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The Constabulary: Producers of Police Court Drama

Without Police Chief Robert Armstrong and other law officers apprehending miscreants and hauling them into court, James Boyer and his fellow justices of the peace would have been much freer to engage in the other pursuits by which they earned their livelihoods. Yet constables were resolutely on duty, maintaining the peace and enforcing the law in and around Bracebridge, essential cast members in the town’s dramas of justice, their pivotal role in the process contributing the popular term police court to the place where justices of the peace presided.

In establishing the rule of law and producing the raw material for more trials, they were joined by other actors in the role of enforcer. For in 1890s Canada, the constabulary was not the only arm of the law. Private citizens also appeared in Magistrate’s Court in a prosecutorial role, not for some private grievance but for the share of fines they were entitled to collect from the conviction of someone caught breaking a public law. The ancient law of moieties, still part of Canada’s Criminal Code in the days James Boyer tried these cases, was a reward system that greatly multiplied the available eyes and ears of enforcement. Moieties lengthened the arm of the law by, potentially, making all citizens throughout the district into private constables.

The most reliable producers of drama in the courtroom, however, were the regular police officers who brought charges as a result of trolling known hotspots. The starring role that the magistrate played in upholding the rule of law depended on solid supporting performances by those policing the town and its environs as constables, revenue agents, health and sanitation inspectors, bylaw-enforcement officers, game wardens, and fence inspectors. These prowling constables arrested drunks at street level and poachers in the backwoods, to maintain peace and order, and to establish the rule of law. They showed up in court, accompanied by the sullen or surly individuals they’d taken into custody, where they pressed charges, gave evidence, and completed their prosecutions.

It was all of one piece, a common theatre of justice. To the police officer, the morning Magistrate’s Court was as important a stage on which to perform his role as the back alleys he patrolled in the evening and the troubled taverns he kept subdued late at night.

It was not always easy for the police to carry out their duties. Two cases from 1894, found later in the chapter “A Constable’s Unhappy Lot,” suggest that establishing the rule of law in Canada’s scattered clearings and growing towns involved a contest of wills. While Canadians are raised on tales of how heroic Mounties rose to this challenge along the northwest frontier, the same feat was equally required in the small towns of Ontario, though by a force neither so well trained nor as renowned as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Indeed, it was an odd assortment of constables and officials in Bracebridge and Muskoka who sought, quite unevenly, to provide some civilizing context for the raw disputes that constantly erupted as people jostled with neighbours, contended with nature, and boiled over with annoyances and frustrations.

Bracebridge’s chief constable in the 1890s was Robert E. Armstrong, who’d first arrived in 1883 to head the town’s police department, and subsequently served as Muskoka District constable as well. In 1889, when the Ontario legislature passed the bill incorporating Bracebridge as a town, the chief honoured this historic moment by ringing the town bell for a full hour of jubilant celebration, proving both his fine sense of occasion and his formidable physical strength.

With a name starting the alphabet, Armstrong appeared first on the list of dozens of Bracebridge proprietors, entrepreneurs, and office holders in an 1891 directory published by the Muskoka Herald, which identified him as “Chief Constable.” Armstrong’s brass-buttoned uniform and full moustache reinforced the reassuring impression he gave townsfolk as a well-maintained and authoritative figure.

Just as the JPs performed other roles in town, police officers often had extra callings as well. In addition to police work, Chief Armstrong was a liveryman, who operated his business and stables from a large wooden structure on property in the centre of town, just off Dominion Street. When the building was destroyed by fire in 1909, he built a substantial replacement brick building for the livery business, which his widow carried on after he died in 1911 until selling out to Ernest E. Boyd in 1913.

Constables did their best to stay equal to their challenging task, for instance by carrying a “nightstick,” or club. In the mid-1890s a controversial escalation of police power stirred Bracebridge. On October 21, 1895, James Boyer, operating in his role as town clerk, prepared an application under Section 105 of the Criminal Code of 1892, which empowered a justice of the peace to authorize what would otherwise constitute an offence: carrying a firearm. Then, as JP, he granted Thomas Dodd, newly hired by the municipality as Bracebridge’s “night watchman,” permission to carry a revolver for one year.

