Left bleeding profusely and all alone, Martineau somehow found the strength to crawl to the back door, unbolt it, and drag herself to the shop next door. When the servants opened the door, the sight of the young woman drenched in blood scared them so much they ran. The neighbour, a Mr. Roy, quickly sent for a doctor. After having her wounds stiched closed, Martineau moved to her father’s home to recover. Sadly, strong as she was, Martineau perished ten days later of her wounds, as did the baby growing inside of her. Adolphus Dewey was now being sought for both murder and infanticide.
The Champ-de-Mars park where Adolphus Dewey’s ghost roams. The remains of Montreal’s fortifications can be seen here.
Dewey was apprehended in Plattsburgh, New York, and sent back to Montreal for trial. His incarceration and trial (which lasted only one day) received international attention and has been called the highest-profile murder trial in nineteenth-century Montreal. The attention the trial received was due mainly to the extreme cruelty and bloodiness of the murder, as well as the young woman’s pregnancy.
Dewey spent four months in chains in his cell in a Montreal penitentiary known for its inhumane conditions. It was there that he became suddenly devout, and spent most of his days reading the Bible and praying. One the day of his trial, a huge crowd fought to get into the courtroom to see Dewey, dressed in mourning clothes, with his three lawyers. Though Dewey’s legal team tried to convince the jury that he wasn’t guilty due to mental derangement, after two dozen witnesses were called against him, it took the jury only fifteen minutes to declare him guilty.
Everyone came to the hanging, which was one of the most popular in Montreal’s history. The Champ-de-Mars fields, which currently stretch out behind the Old Montreal Courthouse (now City Hall) and the Palais de Justice de Montréal, were at the time a terrific place to view executions taking place by the walls of the prison. King claims it was known as the best place in the British Empire to see a hanging, and families would often pack a picnic and bring their children to the event.
Dewey wore a black suit for his execution and gave a speech on the scaffold to the enormous crowd. He apologized for his crime, spoke of God, and asked that the crowd pray for him. The hanging itself was gruesome and long, due to the fact that Dewey’s neck didn’t break when he fell. In a grim parallel to his wife’s prolonged death, Dewey twisted on the rope for a good four minutes, frothing at the mouth while ten thousand citizens watched.
Champ-de-Mars is now a picturesque park. Little evidence of the ghastly deaths that once occurred there remain. That is, unless you decide to walk there at night, when you might be approached by the good-natured ghost of Adolphus Dewey, who is known to give much needed advice to those who are down on their luck. One hundred and eighty-five years later, he haunts the grounds where he came to his bitter end, still trying to make up for his terrible crime. Or, perhaps, he is still trying to convince the people of Montreal that he isn’t the monster we all know he was.
A Timeline of Tragedies:
Historic Violence, Massacres, and Disasters
When researching a book like this, there are always those interesting stories that lack the detail or support to warrant a full chapter. We occasionally have to abandon those pieces in favour of longer tales with more details to share. However, sometimes there is a theme that runs through some of these shorter pieces, something that provides the thread to sew them together. Combined with a few of the longer items, these can be made into a cohesive chapter that follows a particular theme.
This chapter is a showcase for some such stories and provides a simple timeline of some of the various historical violent incidents, massacres, and disasters, both natural and man-made, that have occurred in Montreal. They show the breadth of tragedies that have befallen the city over the centuries.
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The history of Montreal goes back a long time, long before the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century. The land known today as the City of Montreal was inhabited for two thousand years by Haudenosaunee, Wyandot, and Algonquin. Early Algonquin oral history denotes Montreal as “The First Stopping Place” as part of their journey from the Atlantic coast.
When Jacques Cartier arrived in 1535 he renamed the Hochelaga River the St. Lawrence River in honour of the Roman martyr and saint. He also bestowed a new name on the mountain that lies in the heart of Montreal, calling it “Mont Royal” in honour of King Francis I of France. It is believed that the name of Montreal was derived from that. Cartier’s reception by a St. Lawrence Iroquoians nation was a positive one (see “The Missing Village of Hochelaga”). But not all interactions from that point forward were positive. Throughout the city’s early history, there were conflicts and massacres.
Almost seventy years later, Samuel de Champlain built a temporary fort and established a fur-trading post. He would have had no way of knowing that the “temporary” structure would eventually host a population of over six hundred colonists as Fort Ville-Marie (built in 1642), and, eventually, the sprawling metropolis of the City of Montreal.
Champlain would also not have foreseen the bloody battles that would take place on the land, nor some of the tragedies that would befall it. Below is a brief timeline of some of those, with a few additional details:
The Flood of 1642
The steel cross on Mount Royal, which continues to be a significant attraction for visitors to the city, was erected in 1924. But the original cross that it replaced was a wooden one, put there on January 6, 1643, by Paul de Chomeday de Maisonneuve in order to thank God for sparing the local population of the village of Montreal, which had been founded in May 1642.
Shortly after the city’s founding, an unexpected spring-type thaw in December resulted in massive flooding of the land along the St. Lawrence River. The rising flood waters were a real threat to the people of the village. De Maisonneuve prayed to the Virgin Mary to spare the people of Montreal and promised, if his prayers were answered, to erect a cross on a nearby mountain.
After the flood waters retreated, as if in answer to his prayers, he did as he had promised and erected the wooden cross that was replaced more than two hundred and eighty years later.
Bloody Battles and War with the Haudenosaunee
Prior to the arrival of Europeans and the establishment of the fur trade, war among Indigenous nations had a purpose other than the slaughter of one’s enemy. The Haudenosaunee, for example, treated the loss of life and the consolation of a loved one as significant. Due to a belief that the death of a family member had the effect of weakening the spiritual strength of the survivors, it was critical to replace the lost person with a substitute by raiding neighbouring groups in search of captives.
In 1609 Samuel de Champlain recorded that he witnessed a number of battles between the Haudenosaunee and the Algonquin in which very few deaths occurred. This aligned with the understanding that the main purpose of war for the Haudenosaunee was to take prisoners. For the Haudenosaunee, death in battle was avoided at all costs, because of their belief that the souls of those killed in battle were destined to spend the rest of eternity as angry ghosts wandering about in search of vengeance. In fighting against the French, they developed tactics of a quick retreat and setting up stealthy ambush attacks.
During what is known as the Lachine Massacre in 1689, Haudenosaunee warriors launched a surprise attack on the settlement of Lachine, which was located at the lower end of Montreal Island. Here is a description of the attack from the book Ville-Marie, Or, Sketches of Montreal: Past and Present:
During the night of 5th of August 1400 Iroquois traverse the Lake St. Louis, and disembarked silently on the upper part of the island. Before daybreak next morning the invaders had taken their station at Lachine, in platoons around every house within