Pig War

The Pig War was a confrontation in 1859 between the United States and the British Empire over the boundary between the US and the British Empire. The territory in dispute was the San Juan Islands, which lie between Vancouver Island and the North American mainland. The Pig War, so called because it was triggered by the shooting of a pig, is also called the Pig Episode, the Pig and Potato War, the San Juan Boundary Dispute or the Northwestern Boundary Dispute. With no shots exchanged and no human casualties, this dispute was a bloodless conflict.

Background

The Oregon Treaty of June 15, 1846, resolved the Oregon boundary dispute by dividing the Oregon Country/Columbia District between the United States and Britain “along the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver Island, and thence southerly through the middle of the said channel, and of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, to the Pacific Ocean.”

However, there are actually two straits which could be called the middle of the channel: Haro Strait, along the west side of the San Juan Islands; and Rosario Strait, along the east side.

In 1846 there was still some uncertainty about the geography of the region. The most commonly available maps were those of George Vancouver, published in 1798, and of Charles Wilkes, published in 1845. In both cases the maps are unclear in the vicinity of the southeastern coast of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. As a result, Haro Strait is not fully clear either.

In 1856, the US and Britain set up a Boundary Commission to resolve a number of issues regarding the international boundary, including the water boundary from the Strait of Georgia to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The British appointed James Charles Prevost First Commissioner, George Henry Richards Second Commissioner, and William A.G. Young Secretary. The US appointed Archibald Campbell First Commissioner, John Parke Second Commissioner, and William J. Warren Secretary. On June 27, 1857, the American and British commissioners met for the first time on board the British ship H.M.S. Satellite, anchored in Esquimalt Harbour. The two sides met several more times in 1857 in Esquimalt Harbour and Nanaimo Harbour, and corresponded by letter between meetings. The water boundary was discussed from October to December. From the start, Prevost maintained that Rosario Strait was required by the treaty’s wording and was intended by the treaty framers, while Campbell had the same opinion for Haro Strait.

Prevost held that the channel specified in the treaty must have three key qualities:

1. it must separate the continent from Vancouver Island,
2. it must carry the boundary in a southerly direction, and
3. it must be navigable.

Only Rosario fulfilled these requirements, he wrote. Campbell countered that the expression “southerly”, in the treaty, was to be understood in a general sense, that Rosario Strait did not separate the continent from Vancouver Island, but the San Juan Islands from Lummi Island, Cypress Island, Fidalgo Island, and others, and that navigability was not germane to the issue, but even if it was, Haro Strait was the wider and more direct passage. Finally he challenged Prevost to produce any evidence showing that the treaty framers had intended Rosario Strait. Prevost responded to the challenge by referring to American maps showing the boundary running through Rosario Strait, included one by John C. Frémont, produced for and published by the US government, and another by John B. Preston, Surveyor-General of Oregon in 1852. To the other points, Prevost repeated his statements about Rosario Strait’s navigability—the channels between Lummi, Cypress, and Fidalgo islands not being navigable—and that a line through Rosario would be southerly, while one through Haro would have to be drawn westerly. The two continued to discuss the issue into December 1857, until it was clear what each side’s argument was and that neither would be convinced of the other. Prevost made a final offer at the sixth meeting, December 3. He suggested a compromise line through San Juan Channel, which would give the US all the main islands except San Juan Island. This offer was rejected and the commission adjourned, agreeing to report back to their respective governments. Thus ambiguity over the water boundary remained.

Because of this ambiguity, both the United States and Britain claimed sovereignty over the San Juan Islands. During this period of disputed sovereignty, Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company established operations on San Juan and turned the island into a sheep ranch. Meanwhile by mid-1859, twenty-five to twenty-nine American settlers had arrived.

San Juan Island held significance not for its size, but as a military strategic point. While the British held Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island to the west, overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the entry point to Haro Strait, leading to the Strait of Georgia, the nation that held the San Juan Islands would be able to dominate all the straits connecting the Strait of Juan de Fuca with the Strait of Georgia.

The pig

On June 15, 1859, exactly thirteen years after the adoption of the Oregon Treaty, the ambiguity led to direct conflict. Lyman Cutlar, an American farmer who had moved onto the island claiming rights to live there under the Donation Land Claim Act, found a large black pig rooting in his garden. He had found the pig eating his tubers. This was not the first occurrence. Cutlar was so upset that he took aim and shot the pig, killing it. It turned out that the pig was owned by an Irishman, Charles Griffin, who was employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company to run the sheep ranch. He also owned several pigs which he allowed to roam freely. The two had lived in peace until this incident. Cutlar offered $10 to Griffin to compensate for the pig, but Griffin was unsatisfied with this offer and demanded $100. Following this reply, Cutlar believed he should not have to pay for the pig because the pig had been trespassing on his land. (A possibly apocryphal story claims Cutlar said to Griffin, “It was eating my potatoes.” Griffin replied, “It is up to you to keep your potatoes out of my pig.”) When British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar, American settlers called for military protection.

