nine, Mr. Bream came to our camp. He had been round the Grand point, which he says is twenty-two miles long from the carrying place; very low toward the end, which is swampy, and about two miles broad; lies mostly S.E., and is about a third of the lake in length. William Johnson’s Journal, 1761.

One of the first white settlers walking over this locality gathered more than a bushel of arrow points and wondered why they were so plentiful, and more than one hundred years after him, a farmer, while digging post holes for a fence, unearthed several of these flat and nearly square shaped stones, the Indians used to sink their nets.

A few mounds, longer than wide, and two or three excavations, circular in shape, and not very far distant apart, stones of various shapes and sizes, formed by some hidden secret we do not possess, of rock of various strata, altogether foreign to the locality, are all that remain to us, as evidence of the red man. “Turkey Point”, McInnes.

It was January, 1772, when trouble began with some Ojibwas, Mississagas and Ottawas. He [David Ramsay] was compelled to furnish them rum, his life was threatened, his goods plundered, and at last his hut was attacked by night. He killed and scalped three Ottawas, according to his own story, the other Indians having departed previous to the attack. One of those scalped was a woman. When the ice broke up, he and his brother, a boy of seventeen, put his furs and other goods, chiefly deerskins, into the batteau, and set out for Niagara by way of Lake Erie. At Long Point he was forced by the ice to go ashore and camp. Some days afterwards Indians came to the same place and at once began the quarrel with him, chiefly over rum, which he was compelled to furnish them. They threatened his life, and actually seized and pinioned him, tying his arms behind his back and his hands up to his neck, and making him sit by the fire. To make a long story short, Ramsay, in the end, got the better of his assailants. His brother had been able to help him in the struggle, owing to the fact that he had been less carefully watched. It is easy to imagine the effect of rum as a factor in the battle. Ramsay killed his guard and four other Indians, including a boy, scalped them, and got away with his brother. James H. Coyne, “David Ramsay in Long Point Legend and History”.

If the tradition handed down in the first Smith family be true in fact, no doubt would remain as to who was the first white man that established a residence in Norfolk, remaining and afterwards becoming the first settler. This man’s name was William Smith, familiarly known in pioneer times as “Uncle Billy” Smith… It is said that “Uncle Billy” left the parental roof the year following the settlement at Fort Erie, and wandered up into Long Point country where he lived among the Indians. This was in 1786, some four or five years previous to the earliest date claimed for the first settlement. Owen.

…the situation of Long Point is eminently suitable for a fortified post and naval arsenal for Lake Erie, and the establishment of one here would conteract the one held by the United States at Presque’ Isle. A harbor could be constructed on the island near it. It possesses every facility necessary for an important centre of military operations…The settlers to be brought in should be brave and determined Loyalists, such as those from Pennsylvania and Maryland, who at the end of the war were associated to support the cause of the King, and who had sent an agent to ascertain what arrangements could be made for their removal to the province. A strong settlement there would effectually separate the Mohawks on the Grand River from the other Indians. Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe in a letter to the Home Government in London, September 20, 1793.

[Summer 1794] The heavy Batteau was transported from Queenston around the Falls to Chippawa, a distance of 12 miles. Supplies were added to those brought from New York and they once more started on their journey bidding goodbye to the last vestage [sic] of Civilization. They were 12 days making a 100 miles, not bad travelling in those days taking the current of the River & Lake, adverse winds and an unknown coast into consideration. When my Father came within the Bay formed by Long Point, He watched the coast for a favourable impression and after a scrutiny of many miles the Boat was run into a small creek, the high Banks sloping gradually on each side. Directions were given to the men to erect the Tent for my mother.

My Father had not been long on shore before He decided that that should be his home. In wandering about He came to a small eminence [sic] which would (when the Trees were felled) command a view of the Harbour. He gazed around him for a few minuets [sic] and said, “here I will be buried,” and there after 18 years toil he sleeps in peace. “Historical Memoranda,” Mrs. Amelia Harris.

