Читать книгу Ginger - Susan Mayse - Страница 7

Brutal heat, heavy and close as a fever blanket, was one thing people remembered about July 1918.

On Vancouver Island, the fire hazard rose to extreme danger. A single spark could ignite hundreds of square miles, levelling virgin forest and Indian settlements and raw new towns without prejudice. It was no time to be in the woods anyway; mosquitoes, bad that summer, added to the misery of hot restless nights. People in the town of Cumberland retreated to beach shacks or tents at nearby Comox Lake. It was only a three-mile walk, unless they rode the Canadian Collieries train carrying workers up to Number Four pit at the lake and coal from Number Four down to tidewater at Union Bay. Cumberland was a coal mining town.

Only the police worked hard in the sultry weather. Posses of British Columbia Provincial Police had been searching for fugitives since May in the mountainous wilderness around the far end of Comox Lake. The police considered the handful of men they hunted armed and dangerous, but the Cumberland people in lake tents or shacks were untroubled for their own safety. These fugitives were not murderers. In a black year when even Quakers and Mennonites were denied exemption from military service as conscientious objectors, the young men were socialist and pacifist draft evaders.

Cumberland people had distrusted the police since the bitter coal strike four years earlier. Now the posses were an incessant irritation, as bad as the mosquitoes. Cumberlanders instructed their children to answer police questions, “I don’t know.” By July, they had organized supply lines to keep the draft evaders provided with food.

The police, aware of this illegal aid, intensified the search. Cruising the bush, searching the long lake in a small motor launch, several times they came close enough to recognize the fugitives—one had a bushy black beard, another had red hair. A party of British Columbia Provincial Police even made the arduous hike from Port Alberni on the west coast over the central mountains and glaciers of Vancouver Island. They returned empty-handed. By the dog days at the end of July, provincial constables like ex-miner Robert Rushford of Cumberland were back to their town foot patrols and petty theft cases, leaving enforcement of the Military Service Act to others. Draft evasion and desertion in 1918 were serious offences which drew sentences of a year or more at hard labour. The men now combing the bush around Comox Lake belonged to the Dominion Police, a military force responsible in part for security and counter-subversion.

Survey Point lay at the top of the lake roughly twelve miles southwest of the tenters and about fifteen miles from Cumberland. The distances were deceptive. Mature second-growth timber grew on slopes as steep as forty-five degrees, tangled in almost impenetrable undergrowth, rocky underfoot, broken by creeks and gullies, blocked by fallen logs. The hillsides were studded with tall notched stumps, signs of first-cut logging in earlier whipsaw and ox-team days. The terrain was so punishing that a good woodsman, to travel one mile as the crow flies, sometimes had to hike three miles up mountainsides and around streams or pothole lakes. It was mostly too rough for saddle horses or pack mules. There were no roads or real trails. Only half-imagined game trails indented the dense bush, marked by the solitary passages of cougar, black bear and small island deer.

The police sweated at their strenuous work this scorching Saturday. Inspector William Devitt, forty-nine, had recently joined the military police after nearly two decades as city clerk, tax assessor and police chief in the BC interior towns of Trail, Rossland and Nelson. Corporal George Rowe was a former customs collector. Special Constable Daniel Campbell, forty-five, an experienced hunter and woodsman, had until recently managed a hotel and saloon near Victoria. Campbell took off his jacket and pinned his glittering badge to his vest. His smart white-striped black shirt would not be too conspicuous in the dim light filtering between tall trees. It was early afternoon. This morning near Survey Bay, guided by local trappers Tommy Anderson and Dad Janes, they had made the first real breakthrough in the long pursuit.

About a mile in from the lake the three policemen located one of the fugitives’ caches near a large boulder. There they found a rifle, cooking utensils, clothing, a pair of miner’s boots and other supplies which they recached nearby. The trappers reported a faint trail leading toward the south fork of Cruikshank Creek—a good trout stream even in high summer when smaller streams produced wormy fish with a muddy taste—and then onward up the steep timbered flank of Alone Mountain. But had the draft evaders fled up the mountain or were they hiding near the creek?

Janes and Anderson took the mountain trail. Campbell led Devitt and Rowe along a small blazed trail nearer to the creek below. When Devitt saw fresh footprints on an even fainter trail, he took Rowe to investigate.