Military escalation

Brigadier-General William S. Harney, commanding the Dept. of Oregon, initially dispatched 66 American soldiers of the 9th Infantry under the command of Captain George Pickett to San Juan Island with orders to prevent the British from landing. Concerned that a squatter population of Americans would begin to occupy San Juan Island if the Americans were not kept in check, the British sent three warships under the command of Captain Geoffrey Hornby to counter the Americans. Pickett was famously quoted as saying defiantly, “We’ll make a Bunker Hill of it,” placing him in the national limelight. The situation continued to escalate. By August 10, 1859, 461 Americans with 14 cannon under Colonel Silas Casey were opposed by five British warships mounting 70 guns and carrying 2,140 men. During this time, no shots were fired.

The governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island, James Douglas, ordered British Rear Admiral Robert L. Baynes to land marines on San Juan Island and engage the American soldiers under the command of Brigadier-General Harney. (Harney’s forces had occupied the island since July 27, 1859.) Baynes refused, deciding that “two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig” was foolish. Local commanding officers on both sides had been given essentially the same orders: defend yourselves, but absolutely do not fire the first shot. For several days, the British and U.S. soldiers exchanged insults, each side attempting to goad the other into firing the first shot, but discipline held on both sides, and thus no shots were fired.

Resolution

When news about the crisis reached Washington and London, officials from both nations were shocked and took action to calm the potentially explosive international incident.

In September, U.S. President James Buchanan sent General Winfield Scott to negotiate with Governor Douglas and resolve the growing crisis. This was in the best interest of the United States, as sectional tensions within the country were increasing, soon to culminate in the Civil War. Scott had calmed two other border crises between the two nations in the late 1830s. He arrived in the San Juans in October and began negotiations with Douglas.

As a result of the negotiations, both sides agreed to retain joint military occupation of the island until a final settlement could be reached, reducing their presence to a token force of no more than 100 men. The “British Camp” was established on the north end of San Juan Island along the shoreline, for ease of supply and access; and the “American Camp” was created on the south end on a high, windswept meadow, suitable for artillery barrages against shipping. Today the Union Jack still flies above the “British Camp”, being raised and lowered daily by park rangers, making it one of the very few places without diplomatic status where US government employees regularly hoist the flag of another country.

During the years of joint military occupation, the small British and American units on San Juan Island had a very amicable mutual social life, visiting one another’s camps to celebrate their respective national holidays and holding various athletic competitions. Park rangers tell visitors the biggest threat to peace on the island during these years was “the large amounts of alcohol available.”

This state of affairs continued for the next 12 years. The dispute was peacefully resolved after more than a decade of confrontation and military bluster, during which time the local British authorities consistently lobbied London to seize back the Puget Sound region entirely, as the Americans were busy elsewhere with the Civil War. In 1866, the Colony of Vancouver Island was merged with the Colony of British Columbia to form an enlarged Colony of British Columbia. In 1871, the enlarged colony joined the newly formed Dominion of Canada. That year, Great Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Washington, which dealt with various differences between the two nations, including border issues involving the newly formed Dominion. Among the results of the treaty was the decision to resolve the San Juan dispute by international arbitration, with Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany chosen to act as arbitrator. Wilhelm referred the issue to a three-man arbitration commission which met in Geneva for nearly a year. On October 21, 1872, the commission decided in favor of the United States. The arbitrator chose the American-preferred marine boundary via Haro Strait, to the west of the islands, over the British preference for Rosario Strait which lay to their east.

On November 25, 1872, the British withdrew their Royal Marines from the British Camp. The Americans followed by July 1874.

Canadian politicians and public, already angry with the Oregon Treaty, were once again upset that Britain had not looked after their interests, and Canada sought greater autonomy in international affairs.

The Pig War is commemorated in San Juan Island National Historical Park.

 

Hector (Ship)

Hector was a ship famous for having been part of the first significant migration of Scottish settlers to Nova Scotia in 1773. The replica of the original ship is located at the Hector Heritage Quay, a heritage center run by local volunteers, in Pictou.

History

A full rigged Fluyt, Hector (built in the Netherlands before 1750) was employed in local trade in waters off the British Isles as well as the immigrant trade to North America, having made at least one trip c. 1770 carrying Scottish emigrants to Boston, Massachusetts. There is record of a ship named “The Hector”, owned by the Browne Family, built in the Netherlands, which carried the John Budd (1599-1670) Family, and wife Katherine Browne, from England to New Haven, by way of Massachusetts, in 1637. Thomas Hale, and his wife Thomasine (Dowsett) Hale, and their two children were also aboard for this voyage. His cousin was Ann (Browne) Hale.

In 1762 the earliest of the Fuadaich nan Gàidheal (Scottish Highland Clearances) forced many Gaelic families off their ancestral lands. The first ship loaded with Hebridean colonists arrived on “St.-John’s Island” (Prince Edward Island) in 1770, with later ships following in 1772, and 1774. In 1773 a ship named “The Hector” landed in Pictou, Nova Scotia, with 189 settlers, mostly originating from Lochbroom in the Isle of Skye. In 1784 the last barrier to Scottish settlement – a law restricting land-ownership on Cape Breton Island – was repealed, and soon both PEI and Nova Scotia were predominantly Gaelic-speaking. It is estimated more than 50,000 Gaelic settlers immigrated to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island between 1815 and 1870.

