Life’s crazy jumble was presented in Magistrate’s Court according to its own sequence and harmonies of organization, and that is how it was recorded by James Boyer. Instead of reproducing ten years’ worth of cases as they occurred day after day, however, I’ve grouped them into twenty-six thematic “acts” for a more comprehensive sense of the way justice was dispensed. But categories impose artificial barriers between the elements of life as it actually occurs, and the trade-off for orderly comparison of similar events can limit understanding at a higher level. I fear my quest for a suitable category in which to place an episode parallels a constable’s 1890s challenge in deciding which of several possible charges to lay in a complex situation. For instance, in one case a settler brought his neighbour before the magistrate on a charge of unlawfully killing ducks on Sunday, and collected half the fine. Is that best placed with the cases of (a) illegal hunting of game, (b) breaching observance of The Lord’s Day Act, (c) those ongoing feuds between neighbours that intermittently escalate to laying charges, or (d) how the justice system awarded private citizens a portion of the fine for bringing a lawbreaker to court? Because that real 1897 event incorporated all four, placing the case in the “Ill-Gotten Game” chapter rather than in the “Saving the Sabbath” chapter was, like the labelling in several other cases, as artfully arbitrary as a director deciding where on stage certain performers should stand.
Some further choices had to be made, too, when translating five hundred handwritten pages of 1890s cases into a contemporary book. Some similar cases have been dropped from the chapters on fighting, drinking, and suing for unpaid wages; after a while, one gets the point, and space is limited. Likewise, a few cases that involved only an arraignment, guilty plea, and sentencing, with no interesting evidence about what transpired, have been excluded. Yet, most cases, including many similarly sparse on detail, have been reproduced because they portray life in its rawer varieties and provide a cumulative impression of life behind the picturesque postcard images of Muskoka.
You will not encounter Muskoka’s leading lights or major characters here. If not for a brief entry in James Boyer’s bench book, there would be no remembrance, in many cases, that the people who do appear in these pages ever lived. These are the walk-on players, the small folk whose limited action gives counterpoint to the leaders acting out grander roles on the town’s stage and in our country’s history. Rarely did the prominent or prosperous, the pious or polite, get dragged into “police court.” The only churches mentioned in these 1890s cases are the Salvation Army and the Free Methodists, which ministered religion to the same threadbare congregation whose members on weekdays found themselves variously reassembled in Magistrate’s Court.
Individuals hauled before the local justices of the peace were not charged for high crimes, but for low-life enjoyment of a Bracebridge brothel; not for capital murder, but for running their knife across the guy wire of a tent at an evangelical prayer meeting, or for threatening to slash his wife’s throat “from ear to ear”; not for defrauding the government of thousands of dollars, but for lifting a silk scarf or stealing a dog.
James Boyer’s bench book, in furnishing the contents for Part II, adds colour to that grey zone of society where good manners end and the rule of law must begin. His Magistrate’s Courtroom, becoming once again an illuminated stage in a long-darkened playhouse, highlights an intrinsic theme of justice: How small people at its margins are treated reveals big truths about a society.
This book is about the meaning of justice in places so out of the way they cannot be identified by local historic site markers, involving lives so minor they cannot be found in the town’s official histories. It was precisely for those hard-pressed individuals, in those twilight places, that civil rights and the possibility of justice meant everything. If the rule of law is not real at ground level, then lofty pronouncements about “justice” can only ring hollow in the ears of struggling citizens.
I believe resurrecting these cases from Canadian history and viewing its fuller picture allows us to interpret human progress better, and more sympathetically. While inadvertent omission is a passive fault, neglect is usually a purposeful one. So, while reprising these brief courtroom appearances of earlier Canadians may entertain and enthrall with the emotions they evoke, perhaps they can also educate and enlighten through their embrace of everyday experience.
Many of these Muskoka Magistrate’s Court cases never made it into the news columns of Bracebridge’s weekly newspapers. When they did, the entries were usually brief: “Chas. Grimes of the township of Watt was before Justice Boyer last Thursday and committed for trial on a charge of stealing saw logs”; “On Tuesday before Justice Boyer, Joshua Earnshaw, a young man of Watt, was charged with having criminally assaulted Eliza Emerson, a 12-year-old girl living in the same township”; “Tuesday afternoon, H.A. Piper was fined $1 and costs, in all $4.50, for using obscene and irritating language on the street towards Annie Hay.”
There is much to ruminate about and reflect upon in this engaging, human, realistic, sometimes funny, and often disturbing view of a rugged and lively small town. Bracebridge in the 1890s is a place and time that is foreign to us now, but the people we encounter may not seem so dissimilar to Canadians today, at their own edges of emotion and in their engagement with raw life.
In the end, the dramatic theme emerging from this seemingly inconsequential tableau of “small-change” cases is nothing less than the most fundamental imperative in all societies: the quality of justice.
The small change of history does add up. The morality of a nation is not confined to pious people in the pews, but is equally on display in the hallowed sanctity of its squat stone jails.
Chapter One
The Venue: From Dirt Floors to the Gay Nineties
Muskoka District, land of First Nations peoples for over five thousand years when Canada’s incomparable explorer David Thompson mapped the place in 1837, was traversed by fur traders and surveyors in the early to mid-1800s, but only felt the hard edge of intrusion with logging along its southern perimeter in the 1850s and land settlement a decade later. Construction of crude colonization roads opened the way for early arrivals. Then the trickle of settlers turned into a flood after Ontario’s legislature, wanting to entice more newcomers to fill and farm the empty tract, enacted The Free Grant Lands and Homestead Act in 1868. The result was a land boom.
The exhilarating promise of a fresh start in life drew many improbable settlers to this wilderness frontier. An anxious jumble of characters abandoned their problems and set out for Muskoka to start anew on their hundred acres of “free” land, hoping to cash in on a promise Ontario’s government and its immigration agents were aggressively promoting through advertisements in American and British newspapers and in the booklet Emigration to Canada: The Province of Ontario, circulated widely in 1869 to publicize Muskoka’s glowing agricultural prospects for new settlers.
Few heading to Muskoka sought a transformation more complete than a desperate thirty-five-year-old lawyer who, early one September morning in 1869, boarded the train in New York as Isaac Jelfs, but stepped off in Toronto as James Boyer. Accompanying him was a pregnant woman, their little girl, a curly-haired teenager, and another woman in her early twenties. Nobody could have mistaken this formally dressed family group for pioneer settlers heading into Muskoka’s wilds to hack a homestead out of dense forest. Yet, such was their intent.
Not only was Jelfs abandoning his name. He was forfeiting a long-craved legal career with the politically influential Broadway Avenue firm of Brown, Hall & Vanderpoel. He was relinquishing his recording secretary’s role with the Episcopalian Methodist Church in Brooklyn. He was abandoning the vice-presidency of the Brooklyn Britannia Benevolent Association, an office to which he’d been glowingly elected in May that year, being presented with a copy of Byron’s poetical works and making, as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “one of his happy speeches on the occasion.”
The real kicker was that he had closed