Campbell continued alone on a path blocked by fallen logs and heavy underbrush. After a few minutes, shockingly, he almost collided with a stranger. The slight red-haired man in a faded blue shirt carried a rifle which he quickly pointed at the special constable. Campbell had no time to aim, but pulled the trigger even as he raised his own weapon, a custom-made .30 Marlin hunting rifle. His soft-nosed bullet ricocheted off the fugitive’s wrist and struck him in the throat, severed the spinal cord and blasted a hole through the back right side of his neck. The man fell clutching his rifle in both hands, and quickly died.

Campbell stood paralyzed by fear and dismay. As soon as he gathered his wits he yelled for the others. “Come!”

A few minutes later they crashed through the undergrowth to find the special constable standing dumbstruck on a fallen log on the steep hillside, still holding his rifle. They had heard a single shot, but still did not know what had happened. Devitt approached, asking for an explanation, and saw a man lying face-down on the mossy ground.

Private Goodwin, serial number 270432, was the name on his unclaimed order to report for military service; this was one of the draft evaders identified in a military police description. Albert Goodwin was the name on his union card. He was Brother Goodwin to fellow executives of the British Columbia Federation of Labour, and to other Marxian socialists he was Comrade Goodwin. He signed his letters “Yours in Revolt,” and later “Fraternally Yours for Socialism.” Casual acquaintances called him Al or Sandy or Sam or Red. His friends called him Ginger.

“Arrest military defaulters” was the posse’s order, not “shoot on sight.” Yet inadvertently or otherwise the government was rid of a vociferous critic of key policies, and a troublesome source of wartime dissent and socialist subversion. In Dan Campbell’s preliminary investigation for manslaughter in Victoria a week and a half later, his lawyer said, “Why put this man to the expense of a trial when it is a foregone conclusion that no reasonable, fair-minded jury would convict him? As to the use of a soft-nosed bullet, Campbell would have been justified in using a bomb in self-defence.”

“I am sorry for Mr. Campbell,” said one of the two presiding judges. “We will commit him to the higher court.”

On October 1, 1918, the grand jury of the Victoria fall assizes heard witnesses for several hours in the afternoon. The next morning, after less than forty-five minutes in court, the grand jury judges decided not to send the matter to trial. Dan Campbell walked away a free man.

This official account of Albert “Ginger” Goodwin’s shooting resides in transcripts of the Cumberland coroner’s inquiry and the Victoria preliminary investigation, and newspaper accounts inoffensive enough to escape stringent wartime censorship.

The case would go no further in court. Troubling discrepancies and difficulties, however, have to this day kept it unofficially active. Any one of these discrepancies would seriously discredit the legitimacy of Dan Campbell’s hearings, let alone the legitimacy of his shooting of Albert Goodwin. Many discrepancies taken together suggest a serious miscarriage of justice.

The official story reconstructed above derives entirely from public records. If these provided the only available information, Goodwin’s story would remain an insignificant case of a criminal who died violently resisting arrest. But we have more. No information ban, no “exoneration of guilt by the province’s highest court,” as one newspaper called it, could fully suppress the other side of the story, the unofficial side.

At the coroner’s inquiry Joseph Naylor, speaking for Goodwin’s family and friends, was first to challenge the approved version. In two weeks he was behind bars on a charge of aiding draft evaders, a charge dismissed months later for lack of evidence. In the three-quarters of a century since, many have spoken up to counter and fill gaps in the police claims. Some are on the record in considerable detail, unofficially and uncensored. Many of these voices of dissent have now fallen silent in death.

At first the people who spoke up were Goodwin’s friends and labour movement associates like Joe Naylor. Then they were friends of his friends—like my father Arthur Mayse who first heard the story from Dick James and Waddy Williams in 1934—and their children. Later still they were people who stumbled across an enigmatic story between the lines of fragmentary texts, or discovered an extraordinary headstone in a Cumberland cemetery. All have raised the same challenge, the same question.

Why, and how, did Albert Goodwin die? Violently resisting arrest, or trying to surrender, or walking into an ambush? What had he done, what was he planning to do, that would bring military police after him shooting to kill?

Our deaths often define our lives. Goodwin’s death has overlaid his life with both the official story’s base residue and a radiant patina of legend that obscures the truth just as surely. Ginger Goodwin would love every gleaming word; for a man committed to commonality, he clearly prized his own singularity. But as this story is too consequential for repressive falsehoods, it is likewise too consequential for flattering iconography. Instead it demands the difficult task of going back to uncover—beneath the passions and confusions and lies—something like the truth. Let us ask again, and until we have an answer: Why, and how, did Ginger Goodwin die?