Her famous voyage took place in 1773 with a departure date around the second week of July, carrying 189 Highlanders who were immigrating to Nova Scotia. The vessel’s owner, Mr. John Pagan, along with Dr. John Witherspoon, purchased three shares of land near Pictou, Nova Scotia. Pagan and Witherspoon hired John Ross as a recruiting agent for settlers willing to immigrate to Pictou with an offer of free passage, 1 year of free provisions, and a farm. The settlers (23 families, 25 single men) were recruited at Greenock and at Lochbroom (Rossshire) with the majority being from Lochbroom. The settlers that boarded Hector were poor, “obscure, illiterate crofters and artisans from Northern [Scotland], who spoke Gaelic.” The school teacher, William McKenzie was one of the few passengers on the Hector to speak both Gaelic and English.

Hector was an old ship and in poor condition when she left Europe. The arduous voyage to Pictou took 11 weeks, with a gale off Newfoundland causing a 14 day delay. Dysentery and smallpox claimed 18 lives amongst the passengers. The vessel arrived in Pictou Harbour on September 15, landing at Brown’s Point, immediately west of the present-day town of Pictou.

The year’s free provisions never materialized for the passengers of Hector. They had to hurry to build shelter without those provisions before winter set in and starved them.

Replica

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, heritage officials in Nova Scotia sought to commemorate the Hector’s contribution to Nova Scotia’s Scottish history. In 1992, the Ship Hector Foundation was formed from a group of volunteers in Pictou County and elsewhere who began to raise funds for the construction, maintenance and operation of a replica of Hector.

The Hector Heritage Quay, along with the Ship Hector Company Store were opened on the Pictou waterfront in the ensuing years. The marine architect firm J.B. McGuire Marine Associates Ltd. was commissioned to research the particulars of the original Hector and to develop blueprints for an accurate replica. Scotia Trawlers of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia were commissioned to complete phase one and two of the construction at the Hector Heritage Quay, which allowed visitors to the Pictou waterfront to observe the ship’s progress, making it an important local attraction. After several years of construction, the replica Hector was launched with great fanfare and media coverage on September 17, 2000. The date had been delayed due to poor weather on the 16th.

The Quay, opened May to October, offers a three storied interpretive centre, along with blacksmith, carpentry, and rigger shops.

Specifications

Year built: c. 1770
Location: Netherlands
Deck length overall: 25.9 m (85 ft)
Beam: 6.7 m (22 ft)
Gross tonnage: 200
Number of masts: 3
Owner: Mr. John Pagan, a merchant in Greenock, Scotland

 

Indian Residential Schools

The Indian residential schools of “residential” (boarding) schools for Native Canadians funded by the Canadian government’s Indian Affairs and Northern Department, and administered by Christian churches, most notably the Catholic Church in Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada. The system had origins in pre-Confederation times, but was primarily active following the passage of the Indian Act in 1876, until the mid-20th century. An amendment to the Indian Act made attendance of a day, industrial or residential school compulsory for First Nations children and, in some parts of the country, residential schools were the only option. The number of residential schools reached 80 in 1931 but decreased in the years that followed. The last federally operated residential school was closed in 1996. In total, about 150,000 First Nations children passed through the residential school system, and at least 4,000 of them died while attending the schools.

There has long been significant historiographical and popular controversy about the conditions experienced by students in the residential schools. While day schools for First Nations, Metis and Inuit children always far outnumbered residential schools, a new consensus emerged in the early 21st century that the latter schools did significant harm to Aboriginal children who attended them by removing them from their families, depriving them of their ancestral languages, sterilization, and exposing many of them to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of staff and other students, and enfranchising them forcibly. This consensus was symbolized by the June 11, 2008 public apology offered, not only by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on behalf of the Government of Canada, but also by the leaders of all the other parties in the Canadian House of Commons. As well, just nine days prior, the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to uncover the truth about the schools. The commission gathered statements from residential school survivors; the last of seven national events was March 27–30, 2014, in Edmonton.

History

In the 17th and 2nd century, the Canadian federal government’s Indian Affairs department officially encouraged the growth of the Indian residential school system as a valuable agent in a wider policy of assimilating Native Canadians into European-Canadian society. A key goal of the system, which often separated children from their families and communities, has been described as cultural genocide or “killing the Indian in the child”.

Although education in Canada had been allocated to the provincial governments by the British North America BNA act, aboriginal peoples and their treaties were under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Funded under the Indian Act by the then Department of the Interior, a branch of the federal government, the schools were run by churches of various denominations—about 60 per cent by Roman Catholics, and 30 per cent by the Anglican Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada, along with its pre-1925 predecessors, Presbyterian, Congregationalist and Methodist churches. This system of using the established school facilities set up by missionaries was employed by the federal government for economical expedience. The federal government provided facilities and maintenance, and the churches provided teachers and education.