My Father had a couple of Deer Hounds and he used to go to the woods for his Deer, as a farmer would go to his fold for a sheep. Wild turkeys and partridges were Bagged with very little skill or exertion, and when the Creek and Lake were not frozen He need scarcely leave his own Door to shoot Ducks, but the great sporting ground and it is [s]till famous, and the resort of sporting gentlemen from Toronto, Woodstock, and indeed all parts of Canada West, is at the head of Long Point Bay. I have known him several years later return from there with 20 wild geese and a hundred Duck, the result of a few days’ shooting. Pigeons were so plentiful as late as 1810 and 1812 that they could be knocked down with poles. Bears and Wolves were plentiful and the latter used to keep up a most melancholy howl about the house at night, so near that my Mother could scarcely be persuaded that they were not under the window. The Cow, for security, was tied to the Kitchen Door every night, during the day she accompanied the men to the field they were chopping and fed upon brouse which kept her fat and in good heart, the men making a point of felling a maple Tree each morning for her particular benefit. Amelia Harris.

At first it formed part of the Western district, an extremely indefinite province. Previous to the Treaty of 1794, which came into effect in 1796, the Ohio and Mississippi rivers formed the boundary line of Canada. By that treaty the line of division waas drawn in the middle of the lakes.

The Surveyor-General described the Western district as follows in 1796 (in the early part of the year): “On the south it is bounded by Lake Erie; on the east by a meridian passing through the easterly extremity of Long Point, and comprehends all the lands north-westerly of these boundaries, not included within in the bounds of the Hudson Bay Company or the territory of the United States. The boundary which divides it from Louisiana is not well known after it reaches the sources of the Mississippi.” L. H. Tasker, “The United Empire Loyalist Settlement at Long Point, Lake Erie,” Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records, V.II, 1900.

The country is thickly timbered, the chief trees being oak, beech, pine and walnut. Making our way through the forest we reached the lake at a place which, from the abundance of wild-fowl, is named Turkey Point. A ridge or cliff of considerable height skirts the shore for some distance. Between this and Lake Erie is a wide and gently sloping beach. The long ridge of hard sand (Long Point proper) encloses a safe and commodious harbor. The view from the high bank is magnificent. Altogether the place presents a combination of natural advantages and natural beauty but seldom found. Here we have laid out a site of six hundred acres for a town, with reservations for Government buildings, and called it Charlotte Villa, in honor of Queen Charlotte. Lord Simcoe, summer 1795.

Judge Ermatinger commenced by painting a vivid word pictures, describing the surpassing natural beauty of Turkey Point, one could almost fancy himself the first visitor to the region, so primeval, still and grand the scene. A trail leads down the crest of the hill to the level land 150 feet below. A little to the right is the road constructed by the soldiers when the Point was garrisoned, and it affords a safer descent, and a view narrowed by the cliff, but heightened in beauty thereby. Upon these heights was the first capital and chief military depot of the London district. A court house and jail and fort, red-coated foot soliders and more sombrely dressed court officials, litigants, and witnesses, were once familiar objects there. The civic officials during sessions of court lodge at Hatch’s Hotel below the hill, where a fisherman’s dwelling now stands. No trace of any of the buildings referred to now remains, save the almost obliterated fitches which surrounded the fort, or a few broken bricks from the chimneys…In 1795 there were four settlers, when Governor Simcoe visited the point, and, it is said, contemplated making it the provincial capital. Certain it is, however, that it was intended to be the site of one of the great cities of the province. A large tract of land was set apart for this purpose and it still held by the government. But the city did not materialize. It is as the site of ancient Carthage, but more desolate, though nonetheless beautiful. The place was know as Turkey Point, Port Norfolk, Charlotteville and Fort Norfolk. The two first names designate the low lands and harbor, and the two latter the uplands and fort. “Turkey Point, The Ancient Capital of the London District, Paper read by Judge Ermatinger before the Elgin Historical and Scientific Institute,” The Simcoe Reformer, Dec. 18, 1936.

The most important aboriginal site near St. Williams is that of the Attiwandaron village that covered probably the whole of the present Newkirk Cemetery and the field east and southeast of the same. It location was ideal — close to Long Point Bay, but far enough inland to be protected from enemies prowling about in canoes. Not only was it mostly on sandy soil, but it was well watered — the never-failing spring creek at the east, Mud Creek at the south and the latter’s northern bend at the west. To the northward was endless fairly level ground on which corn, beans, squashes and tobacco could be planted. The surface of the field is still marked with blackened spots from the fires of the long houses. McCall.