Following Armstrong’s retirement from police work in 1903, the town council, choosing from many applicants, selected William McConnell and John Miller as the new arms of the law in Bracebridge, with McConnell as chief.

In the frontier’s contest of wills, it was not only the police constables who required courage. On occasion, so did the justices of the peace. In the mid-1870s, for instance, following failed efforts by intimidated constables to bring in dangerous men on outstanding arrest warrants, a frustrated Magistrate Charles Lount went himself into the townships to arrest two shantymen at their lumber camp, taking them from the daunting midst of their roughneck companions. A decade later, in June 1885, courage was still a prerequisite of office when James Boyer, accompanied by Justice of the Peace Alfred Hunt and Constables Johnson and Young, walked steadily down the middle of Bracebridge’s main street to confront an angry mob of Italian railway construction workers who were mounting a strike and protest for their hard-earned but unpaid wages. Boyer read the Riot Act to them, commanding them on pain of arrest to disperse, which they did.

Constables in Bracebridge did not usually leave hard matters to others, however. In the late 1870s and 1880s, when William J. Hill was police chief and J.H. Tomlin his assistant constable, the pair had not only to deal with small crimes of delinquent boys and horse thieves, but also take on boisterous forces of loggers. As the heyday of lumbering swept a new wave of men into town, such occurrences became more frequent. With the population rising from thirteen hundred in 1880 to over three thousand by 1889, this economic expansion produced a new kind of raw reality.

One characteristic of the district’s lumber economy was its role in “vastly increasing alcohol consumption,” concluded Larry D. Cotton after reviewing Muskoka newspaper accounts from this era. Competing lumber companies, he explains in Whiskey and Wickedness, “would sometimes attract shantymen into their employment by holding ‘open house’ at a hotel,” where “free whiskey would be part of the incentive offered to sign on for the winter.” Because the isolated, rugged, and dangerous work in lumbering was better remunerated than many jobs, it attracted vigorous younger men. The lumber camps themselves were strictly booze-free, so loggers, “who naturally wanted to have a few drinks and some fun after they were paid,” could hardly wait to hit town in the spring once they drew their winter’s earnings. The growing number of hotels in Bracebridge and other Muskoka towns “would be filled with shantymen every fall and spring, looking for a good time.”

Orillia’s two newspapers, the Packet and the Times, reported in June 1883 an example of the kind of incident such situations could produce. In Bracebridge, a gang of some twenty men had arrived in town, their dangerous work of driving logs completed and their pockets filled with wages. One of the lumbermen, who’d been directing obscene and insulting language at several Bracebridge women, was hauled before Magistrate Boyer on a charge of drunkenness. The man refused to pay his fine and escaped from the courtroom with the help of his logger buddies. Gathering even more shantymen together, they defiantly prepared to resist the constables whom the magistrate had promptly sent after them. A “terrible fight” between the two sides did not settle matters. With reinforcements needed to make arrests, special constables were then deputized and sent into battle, when “much hard fighting took place before the lawless woodsmen were brought under control.”

Five shantymen were taken into custody, but the others escaped arrest. After nightfall they went back into Bracebridge to raid the jail and free their companions. Rather than slinking into the bush, they then went en masse to a local hotel to celebrate the day’s events, a brazen display of just how secure these roughnecks felt in this pioneer town.

If this challenge to the rule of law and Bracebridge’s constabulary went unchallenged, it would reveal just how thin civilization’s veneer really was, and perhaps encourage the town’s descent into anarchy under rule of the mob. So, returning with yet more reinforcements, a strengthened posse of constables surprised the celebrating fugitives, recapturing the five lumbermen and returning them to jail. Later their undaunted comrades, who’d again successfully escaped during the melee at the hotel, “returned in the middle of the night and conveyed whiskey to their locked-up friends to lighten their burden.”