The foundations of the system were the pre-confederation Gradual Civilization Act (1857) and the Gradual Enfranchisement Act (1869). These assumed the inherent superiority of British ways, and the need for Indians to become English-speakers, Christians, and farmers. At the time, many Aboriginal leaders wanted these acts overturned.

Specific laws also linked the apparatus of the residential schools to the compulsory sterilization of students in 1928 in Alberta and in 1933 in British Columbia. Although some academic articles currently offer rough estimates of the numbers of sterilizationsthe review of archival documents that would produce more specific numbers is incomplete and ongoing.

In February 2013, research by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission revealed that at least 3,000 students had died, mostly from disease. In 2011, reflecting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s research, Justice Murray Sinclair told the Toronto Star: “Missing children — that is the big surprise for me, […] That such large numbers of children died at the schools. That the information of their deaths was not communicated back to their families.” In a legal report, the Canadian Bar Association concludes that “Student deaths were not uncommon”. The system was designed as an immersion program: in many schools, children were prohibited from (and sometimes punished for) speaking their own languages or practicing their own faiths. In the 20th century, former students of the schools have claimed that officials and teachers had practiced cultural genocide and ethnocide. Because of the relatively isolated nature of the schools, there was an elevated rate of physical and sexual abuse. Corporal punishment was often justified by a belief that it was the only way to “save souls”, “civilize” the savage, or punish runaways who, if they became injured or died in their efforts to return home, would leave the school legally responsible for whatever befell them. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate heating, and a lack of medical care led to high rates of influenza and tuberculosis; in one school, death rates reached 69%. Federal policy tying funding to enrollment numbers may have made things worse, as it led to sick children being enrolled in order to boost numbers, thus introducing and spreading disease. Details of the mistreatment of students had been published numerous times throughout the 20th century. Following the government’s closure of most of the schools in the 1960s, the work of indigenous activists and historians led to greater awareness by the public of the damage which the schools had caused, as well as to official government and church apologies, and a legal settlement. This has been controversial both within indigenous and non-indigenous communities.

The first residential schools were established in the 1840s and the last residential school closed in 1996. Their primary roles were to convert Indigenous children to Christianity and to “civilize them”. In the early 19th century, Protestant missionaries opened residential schools in the current Ontario region. The Protestant churches not only spread Christianity, but also tried to encourage the Indigenous peoples to adopt subsistence agriculture as a way to ensure they would not return to their original ways of life after graduation. For graduates to receive individual allotments of farmland, however, would require changes in the communal reserve system, something fiercely opposed by First Nations governments.

In 1857, the Gradual Civilization Act was passed by the Legislature of the Province of Canada with the aim of assimilating First Nations people. This Act awarded 50 acres (200,000 m²) of land to any indigenous male deemed “sufficiently advanced in the elementary branches of education” and would automatically “enfranchise” him, removing any tribal affiliation or treaty rights. With this legislation, and through the creation of residential schools, the government believed indigenous people could eventually become assimilated into the population. It ignored the matrilineal systems of many tribes, in which property was controlled and passed through the maternal line, as well as the major roles that Aboriginal women typically had in cultivating their crops after men had cleared the fields. After confederation (1867), Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald commissioned Nicholas Flood Davin to write a “Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds” (now known as the “Davin Report”), which was submitted to Ottawa in March 1879 and led to public funding for the residential school system in Canada.

In 1884, school attendance became compulsory by law for status Indians under 16 years of age. Where residential schools were the only option, children were often forcibly removed from their families, or their families were threatened with fines or prison if they failed to send their children. Students were required to live on school premises. Many had no contact with their families for up to 10 months at a time because of the distance between their home communities and schools, and in some cases had no contact for years. In many of the schools, students were discouraged or prohibited from speaking Aboriginal languages, even among themselves and outside the classroom, so that English or French would be learned and their own languages forgotten. In some schools, they were subject to corporal punishment for speaking their own languages or for practicing non-Christian faiths, policies that have given rise to allegations of cultural genocide.

After the Second World War, the Canadian Family Allowance Act began to grant “baby bonuses” to families with children, but ensured that this money was cut off if parents refused to send their children to school. This act further coerced indigenous parents to accept the residential school system.

Compulsory school attendance had ended by 1948, following the 1947 report of a Special Joint Committee and subsequent amendment of the Indian Act; although this did little to improve conditions for those attending residential schools. Until the late 1950s, residential schools were severely underfunded and often relied on the forced labour of their students to maintain their facilities, although it was presented as training for artisan skills. The work was arduous, and severely compromised the academic and social development of the students. In many cases, literacy education, or any serious efforts to inspire literacy in English or French, was almost non-existent. School books and textbooks, if they were supplied, were drawn mainly from the curricula of the provincially funded public schools for non-Aboriginal students, and teachers at the residential schools were often poorly trained or prepared. During this same period Canadian government scientists preformed nutritional tests on student and knowingly kept some students undernourished to serve as the control sample.