It was on July 14, 1796, that Thomas W. Welsh, first justice of the peace, first land surveyor, and first registrar of deeds for Norfolk, wrote out an oath of allegiance for the settlers of this district by signing which they promised fealty to King George III, and evidenced their intention of banding together for the defence of the new land to which they had recently come. Most of them came to Canada to be under the Union Jack.

In 1798 one return was inscribed “Return of Captain Thomas Welsh’s Company of the Regiment of Norfolk Militia, commanded by Samuel Ryerse, Esq.” This was the first mention of Colonel Ryerse, first Colonel of the Norfolk Militia… “Review of the Norfolk Regiment since 1796,” Enid Johnson, The Simcoe Reformer, 1950.

…the Norfolk Militia was organized into two regiments early in 1812. Lieut.-Colonel Joseph Ryerson was in command of the Militia at the time and continued his command of the First Regiment, while Lieut.-Colonel Robert Nicol was named to command the Second Regiment. Each unit was called upon to form two Flank Companies for active service in any part of the Province, each Company to consist of three officers and 37 other ranks. Johnson.

Lt.-Col. and Quartermaster General Nicol in 1812 surveyed the harbor and delivered a chart of the same to Sir Isaac Brock. Nowhere on the bar is the water then less than eight feet deep. Col. Nicol recommended the fortifying of Turkey Point, as in his opinion, it was the only place on Lake Erie where a naval depot and shipyard could be established. The colonel also recommended a survey of the harbor by officers of the engineers and royal navy and the construction of two frigates and two sloops of war with some gun vessels, a recommendation upon which action as commenced but afterward abandoned. Col. Nicol afterwards lost his life by falling one night over the precipice into the Niagara river while superintending the construction of Brock’s monument. Ermatinger.

In the spring of 1812 the first hanging took place at Turkey Point, when a negro, convicted of larceny and incendiarism, suffered the extreme penalty of the law. Ermatinger.

General Brock addressed a gathering of Norfolk men at the Culver Tavern about two mile south of Simcoe and from that spot the detachment proceeded to Dover and boarded boats, which could accommodate 400, and the remainder had to march to the relief of Amherstburg. Major Salmon and his men went by water, and had an extremely uncomfortable voyage. As a result of this expeditions behaviour at the capture of Detroit both Major Salmon and Lt.-Col. Nichol were awarded the Gold Medal for Distinguished Conduct. Johnson.

In May 1814 we had several days of heavy fog. On the 13th, I think, the fog lifted. We saw seven or eight ships under the American flag anchored of[f] Ryerse with a number of small Boats floating by the side of each ship. As the fog cleared away they hoisted sail and dropped down three miles below us, opposite Port Dover. Of course, an invasion was anticipated. The Militia under the command of Col. Talbot were immediately ordered to assemble at Brandtford [sic] a distance of thirty miles by 10 A.M. the next day, which they did, with a good many exceptions of Officers & Men. The general wish was to try & prevent the American landing and expressed indignation at being ordered to a safe distance from all danger. On the following morning, the 15th of May, as my Mother and myself were at Breakfast, the Dogs made an unusual barking. I went to the door to discover the cause. When I looked up I saw the hillside and the fields as far as they eye could reach covered with American soldiers. They had landed at Patterson’s Creek, Burnt the Mills and village of Port Dover and then marched to Ryerse. Two men stepped from the ranks, selected some large chips, came into the room where we were standing and took coals from the hearth, without speaking. My mother knew instinctively what they were going to do. She went out and asked to see the commanding officer, a gentleman rode up to her and said he was the person she asked for. She entreated Him to spare her property and said that she was a widow with a young family. He answered civilly & respectfully and regretted that his orders were to Burn, but that He would spare the house, which He did, & said in justification that the Buildings were used as Barracks and the mill furnished flour for British Troops. Very soon we saw [a] column of dark smoke arise from every Building and what at early morn had been a prosperous homestead, at noon there remained only smouldering ruins. The following day Col. Talbot and the Militia under his command marched to Fort Norfolk. The Americans were then safe on board their own ships & well on their way to their own shores. My Father had been dead less than two years, & little remained of all his labors, excepting the orchards and cultivated fields. Amelia Harris.