Two river drovers who’d escaped the Bracebridge constables were arrested several days later at the Albion Hotel in Gravenhurst, but the ringleader of the shantymen, eighteen-year-old Joseph Rule, eluded capture and made his way home to Peterborough. Arrested there, he was brought in chains back to Bracebridge Magistrate’s Court, where he boldly threatened everyone in sight with retribution. Undeterred, however, James Boyer “sent Rule and his other jailed companions to Peterborough to serve out their sentences.”

This episode, noteworthy for its drama but not exceptional for its character, typified the era when liquor flowed freely at Bracebridge’s five prospering hotels. Barrie’s Northern Advance would report on March 5, 1885, that, “howling drunks are common in Bracebridge.”

The community had in fact been awash from its inception in a perfect sea of booze, its hotels, many with names grander than their premises, driving alcohol consumption. In 1861, when it still had only two log buildings to its credit, the embryonic village opened its first tavern in one of them, Hiram James McDonald’s “Royal Hotel.” By 1864 Alexander Bailey opened his establishment, the “Victoria Hotel,” to honour the reigning monarch, at the foot of the falls on the north side of the river. The following year James Cooper also constructed a log building on the north side of the river, which he christened the “North Falls Hotel” after the original name of the settlement. Hotel guests and nearby settlers found liquor readily available in all of them at any hour.

Life was roughened by more than consumption of raw whiskey. In May 1869 Muskoka pioneer Seymour Penson arrived in Bracebridge and checked out the Royal and Dominion hotels, finding both “very small and primitive.” The former had about ten rooms, the latter double that number, both overcrowded. He stayed at the Dominion, in which the only available accommodation was on the sitting-room floor, where half the hotel’s paying guests slept before an open fireplace.

At the start of the 1870s, Bracebridge’s population numbered 375 but by the end of the decade stood at 1,300. To handle growing accommodation requirements, two more hotels, the British Lion and the North American, were built in 1870 at the corners of Dominion and Ontario streets, facing one another across the roadway. Although the village now had six hotels, they still could not keep up with demand, and guests slept in rows on the floors of the North American, Victoria, Royal, Dominion, British Lion, and Queen’s hotels. The patrons placed great demand on the billiard tables, dining rooms, and especially the bars of these establishments. In addition to housing arriving settlers and travellers, Bracebridge’s hotels competed for the local workingman’s dollar in their bars, a situation that frequently required the services of the constable in order to deal with the brawls that erupted inside and the street fights that occurred outside the premises of the hotels as a result of the their brisk sales of intoxicants. The hoteliers also hosted events to curry favour with powerful local interests, important if they hoped to stay in business in the wide-open way they had become accustomed to.

Temperance forces, which some in Bracebridge saw as aligned with the work of the constables, began to rise in response to the challenges of too much alcohol, and became as active politically as the hoteliers and pro-liquor interests, gaining control of municipal government in 1868. The new council passed bylaws restricting liquor licences in the Bracebridge settlement and imposing stringent regulations, requiring the hotels to become more than glorified drinking holes. The limit was to be five “places of public entertainment,” and new tavern fees were set at twenty-five dollars yearly.

Other measures of restraint were imposed, though in these early days these measures were still controls rather than prohibitions. For instance, after 1868 Bracebridge businesses such as general stores, blacksmith shops, and hardware stores that sought and got shop licences for liquor could only sell whiskey in a minimum of one-quart containers, and could no longer allow customers to drink on the premises. Until then, notes Cotton, “customers could buy small samples such as a dipper full of whiskey (called a ‘grunt’) taken from a barrel at the back of the store” and down it on the spot. Because it was harder to get tavern licences, and because it cost more to build and operate a tavern, he adds, it was much cheaper and easier to obtain a shop licence. “Prospective whiskey merchants could simply buy one hundred dollars’ worth of household and foodstuff articles, rent a commercial space, and roll in the whiskey barrels.”