When the government revised the Indian Act in the 1940s and 50s, a slim majority of Indian bands, along with regional and national native organizations, wanted residential schools to stay open. Those who supported the schools wanted to keep the religious component as well. Motivations for support of the schools included their role as a social service in communities suffering extensive family breakdown; the significance of the schools as employers; and the seeming lack of other opportunities for children to receive an education. In the 1960s, when the government decided to close certain schools, some Indian bands pleaded to have them to remain open. In 1969, after years of sharing power with churches, the Department of Indian Affairs took sole control of the residential school system.

In Northern Alberta, parents protested the DIA decision to close the Blue Quills Indian School. In the summer of 1970, they occupied the building and demanded the right to run it themselves. Their protests were successful and Blue Quills became the first Native-administered school in the country. It continues to operate today as the Blue Quills First Nations College, a tribal college. The last residential school operated by the Canadian Government, Gordon Residential School, was closed in 1996. White Calf Collegiate, closed in 1998, was run by the Lebret Residential school board.

In the 1990s, investigations and memoirs by former students revealed that many students at residential schools were subjected to severe physical, psychological, and sexual abuse by school staff members and by older student. Several prominent court cases led to large monetary payments from the federal government and churches to former students of residential schools. A settlement offered to former students was announced on September 19, 2007.

Mortality rates

In 1909, Dr. Peter Bryce, general medical superintendent for the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), reported to the department that between 1894 and 1908, mortality rates at some residential schools in Western Canada ranged from 30% to 60% over five years (that is, five years after entry, 30% to 60% of students had died, or 6–12% per annum). These statistics did not become public until 1922, when Bryce, who was no longer working for the government, published The Story of a National Crime: Being a Record of the Health Conditions of the Indians of Canada from 1904 to 1921. In particular, he alleged that the high mortality rates could have been avoided if healthy children had not been exposed to children with tuberculosis. At the time, no antibiotic had been identified to treat the disease.

In 1920 and 1922, Dr. A. Corbett was commissioned to visit the schools in the west of the country, and found similar results to Bryce. At the Ermineskin school in Hobbema, Alberta, he found 50% of the children had tuberculosis. At Sarcee Boarding School near Calgary, all 33 students were “much below even a passable standard of health” and “[a]ll but four were infected with tuberculosis.” In one classroom, he found 16 ill children, many near death, who were being made to sit through lessons.

In February 2013, research by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission revealed that at least 3,000 students had died, mostly from disease.

Reconciliation attempts

In March 1998, the government made a Statement of Reconciliation – including an apology to those people who were sexually or physically abused while attending residential schools – and established the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. The Foundation was provided $350 million to fund community-based healing projects focusing on addressing the legacy of physical and sexual abuse at Indian residential schools. In its 2005 budget, the Canadian government committed an additional $40 million to continue to support the work of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.

In the fall of 2003, after some pilot projects launched since 1999, the Alternative Dispute Resolution process or “ADR” was launched. The ADR was a process outside of court providing compensation and psychological support for former students of residential schools who were physically or sexually abused or were in situations of wrongful confinement.

On November 23, 2005, the Canadian government announced a $1.9 billion compensation package to benefit tens of thousands of former students at native residential schools. National Chief Phil Fontaine of the Assembly of First Nations said the package covers, “decades in time, innumerable events and countless injuries to First Nations individuals and communities.” Justice Minister Irwin Cotler called the decision to house young Canadians in church-run residential schools “the single most harmful, disgraceful and racist act in our history.” At a news conference in Ottawa, Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan said: “We have made good on our shared resolve to deliver what I firmly believe will be a fair and lasting resolution of the Indian school legacy.”

This compensation package became a Settlement Agreement in May 2006. It proposed, among other things, some funding for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, for commemoration and for a “Truth and Reconciliation” program in aboriginal communities, as well as an individual Common Experience Payment (CEP). Any person that could be verified as residing at a federally run Indian residential school in Canada, as well as other criteria, was entitled to this CEP. The amount of compensation was based on the number of years a particular former student resided at the residential schools: $10,000 for the first year attended (one night residing there to a full school year) plus $3,000 for every year resided thereafter.

The Settlement Agreement also proposed an advance payment for former students alive and who were 65 years old and over as of May 30, 2005. The deadline for reception of the advance payment form by IRSRC was December 31, 2006.

Following a legal process including an examination of the Settlement Agreement by the courts of the provinces and territories of Canada, an “opt-out” period occurred. During this time, the former students of residential schools could reject the agreement if they did not agree with its dispositions. This opt-out period ended on August 20, 2007.

The Settlement Agreement gave way to the Independent Assessment Process (IAP), a case-by-case, out-of-court resolution process where claims from former Indian Residential School students are examined by an Adjudicator. The IAP became available to all the former students of residential schools on September 19, 2007. All former students (who met certain criteria) had to apply by themselves or through a lawyer of their choice to receive their full compensation. The deadline to apply for the IAP was September 19, 2012. This gave former students of residential schools four years from the implementation date of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement to apply for the IAP. Claims involving physical and sexual abuse can be compensated up to $275,000.