After killing the first Indian, I cut lead and chewed above thirty balls, and above three pounds of Goose Shot, for I thought it a pity to shoot an Indian with a smooth ball. David Ramsay to Patrick Campbell, 1793.

Specimens of wapiti antlers taken on Long Point are now in the possession of Mr. M. M. Smith, who resides in Simcoe, Norfolk County. It is estimated from casual hearsay accounts that wild wapiti disappeared from the region between one hundred and thirty and one hundred and forty years ago. Snyder, 1932.

About the end of the same month, part of the British prisoners taken at the battle of Lake Erie and during proctor’s retreat were landed at Long Point, having been purposely detained for more than a month in an unhealthy situation at Sandusky, to prevent them joining General Drummond in time to take part in the campaign. They were almost naked, most of them without shoes, and many of them suffering from ague. The surgeon sent to meet them reported that very few of them would ever be fit for duty again.

“At the first sight of our poor fellows,” he wrote on October 7 [1814], “it was with difficulty I could repress my feelings of pity at their miserable condition and of indignation at their treatment which was the cause of it.

“The further we advanced, the scene of misery deepened and from wretchedness in appearance we arrived gradually to the very essence of everything miserable, nakedness, uncleanliness, disease, and death.”

A month later the remainder were put on shore in much the same condition. Major Muir wrote on that occasion:

“On the 25th October [1814] three vessels anchored in the bay and a boat came ashore, and I was informed that the prisoners were on board, but many of them were sick. Soon after the boats arrived at the beach with some dead, others dying, and one half of them unable to help themselves in any manner whatever. In short, we lost six men and one woman that night…” Brig.-General E. A. Cruikshank, “The County of Norfolk in the War of 1812”.

One Ramsay, before and after the Revolution, traded with the Indians of this region up to Detroit. Dr. Troyer believed in magic, and had a mineral rod, by which he divined where gold was buried. About 1790, when Ramsay was coming from Detroit with two men and his boat loaded with furs and gold, he had a dispute with Indians living at Port Stanley, where they had large corn fields, over his refusal to furnish them liquor. They followed him from the land down to Port Burwell and the carrying place, and Long Point to the end of the peninsula, and prevented him doing any further trade. At the portage he buried his money in an iron chest and killed a black dog and buried it over the chest as protection. This was Ramsay’s last trip. About 1817 Dr. Troyer and his son, Michael, having found out by his divining rod where the treasure was, went out towards evening to dig it up. I saw them going out in the boat. My father was the only one I know about that they consulted but he was a believer and would not go. The Doctor afterwards told me that they dug down to the box. The Doctor was a Tunkard. He held a Bible open and a lighted candle to keep away the Evil One. Michael dug and tried to pry the chest out of the ground, when a black dog rose up beside the chest — grew bigger and bigger, until the light went out, and then they took to their boat and went home. As told to James H. Coyne by Simpson McCall in 1893.

The fort at Turkey Point, called Fort Norfolk, was from 150 to 200 feet square with an open square of yard in the centre. The building was one story in height, about seven feet clear. Rooms, with loopholes at intervals, were ranged around the inside of the walls, the centre being an open quadrangle. Married soldiers occupied shanties erected conveniently near the fort. Detachments of the 19th Light Dragoons and of the 37th Regiment were stationed there during the War of 1812-1814. Ermatinger.

Lake Erie is two hundred and forty-six miles long, and sixty broad at its widest part. The depth averages from fifteen to eighteen fathoms over its whole extent, and, in consequence of this remarkable shallowness, it becomes rough and boisterous when the wind blows strongly from any point on the compass. At these times a very high and dangerous surf breaks upon its shores, which, in many places, resemble the beach of the sea, being strewed with dead fish and shells, and infested with aquatic birds of various kinds. Often during storms the Lake is covered with such a think mist, that it is impossible to see to the distance of ten yards from the shore. The waves then roll with terrific violence from amidst the cloudy obscurity, and suggest to the imagination the appalling dangers which threaten those vessels that are exposed to the tempest; for the navigation of the Lake is rendered highly dangerous, by reefs and projecting points of land, and by the nature of the banks, which, towards its western extremity, are so bold and precipitous, that when a vessel is driven upon them shipwreck becomes almost inevitable. John Howison Esq., Sketches of Upper Canada, 1821.

