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