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