In the early 1870s, two of Bracebridge’s many hoteliers, George Gow of the Dominion Hotel and Hiram McDonald of the Royal, got themselves elected to municipal council and saw to it that the temperance forces were kept at bay and that those wanting liquor licences got them. In response, temperance crusader Thomas McMurray stepped up his campaign through the Northern Advocate to “End the Traffic in Strong Drink.” The community’s temperance movement would also be shored up during the 1870s by voters from Bracebridge’s increasing number of Protestant churches. Their struggle against Gow and McDonald was aided when, in 1876, a new provincial statute was enacted that sought to cleanse practices in local government by taking tavern and shop licensing away from municipal councils, giving the responsibility to a district licensing commission instead.

Of course, as every constable knew, those who could not buy liquor at a local hotel or tavern might resort to the timeless expedient of stealing it. In June 1885 a man broke into Brasher’s liquor store in Bracebridge and removed a quantity of brandy. Catching the thief was not too hard. He was later found by constables Johnson and Dennison, according to the June 11 edition of Barrie’s Northern Advance, lying beside the railway track in a state of helpless intoxication.

The battles over booze ebbed and flowed but never came to a standstill. All the while, hapless police faced the conundrum of having to work the middle ground of law enforcement in a deeply divided community. Public drunkenness was a problem, but the temperance movement aim of tighter liquor control would only increase the constabulary’s challenges, and the workload in Magistrate James Boyer’s court.

Temperance seemed ascendant. By 1886 the Scott Act so restricted licensing of liquor that many hotels were forced to close. By 1890 temperance was increasingly accepted in many quarters as the new standard for right living. The call for temperance had now ominously escalated into the more autocratic and austere policy of prohibition. Driving this zero-tolerance policy were zealous hard-liners, of whom Thomas McMurray, by this time engaged in a Canada-wide tour preaching prohibition, was one of the most ardent.

In response, the work of distilling and distributing alcohol went underground. “Stills appeared everywhere in Muskoka’s backwoods,” reports Cotton, “and ‘blind pigs’ or bootlegging became a growth industry.” One such operation in Oakley Township, east of Bracebridge, came to light when charges laid in Magistrate’s Court in September 1898.

Not all distilling operations were hidden in the back woods, though. When a 1902 fire destroyed many buildings in Bracebridge’s downtown business core on a cold February night, the oldest structure to fall was the Brown Estate building, which had a frame made from heavy timbers hewn in the bush back in the days when first-class pine could be had for the cutting within a few hundred yards of where the building stood. In the attic of this early Bracebridge structure firemen discovered a large tank, which licence inspector E.F. Stephenson and the liquor commissioners examined, pronouncing it part of a still. How it came to be there, nobody in Bracebridge volunteered.

Despite local initiatives by Bracebridge’s formidable temperance forces and newly enacted provincial measures that gave their cause the force of law, alcohol continued to flow through the veins of many Muskokans in the 1890s. In turn, cases arising from the exploits and conundrums of individuals “under the influence” continued to pass, just as steadily, through Muskoka Magistrate’s Court, until 1911, when a majority of Bracebridge citizens finally voted the municipality “dry” in a prohibition plebiscite.

Throughout the bench book, one can find many cases where booze served as a contributing factor in the charges laid. Alcohol also extracted costs from others in Muskoka, particularly the family members of society’s underside — the hungry children and beaten wives — who experienced much pain and suffering. The plight of most may never have made it into the pages of James Boyer’s bench book or the Bracebridge newspapers, but would certainly have tallied negatively in the integrity ledgers of the town’s tavern owners.