In the early days, these notes explained further, the four corners, now the main intersection of the village, were not opened and the site was covered with a black ash swamp. The road to the west turned at the top of the hill where the United Church now is, and followed the creek around, coming out on the hill where the old jam factory now stands and proceeding westward. “St. Williams Noted for its Forestry Station,” Jean Hall Waldie, The Simcoe Reformer.

Disastrous collision & loss of life. Propellor Cataract collided with brig Oxford off Long Point. Lost — captain John Lee & wife, 2 children, seamen. The Christian Messenger, June 12, 1856.

We regret to learn that the schooner A. Gilmour, Capt. Brown, of Kingston, and bound for that port, as wrecked in the gale of Saturday last, in Long Point cut, near Port Rowan. The Captain, his son and two of the hands were drowned. “Wreck and Loss of Life,” Caledonia Advertiser, Nov. 12, 1856.

He was roused from his sleep by the beating of invisible arms; cold draughts rushed through his apartment, no matter how carefully he closed every crevice against the air; horrible noises, groans and cries made the night hideous. Adele S., “The Legends of Long Point Bay,” The British Canadian, March 2, 1870.

Rising quickly, the doctor inserted the peg in the knot-hole, hoping thereby to capture Mrs. M., as he knew the queen of witches usually left a place last. Horrible were the screams that were heard outside and in the house. The doctor lit the lamp, and discerned, crouching in one corner, a beautiful girl whom neither he nor his companion had ever seen. She maintained a perfect silence, and young N. took her down stairs, followed by the doctor. A stormy discussion took place between Mrs. N., her son, and the doctor –the two elders wishing to at once treat the witch as the doctor’s books demanded; but N. interfered, and declared she should remain — that she was too beautiful to be punished. Doctor Troyer departed in a great rage, and for months he would not speak to N. Meanwhile, the girl remained at the N.’s, and enchanted everyone with her beauty and agreeable ways. She never could be induced to mention where she came from, and who she was. Finally, N. married her, and, to the surprise of all who knew the circumstances of her strange appearance, she made an excellent wife and mother. The years wore on, and the N.s prospered, till one unlucky day, during some house-cleaning, the peg in the knot-hole was unwittingly removed by one of the children. With a terrible scream the mother vanished, and never was heard of again. The chain which bound her to the place was broken, and she returned where she came from. N. mourned sincerely, and tried in all ways to find some trace of his phantom wife. Finally, after some years he married again, and the trouble was almost forgotten. Sometimes, however, at night, mysterious noises were heard, and the next morning traces of some person having been in the house were found, the children’s clothes were mended, and many little offices performed. After they were grown, she never appeared. Adele S., “The Legends of Long Point Bay” The British Canadian, March 2, 1870.

Port Royal, which is situated near the mouth of Big Creek, on the high land just before it dips down to the Long Point marshes, was the centre of lumber trade activities in the fiftiers and sixties of the 19th century. As one old-timer put it, “You could walk anywhere on Bog Creek, at any season of the year, on a jam of logs.” All about lay the great pine country, whose sandy slopes when denuded of their mantle of trees, became hills of menacing blow sand, “not worth fifty cents an acre for farming.”

Companies leased certain sections of land and as the timber was cut the logs were stamped with the company’s mark and put into big Creek. The river [drivers were strapping Irishmen, few of them under six feet tall. That was the day when three hotels did a roaring business in Port Rowan.

The logs were received at Port Royal and bound into rafts. Tugs, which could not navigate the creek, waited outside in Long Point Bay, and took the logs to the sawmills of Tonowanda and Buffalo. “Wealth of Logs Floated to Lake on ‘Big’ Creek” Mabel Burkholder, The Simcoe Reformer, 1945.

During the severe storm of Saturday last, a large American vessel — the Jersey City — was wrecked on the north side of Long Point. The crew and passengers, to the number of seventeen persons, succeeded in reaching the Point — but only to perish of cold and fatigue, unable to kindle a fire. “Dreadful Shipwreck on Long Point — Seventeen Lives Lost” Norfolk Messenger, Nov. 29, 1860.