Similar forced residential boarding schools for indigenous communities were operated in Australia (where the students are referred to as the Stolen Generation). The Native American boarding schools operated in the United States through the 1970s were far less harsh and not comparable, although its former students have similar complaints, especially about prohibitions against using their own languages and traditions.

Apologies

Federal government apology

On June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology, on behalf of the sitting Cabinet, in front of an audience of Aboriginal delegates, and in an address that was broadcast nationally on the CBC, for the past governments’ policies of assimilation. The Prime Minister apologized not only for the known excesses of the residential school system, but for the creation of the system itself.

Vatican expression of sorrow

In 2009, Chief Fontaine had a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI to try to obtain an apology for abuses that occurred in the residential school system. The audience was funded by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. Following the meeting, the Vatican released an official statement on the church’s role in residential schools:

His Holiness recalled that since the earliest days of her presence in Canada, the Church, particularly through her missionary personnel, has closely accompanied the indigenous peoples. Given the sufferings that some indigenous children experienced in the Canadian Residential School system, the Holy Father expressed his sorrow at the anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of some members of the Church and he offered his sympathy and prayerful solidarity. His Holiness emphasized that acts of abuse cannot be tolerated in society. He prayed that all those affected would experience healing, and he encouraged First Nations Peoples to continue to move forward with renewed hope.

Fontaine later stated at a news conference that at the meeting, he sensed the Pope’s “pain and anguish” and that the acknowledgement was “important to me and that was what I was looking for.”

Other apologies

On Friday, August 6, 1993 at the National Native Convocation in Minaki, Ontario, Archbishop Michael Peers offered an apology to all the survivors of the Indian residential schools on behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada. Archbishop Peers said:

I accept and I confess before God and you, our failures in the residential schools. We failed you. We failed ourselves. We failed God.

I am sorry, more than I can say, that we were part of a system which took you and your children from home and family.

I am sorry, more than I can say, that we tried to remake you in our image, taking from you your language and the signs of your identity.

I am sorry, more than I can say, that in our schools so many were abused physically, sexually, culturally and emotionally.

On behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada, I present our apology.

In 2004, immediately prior to signing the historic first Public Safety Protocol with the Assembly of First Nations, RCMP Commissioner Zaccardelli veered from his corporate speech and issued an apology on behalf of the RCMP for their role in the Indian Residential School System. “We, I, as Commissioner of the RCMP, am truly sorry for what role we played in the residential school system and the abuse that took place in the residential system”.

On October 27, 2011 University of Manitoba president David Barnard apologized to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the institution’s role in educating people who operated the residential school system. This is believed to be the first time a Canadian university has apologized for playing a role in residential schools.

Lasting effects of residential schools

Over 150 000 students attended the residential schools. This has caused them to leave a lasting print among the aboriginal people of today that they refer to as a “collective soul wound.” A sample of 127 survivors revealed that half of these survivors have criminal records, 64% have been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, 21% have been diagnosed with major depression, 7% have been diagnosed with anxiety disorder and 7% have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. These disorders are not a comprehensive list of the afflictions Residential Schools survivors suffer from. Some native people feel that no amount of time would be enough to heal this wound, such as the thousands of families of missing children. Some children attended residential school in the late sixties disappeared from them never to be heard from again. Their families are unable to move on from this because the missing children’s fate is still a mystery. The families feel that without finding out what happened to their missing members, they will not receive the closure they need to move on and no amount of compensation from the government will be enough to repair the damage. Some survivors that were sexually abused kept their suffering a secret for decades after their time in the residential schools. One survivor has been quoted saying “you can’t forget everything in five years, in ten years,” and many aboriginals feel that though the Canadian government has made a start in reconciliation, it will be a long process, because they cannot instantly feel better. The lasting impact that the schools have had is also manifested in the rate of drug and alcohol abuse among survivors. As an attempt to hide from the memories and the pain many aboriginal people found themselves turning to substance abuse, which means that the suffering continues as they and those around them are forced to deal with addiction on a daily basis. It is both because the residential schools continue to cause harm, and because the hardships they created in the past continue to haunt survivors, that the aboriginal people are simply unable to be consoled at present time. Survivors of the residential schools have difficulty receiving compensation because they must prove that they attended the schools. This is difficult and sometimes impossible to do because the schools kept little to no records. Many survivors of the residential schools suffer from residential school syndrome (RSS). Residential school syndrome is very similar to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and includes many of the same symptoms, such as nightmares, flashbacks, recurring intrusive memories, and avoidance of triggers that would force the survivor to recall the residential school experience. Residential school syndrome is dissimilar to PTSD in that it affects a certain specific cultural demographic, while PTSD affects people from all different cultures. Many victims of residential school syndrome suffer from difficulty sleeping and anger management issues and find themselves withdrawing from those around them. Detachment from others and difficulty maintaining relationships is not uncommon for those suffering from residential school syndrome. Victims of residential school syndrome often have difficulty finding aid because the damage done to them is often denied. Residential school syndrome has not been officially defined by medical experts and there is no consensus on the matter; some deny that it exists. Many survivors of the residential schools also suffer from historic trauma (the above-mentioned “collective soul wound.” Historic trauma explains the Aboriginal trauma more completely than residential school syndrome. It is the idea that the “military, economic, and cultural conquest of people aboriginal to the American continents was a form of genocide,” and that, much like in the inter-generational trauma caused by the Holocaust, the Aboriginal people of Canada are suffering across more than just one generation. Historic trauma refers to the way in which the entire culture has been hurt and even those not directly related to the residential school experience are suffering from it. Historic trauma is like psychological baggage that gets passed on from generation to generation, and spans across many lifetimes. Historic trauma is passed on the same way that all other aspects of the culture are passed on; along with the traditions and values of the culture, the hardships and wounds are transmitted to younger generations.

