Looking back, it is easy to believe this haphazard system might have been better. Yet, an early Muskoka justice of the peace, W.E. Foot, shows why it was hard for the attorney general’s office in Toronto to know where, across Ontario’s sprawling hinterland, all its JPs were scattered. Foot hustled to Canada from Ireland in 1872 to claim free land in Muskoka’s Medora Township, locating his property at an indentation of Lake Muskoka that he named “Foot’s Bay.” However, like many other free-grant settlers, he later moved into Bracebridge, leaving behind his original name on that lakeside locale.
In Bracebridge Mr. Foot became active as a justice of the peace, among other things, but in the early 1880s the aptly named man again took foot, shipping out this time for the Northwest Territory. There he stayed until relocating to Toronto in 1886. Then he quit the provincial capital for Parry Sound, where he became deputy registrar and justice of the peace for the next twenty years. Clearly, being a JP did not hold one down. As Foot in fact showed, it was a ticket to ride in Canada’s mobile and developing society during the country’s dynamic decades of settlement. He became part of society’s free-floating supply of JPs. His story was far from unique.
Beyond death and mobility, something else made it hard to keep an accurate central record in Toronto of who, at any given time, might be presiding in Ontario’s far-flung Magistrate’s Courts. Justices of the peace included everyone elected as mayors and reeves, plus all those appointed game wardens. By virtue of holding their office or position, they were empowered ex officio (emanating from office) to act as JPs in addition to their other duties. This component of the system not only ensured a well-grounded local element, but reinforced the local power structure, the crossover or combination of roles oddly echoing the magistrates’ earlier all-embracing role in local governance. The fact that municipal elections were held every New Year’s Day meant that across the province a reasonably frequent turnover occurred among those who held these offices. This annual change in elected officials contributed to the confusion over who was sitting as a justice of the peace. The number of game wardens was equally uncertain, for similar reasons of appointment and continuance in office.
Sometimes the only person available to hear a case was one of these ex officio municipal officials. Huntsville, twenty-five miles north of Bracebridge, was incorporated as a village in 1886, so, from that date, Huntsville’s first reeve, L.E. Kinton, could have acted as a JP, giving swifter justice and avoiding the cost and inconvenience of travel to Bracebridge. Life must have been peaceful in Huntsville’s opening days, however, because the first recorded dispute only came several years later when Dr. F.L. Howland, Kinton’s successor as reeve, presided in a makeshift courtroom. The case involved two Chaffey Township neighbours who got into a fight over a contested line fence between their properties.
The complainant, with one blackened eye swollen shut and the other side of his face puffed up, sat in court by himself, looking dejected, seeking justice for his black eye and redress for his removed fence. The defendant, a much smaller man, recounted local historian Joe Cookson, sat beside his wife, “a very hefty and capable looking woman,” “looking equally as glum.”
As a lone justice of the peace, Reeve Howland was to review the case and, if he found the complaint justified, send it for trial in Bracebridge. Howland questioned the complainant about the reason for the dispute, asked about the location of the attack, then inquired, “How many times did this man hit you?”
“Oh! He never hit me, your honour. No siree, it was her. That woman’s a regular devil, your honour. She’s a menace to the countryside.”
“You’re sure the defendant himself never struck you?”
“Quite sure, your honour. He’s a kindly sort of man. But her, I sure could tell you plenty.”
“Never mind,” coughed Dr. Howland, as he cleared his throat, looked down, and shuffled some papers on his desk. He then looked up again to pronounce: “I’m going to dismiss this case and bind all three of you over to keep the peace. In regards to the fence, next time I see the reeve of Chaffey I’ll get him to send his ‘fence viewers’ over to look the situation over. We’ll abide by their decision. Case dismissed.”
Whether as a medical man, or head of a council, or the newspaper editor he also was, Dr. Howland as an ex officio justice of the peace had clearly acquired practical ways to resolve contentious matters.
A small town’s watchful eyes and active tongues usually meant that culprits and perpetrators were promptly arraigned.
One day some men were brought up for tossing attention-getting candies at girls during a Salvation Army church service. Then next, a sly trapper appeared after getting caught with 176 muskrat pelts out of season. Plenty of heavier action was served up, too: men fighting in the woods with axes, men fighting along the roads with shovels and buggy whips, a husband threatening to slit his wife’s throat from ear to ear with his straight razor.
A constant flow of assault and battery cases moved through Magistrate’s Court in 1890s Bracebridge, too, as men settled scores and the town danced to its steady rhythm of street brawls.
The slosh of alcohol showed up everywhere, from harmless drunks sitting in the street to instruct enthralled school children, to spiteful ones slipping insinuations about a man’s wife into barroom talk and provoking a bare-knuckled, knockdown fistfight. Life was raw in many ways. Shooting a neighbour’s dog did not go unpunished. Those who destroyed other men’s fences, whether through burning, stealing, or vandalizing, were brought to justice.
The town was a theatre that never closed, and the justice of the peace was always standing by, ready to perform his leading role with the ever-shifting cast of characters.
A variety of conflicts to be adjudicated were spawned by disagreements over money and commerce, such as financial struggles over unpaid wages and broken contracts. Logs, because they were valuable, were often the object of money-based conflicts, as men struggled to acquire these assets through illegal cutting, outright theft, bushlot battles over the location of property lines and the logs within them, and skirmishes over unmarked logs allegedly found in the public domain along the roadside.
Captains charged for operating boats without a licence for commercial purposes, for transporting more paying passengers across Muskoka’s lakes than their boats were authorized to carry, or for selling fresh garden produce to summer cottagers (including a judge) at the end of their docks without being licensed to do so, presented another face of Muskoka’s ongoing conflicts: local officials sought to regulate commerce by challenging enterprising individuals who, for their part, helpfully sought to provide important services in a district dependant on tourism. It was a defining conflict for “the rule of law.”
Joining this steady parade of criminal and financial cases, another procession through the Magistrate’s Courtroom emanated from the community’s social and cultural impulses. On this stage the magistrate’s performance was to enforce laws that satisfied community norms when lack of respect, absence of courtesy, cutting corners, dodging blame, creating mischief, making mistakes, expressing rude resentments, or indulging in escapades went beyond accepted standards of propriety. In this, James Boyer had to contend with the double standards of humans who celebrate virtue but look to find it in others more than in themselves.
Brothels, whether operating in town or at a discreet buggy ride’s distance into the countryside, generated courtroom sensations, and in doing so, epitomized the conflicts created by the community’s double standard. Less serious but in like vein was a honeymoon charivari in Bracebridge that amused many townsfolk who chuckled to think that the groom was not the only young man to have fun on his wedding night, but which predictably offended a few. The event became a cause of mild consternation after its youthful perpetrators were dragged by the town’s stern chief constable, “Old Man Dodd,” before a bemused magistrate as the community sought to find its markers for moral probity.
Other cases, whether arising from misbehaviour at church meetings and theatrical performances, or other unmannerly outbreaks, seem petty by almost any standard. Yet, they do serve to underscore how some law or other against public mischief is always handy and