In 1861, the alarms caused by the Fenian activities in the United States on becoming known here, occasioned the beginning of the reorganization of the militia. Four rifle companies and two infantry companies were formed. In 1866, the new unit was styled the 39th Battalion of Infantry which name was used until the First Great War. Johnson.

Across from the St. Williams planing mill stands a house which was pointed out to me as the first one built in the village. Erected in 1832 by Peter Price, one of the first pioneers to settle on the present site of St. Williams, this pleasant and attractive home is still occupied. It was once known as the “House in the Wilderness,” due to the heavy growth of shrubbery and trees in the old days. Waldie.

The McCalls were a Scottish clan from Argyleshire. Donald McCall came to America in the year 1756 with the regular British troops who were sent over against the French at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. He was a private in Montgomery’s Highlanders, and took part in the capture of Louisburg in 1758, and served also under Wolfe at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the taking of Quebec. With a detachment of the regiment he was afterwards sent up the lakes. From the Niagara River the party came along the north shore of Lake Erie in batteaux, and when near Turkey Point had an encounter with some French and Indians. Their enemies fired at them from the shelter of the woods, but the plucky Highlanders promptly ran their boats ashore, defeated and chased them inland as far as where the village of Waterford now stands. On their way back they encamped for the night on what is now lot 18 of the 4th concession of the township of Charlotteville, near the present residence of Simpson McCall. In the morning the solders improvised some fishing tackle, and in a short time had caught out of Young’s Creek all the speckled trout the party could eat.

In 1763, after the Treaty of Paris, being discharged on the breaking up of his regiment, he settled in the State of New Jersey, where he lived until the breaking out of the Revolutionary War. He immediately joined the King’s Regiment, and did not retire from military life till after the surrender of Yorktown.

When he returned to his New Jersey home he soon found that he was regarded as an alien and shunned by his neighbors. Not caring to remain, in 1783 he made his way to New Brunswick and settled on a small allotment there.

In 1796 a party from New Brunswick, led by Donald McCall, came west to the Long Point settlement. He was selected as the leader because he had previously visited the country. Among the party were the loyalists Lieut. Jas. Munro and Peter Fairchild. They landed at the mouth of Big Creek on July 1st, 1796, and took up land in various localities.

The old leader, remembering his adventures with the French and Indians, and the episode of the speckled trout fishing alluded to above, made his way inland to the identical spot where the camp fires of his Highland regiment had been lighted forty years before.

His family consisted at the time of five sons and three daughters — John, Duncan, Daniel, James and Hugh, and Catherine, Elizabeth and Mary. Duncan, being already married, settled near his father, on Lot 23 of the 5th concession. On the 26th July, 1796, a son was born to him, the first white child born in the county of Norfolk. This child (Daniel) served afterwards in the War of 1812, taking part in the Battle of Lundy’s Lane and in a skirmish at Malcolm’s Hollow (Oakland), where the British were outnumbered and driven back by General McArthur. Tasker.

There are people in Port Rowan today who have a distinct remembrance of having seen this witch trap in Dr. Troyer’s bedroom. But in spite of this defensive means the witches would occasionally take him out in the night and transform him into various kinds of animals and compel him to perform all sorts of antics. One night the witches took him out of a peaceful slumber, transformed him into a horse and rode him across the lake to Dunkirk where they attended a witch dance. Strange as it may appear, Dr. Troyer believed all this, yet, aside from witchcraft, he was considered a sane man. He is described as wearing a long white flowing beard; and it is said he lived to be ninety-nine years old, and that just before his death he shot a hawk, off-hand, from the peak of the barn roof. E. A. Owen, Pioneer Sketches of Long Point Settlement, 1898.

McDonald was terrified by the melancholy wind stirring the tree-tops, owls hooting, wolves yelping, then the heavy tramp, tramp of a vast multitude, inarticulate voices of men, the crashing of boughs and snapping of twigs, and then the rush of some great unseen host. Soon there was the sound of combat in the air with an opposing multitude, followed by groans of the wounded and shrieks of the dying. James H. Coyne, “David Ramsay in Long Point Legend and History”.