Healing

The healing process is a long and difficult one. Many Aboriginals find it difficult to talk about their experiences, but when they do, healing slowly begins. The national event of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission allows the survivors to share their stories and put them on record. Some survivors say that this allows them to see that their suffering is shared and allows them to find joy and laughter with one another which demonstrates that it is a healing process.

 

William Grant Stairs

 

William Grant Stairs (1 July 1863 – 9 June 1892) was a Canadian-British explorer, soldier, and adventurer who had a leading role in two of the most controversial expeditions in the history of the colonisation of Africa.

Education

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the sixth child and third son of John Stairs and Mary Morrow, he attended school at Fort Massey Academy in Halifax, Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, Student # 52

Career

After graduating as a trained engineer, Stairs spent three years working for the New Zealand Trigonometrical Survey in northern New Zealand. In 1885, he accepted the offer of a commission in the British Royal Engineers and trained in Chatham, England. In 1891 he transferred to the Welsh Regiment.

Emin Pasha Relief Expedition

Captain Stairs was appointed to the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition led by Henry Morton Stanley, at the time the most celebrated living explorer of Africa. Stairs sailed from London on 20 January 1887 and met Stanley in Suez on 6 February. Their expedition started from Banana at the mouth of the Congo River on 19 March and ended in Bagamoyo, Tanzania on 5 December 1889. Stairs was appointed second-in-command after Captain Barttelot was shot on 19 July 1888.

During the 5000 km journey across Africa through some of its most difficult country consisting of almost impenetrable rainforest and swamps, Stairs and colleagues suffered frequently from malaria and dysentery. Stairs had endurance, toughness and perseverance. He discovered one source of the Nile, the Semliki River, and became the first non-African to ever climb in the Ruwenzoris, reaching 10,677 ft before having to turn around. He was seriously wounded in the chest by a poisonous arrow during an attack by natives, many of whom assumed they were a slave-raiding party, and the expedition killed hundreds in return. Stairs recovered from his wound to continue the journey. In Dublin, Ireland there is a bronze plaque depicting this 13 August 1887 event on the statue of expedition Surgeon Major Thomas Heazle Parke who removed the arrow and sucked the poison from the wound.

The expedition was lauded in Europe and North America for exploits seen as heroic. On his return to England Captain Stairs was named a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in 1890. Then details emerged of the many Africans killed by the expedition. Stanley’s own accounts revealed how he shot Africans who impeded the expedition’s progress. The expedition also used brutality against its own porters. Stanley spent his remaining years defending himself and the expedition from criticism made principally in Britain of excessive force and mismanagement of the expedition’s Rear Column commanded by Barttelot.

The Stairs Expedition to Katanga

In 1891 on Stanley’s recommendation, Stairs was appointed by King Léopold II of Belgium to command a mission to take Katanga also known as Garanganze with or without the consent of its powerful king, Msiri. Leopold had used Stanley’s services before and agreed with his use of force and understood Stairs to be in the same mould, and he had a reputation for carrying out orders completely and without hesitation.

The Stairs Expedition was a military mission of 400 men under the Congo Free State flag, armed with 200 rifles modern for their time. (Msiri’s men had muzzle-loading muskets). Stairs ran a well-organised expedition and won the loyalty of his officers and chiefs (Zanzibari supervisors). It was smaller and lighter than his previous expedition, with only two other military officers. They were in a race against Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company expanding from the south, which had already sent two failed expeditions to Msiri. Stairs and Joseph Moloney, the expedition’s British medical officer, were aware that they could potentially come into armed conflict with a British expedition, and agreed they would nevertheless discharge their duties to their employer, Leopold.

The Stairs Expedition became notorious for the fate of Msiri. After three days of negotiations without progress, Stairs gave Msiri an ultimatum to sign the treaty the next day, 20 December 1891. When Msiri did not appear, he sent his second-in-command, Captain Bodson to arrest Msiri, who stood his ground. Bodson shot him dead, and a fight broke out. The expedition took their wounded and Msiri’s body back to their camp where Stairs was waiting, and there they cut off Msiri’s head and hoisted it on a pole in plain view as a ‘barbaric lesson’ to his people. Some of the Garanganze were massacred by the expedition’s askaris, and most of the rest fled into the bush.