Conditions of social rawness became aggravated, as already described, with the presence of logging crews in Muskoka. The next assault wave arrived with the roughneck construction gangs building the railways. From the 1870s into the 1890s, railway construction stimulated a booming regional economy, drawing into central Muskoka “thousands of tough railway navvies.” Fighting between them and the shantymen of the lumber camps followed as night the day, and, as Cotton documents in Whiskey and Wickedness, “use of firearms and knives became quite commonplace in the 1870s and 1880s, resulting in a number of deaths.” By 1900, with completion of Muskoka’s major railway construction projects, many of these rowdy men had moved on, and, combined with more stringent control over the liquor situation, the raw life of Bracebridge seemed to be ebbing into a more genteel social order.

The sex trade, however, remained a constant. No amount of Victorian hypocrisy or supposed social gentility could mask matters that constables had to address in a country where the law, in criminalizing such commerce, created the brothels of Bracebridge. “Wherever there is plenty of money and lots of young single men,” observed Cotton of this phenomenon in Muskoka’s capital, “houses of ill-repute seemed to flourish.”

From the early 1870s through the 1880s, bordellos, often operating as boarding houses and inns, required steady attention from the Bracebridge law enforcers. Two such establishments were closed down in March 1880 when the women who acted as the “proprietors” of each were convicted by Magistrate James Boyer of keeping houses of prostitution. As Orillia’s Packet reported on March 31 that year, these women were given heavy fines, but also made to know that the fines would not be enforced if they left Bracebridge within three days. That was James Boyer’s preferred way of addressing the problem: in effect, moving it to some other municipality.

Not only Orillia’s newspapers, but also businessmen from that town thirty-five miles to the south, took attentive interest in the red lights of Bracebridge. Orillia’s Sam Smith, for instance, operated a prospering Bracebridge house with four female hostesses during the winter of 1885. “The business became so popular,” reports Cotton, that Bracebridge police “could no longer ignore it.” Constables Ouderkirk and Binyan organized a team of special constables for a raid on Smith’s premises.

News of the episode not only titillated readers of Orillia’s ever gossipy Packet, but also those of Barrie’s high-minded Northern Advance, both of which reported on March 5 that year how Sam Smith had been arrested outside the house, another man chased without capture because he knew a road down a hill better than the pursuing constables, and how charges and convictions quickly followed. Smith, as owner of the establishment, was fined seventy dollars and told to get out of town. Four females were given thirty-six hours to do likewise.

Bracebridge police could not rest for long, however. Two months later, constables Howard, Ouderkirk, and Johnson raided another house, arresting two inmates and “a regular customer” by the name of Jack Beaudry.

Nudity of a more public variety occurred down at the river, where swimming was popular, especially among those too poor to afford bathing costumes. No one much cared about this perfect human encounter with nature, other than some older church-goers and their smooth-faced ministers, who mistook the muddy banks of the Muskoka River for a slippery slope to degenerate living. In time council came to put that point of view into Bracebridge Bylaw Number 128, dealing with morals. It stipulated that bathers in the river could no longer be naked.

Despite this quest for moral uplift, it took time for this bylaw on bathing attire to take hold within Bracebridge town limits. In 1911 during the intense heat of summer, after police chief McConnell received several complaints that boys swimming in the river had neglected to clothe themselves sufficiently, if at all, he loudly announced through the newspapers that he was “going to lay charges.” McConnell was popular with the boys of the town, who gave him his nickname of “Pink” after the famous Pinkerton detectives, their short and cryptic name facilitating urgent warnings of “Here comes Pink!” Probably all the advance warning McConnell circulated helped ensure that no charges were ever laid, allowing some great swims to occur in Bracebridge that year.

A mixture of fear and pride accompanied these men who, usually with little or no training for the job, donned uniforms and enforced the law across Canada’s uneven frontier terrain. With “peace and order” two cornerstones of the country’s constitution, it fell to local law enforcers to make this conceptual attribute a reality where it counted: on the streets of the country’s towns, especially after nightfall. The local justice of the peace enabled prompt, close-at-hand resolution of conflicts, while the constable was equally a stabilizing influence in an instable society. That influence derived its power from being able to bring lawbreakers to face a range of punishments.