I shall now lead you a ramble through Long Point, which is a tract of country different in appearance from any I have yet described. When I first visited this part of the Province, the sudden change which took place in the aspect of nature seemed like magic. The soil became light and sandy, the forests had dwindled away, and natural groves and copses met the eye in their stead. The fields were beautifully level, and the uncultivated lands had more the appearance of a pleasure-ground than of a wilderness. The trees being small and few in number, and distributed in beautiful clumps, did not at all suggest the idea of a forest… John Howison.

…wide plains covered with small oaks stretched on either side, whole forests of these scorched and burnt up trees with their brick-red withered leaves, unvaried by a speck of green or any fresh foliage, followed one another, their parched and thirsty appearance exciting an oppressive feeling of hopelessness lifelessness and drought such as one may be supposed to experience travelling the desert sands of Africa. The Canadian Journal of Alfred Domett, 1833-1835.

Long Point abounds with game of various kinds, and the woods, from their openness, are favourable for pursuit of it. Partridges spring from the copses, and deer often bound across the path of him who traverses the forests. Immense flocks of passenger, or wild pigeon, frequent this and other parts of Upper Canada during the spring and autumn; and myriads of them are killed by firearms, or caught in nets by the inhabitants; for they fly so close, and in such numbers, that twenty or thirty may sometimes be brought down at a single shot… John Howison.

The Atlantic was another of the fine side-wheelers in the immigrant trade of the 1840s and 1850s. She was making her regular trip from Detroit to Buffalo in August 1852. She stopped at Erie to pick up about 200 Norwegians who were going to Quebec. The ship was so crowded, however, that she had to leave seventy-five of the Norwegian company on the Erie wharf. She was running in the after-midnight darkness and fog a few miles off Long Point and nearing her destination when the propeller-driven Ogdensburg, going west, hit her on the port side just forward of the wheel. There was no apparent damage, since the Ogdensburg had reversed her engines before the collision, and both ships went on in the fog and darkness, thinking all was well. The Atlantic steamed on two miles and suddenly began to sink. Her passengers were awakened and told to prepare to abandon ship. They threw overboard settees, chairs and mattresses for life preservers. The fires in the boilers went out with a hiss of steam. The process of abandoning ship was proceeding in calm order when the Norwegians suddenly went mad. They could not understand a word of English when the captain tried to direct them and explain what was happening. They started leaping overboard in the darkness in spite of all efforts to restrain them. The ship went down at two-thirty in the morning. The Ogdensburg had stopped for repairs after the collision. She heard the terrified shrieks of the drowning Norwegians two miles away. She rushed back to the scene in time to pick up 250 of the passengers. More than 300, most of them Norwegians, were drowned. Hatcher.

The seine netters’ fishing grounds are the Inner Bay whence they gather in a great conglomeration of coarse fish including perch, mullet and carp. The carp are shipped out alive in tank trucks to Toronto, New York and Chicago to meet the demand of the Jewish trade.

As they tend their nets the fishermen propel their dories about the bay by punting, due to the shallowness of the water which ranges from six to eight feet in depth, with a few channels about 14 feet deep. By June 1 the seine fishing season is concluded until fall. “Picturesque Port Rowan,” Jean Hall Waldie, The Simcoe Reformer.

Whitefish are now unknown in the waters of the Inner Bay, though the early settlers called the bar, a short distance from Deep Hole Point, White Fish Bar on account of the numbers of white they caught there. So much then for the filling up of the beautiful bay. In place of the white fish, we have the carp, properly styled the water hog… McInnes.

Not all wrecks were caused by treacherous weather and shoals. At various times ‘wreckers’ are known to have worked from the Long Point beaches. They were unscrupulous, ghoulish opportunists who lured vessels to their doom by using false beacons where captains were expecting the guiding beams of a lighthouse. Before anyone on the mainland was aware of the tragedy, the wreckers would strip the hapless vessel of her cargo and gear and make good their escape.

The area near the bay entrance to the Cut was a favourite area for their operations. For example, in December 1860 the schooner Greenbush was coming down the lake in a stiff blow, easing along the south beach as her captain watched for the red light that identified the wide mouth of the Cut. Picking it out, he ran towards the pounding surf and deeper water that the light marked for him. Suddenly the stout little schooner shuddered from bow to stern as her keel bottomed hard on a shoal. Her bow crashed even more heavily on the next sand bar, then a following sea lifted her stern high and swung it shorewards, leaving her heeling precariously to starboard. Too late the captain realized that a wrecker’s false light had lured him into the treacherous shallows far up the beach from the Cut. Not one of her crew of thirteen survived. Harry B. Barrett, Lore and Legends of Long Point.

…the report of the Ontario Game and Fisheries Department for 1909 which states that “a number” of elk was introduced by the Long Point Company in 1909, one of which escaped and was killed in November of that year. Snyder.

With marvelous rapidity it became an open common and a resort for the idle and dissipated. The place was shunned by sportsmen of the better sort. With steamboats and tugs on the American side of the lake and no railway on the Canadian side, Long Point was more easy of access from Buffalo and Erie than from any Canadian City. “Morrissey and Heenan” had their prize fight there and more recently “Dwyer and Elliot.” A brothel had a temporary location — the inmates supplied from Buffalo. Rev. Dr. Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Education in Ontario, who had shot there from boyhood, wrote the Government that it was then impossible for a respectable man to go there, and ruin for any young man to shoot there. That immorality, drunkenness, and a low tone was prevalent throughout the place. Edward Harris, Recollections of Long Point, 1918.

Here Bill Price’s powder flask burst, when loading his gun. It is not certain whether he had been using brown paper for wadding or smoking his pipe at the time. Before the accident he had a very handsome face. This was Peter Price’s favorite son. He might have reached any position in Ontario had he not been so devoted to the marsh. Edward Harris, 1918.

But even there the canvas back, red head, widgeon and mallard ducks are met by the market hunter, with his pump gun, in his skeg boat, and with a string of one hundred decoys, are slaughtered in vast numbers and sold. “Turkey Point,” Dr. Walter McInnes.

Norfolk County is noted for having several plants growing in it naturally that are not found plentifully anywhere and that are not found elsewhere in Southern Ontario. Norfolk’s lake-tempered climate and variety of soils have much to do with the great number of different plants found within its borders.

Let us imagine that it is early morning on a day in late June and that we had camped the previous night on the north shore of Long Point Bay. On going down to the lake to wash we notice the umbrella-like leaves of the American Lotus standing in the shallow water. Later in the year these plants bear wonderful, large, lemon-yellow flowers possessing a very sweet scent… Robert Landon, “A Jaunt Among Norfolk’s Wild Flowers” The Monocle, May, 1929.

Much of the land around Long Point was a desolate sight a generation ago. The thick stands of white pine were cut off and the sand lands were cleared for agriculture. The results were inevitable: the thin soil was quickly exhausted, sand blew over the fields, sifted out from the roots of stumps, exposed barren limestone outcropping and drifted over the roads. Farms were abandoned and the buildings fell into ruins. Harlan Hatcher.

—Collected and edited by Douglas Glover

See also my cousin John Cardiff’s Norfolk County genealogical site Norfolk Genealogy which contains a trove of news clippings, photos, as well a minute historical data for individual families.

I have used Norfolk County folklore and history in several pieces of fiction and nonfiction.

“A Flame, a Burst of Light” is short story about prisoners of war returning from a disastrous prison camp in Ohio in 1814. It was originally published in The New Quarterly and is coming out in my book of stories Savage Love.

“The Sun Lord and the Royal Child” is a short story about the scandalous behaviour of archaeologists, the Neutral and the Southwold Earthworks. It was originally published in Ninth Letter and reprinted in Savage Love.

“Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm’s Mills (now Oakland, Ontario, November 6, 1814″ is about the 1814 battle. You can find it in my book A Guide to Animal Behaviour.

“Turned into a Horse by Witches” is about Dr. Troyer, the famous Long Point witch doctor, and is also in A Guide to Animal Behaviour.

My essay “Possum” about my great-grandfather John Brock and St Williams was published in The New Quarterly.

And, of course, some of the scenes in my novel The Life and Times of Captain N. take place on the Lake Erie shoreline. The character Hendrick Nellis is based on the real Hendrick Nelles. The character Mary Hunsacker is based on Mary Sitts who is buried in the pioneer cemetery in Boston (Norfolk County).