Stairs handed over Msiri’s body to his two brothers and an adopted son, Makanda Bantu, whom Stairs installed as chief to replace Msiri, and who signed the treaty acknowledging Leopold as sovereign. The two brothers refused to do so until Stairs sent Moloney to threaten them with the same fate as Msiri.

Oral histories of the Garanganze people say that the expedition kept Msiri’s head – by some accounts in a can of kerosene – but it cursed and killed everyone who carried it and eventually, this included Stairs. He was ill with malaria throughout January 1892. After being relieved by another expedition, the Stairs Expedition set out on the long return journey to Zanzibar. Stairs was frequently sick but by May 1892 had recovered. On a steamer down the lower Zambezi he had another attack of malaria which killed him on 9 June 1892. He is buried in the European Cemetery in Chinde, Mozambique at the mouth of the Zambezi River.

Only 189 of the 400 men on the expedition made it back to Zanzibar, a year after they had left, most of the rest died and few deserted. Katanga became part of the Congo Free State, which was annexed by Belgium in 1908 after an international outcry over the killings, brutality and slavery by Leopold’s regime. In the early 20th century as Katanga’s mining industries developed, some British in Northern Rhodesia, representing the losers in the scramble for Katanga, thought of Stairs as a mercenary and traitor to the British Empire.

Commemoration

Captain Stairs is commemorated with three identical tablets (c. 1902) in the vestibule of Mackenzie Building at Royal Military College of Canada, St. George’s Cathedral (Kingston, Ontario) and in Rochester Cathedral near Chatham, England.

• “William Grant Stairs, Captain the Welsh Regiment. Born at Halifax Nova Scotia 1 July 1863. Lieutenant Royal Engineers 1885–91. Served on the staff of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition 1887 under the leadership of H.M. Stanley and exhibited great courage and devotion to duty. Died of fever on the 9 June 1892 at Chinde on the Zambesi whilst in command of the Katanga Expedition sent out by the King of the Belgians.”
• A tablet at the Royal Military College of Canada Memorial Arch erected in 1932 “The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition 1887–1890 52 Captain W.G. Stairs”

A collection of artefacts from his African expeditions are at Fort Frederick (Kingston) and some his diaries are preserved in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia; others are lost.

Stairs Island, Parry Sound, Ontario was named in his honour.

 

Alexis Bidagan St. Martin

Alexis Bidagan St. Martin (April 18, 1802 – June 24, 1880) was a Canadian voyageur who is known for his part in experiments on digestion in humans, conducted by the American Army physician William Beaumont between 1822 and 1833.

 

Work with Beaumont

On June 6, 1822 Alexis St. Martin, at the fur trading post on Mackinac Island, was accidentally shot with a musket at close range. The charge of the musket shot left a hole through his side that healed to form a fistula aperture into his stomach.

William Beaumont, a US Army surgeon stationed at a nearby army post, treated the wound. Although St. Martin was a healthy 20-year-old, he was not expected to recover due to the severity of his wound. Beaumont explains in a later paper that the shot blew off fragments of St. Martin’s muscles and broke a few of his ribs. After bleeding him and giving him a cathartic, Beaumont marked St. Martin’s progress. For the next 17 days, all food he ate re-emerged from his new gastric fistula. Finally after 17 days, the food began to stay in St. Martin’s stomach and his bowels began to return to their natural functions. When the wound healed itself, the edge of the hole in the stomach had attached itself to the edge of the hole in the skin, creating a permanent gastric fistula. There was very little scientific understanding of digestion at the time and Beaumont recognized the opportunity he had in St. Martin – he could literally watch the processes of digestion by dangling food on a string into St. Martin’s stomach, then later pulling it out to observe to what extent it had been digested. Beaumont continued to experiment on St. Martin off and on until 1833.

Alexis St. Martin allowed the experiments to be conducted, not as an act to repay Beaumont for keeping him alive, but rather because Beaumont had the illiterate St. Martin sign a contract to work as a servant. Beaumont recalls the chores St. Martin did: “During this time, in the intervals of experimenting, he performed all the duties of a common servant, chopping wood, carrying burthens, etc. with little or no suffering or inconvenience from his wound.” Although these chores were not bothersome, some of the experiments were painful to St. Martin, for example when Beaumont had placed sacks of food in the stomach, Beaumont noted: “the boy complained of some pain and uneasiness at the breast.” Other symptoms St. Martin felt during experiments were a sense of weight and distress at the scrobiculus cordis and slight vertigo and dimness of vision.

After the experiments

Beaumont published the account of his experiments in 1838 as Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, and the Physiology of Digestion. He and St. Martin parted ways, with Beaumont eventually going to St. Louis, Missouri, and St. Martin to his home in Quebec, Canada. Off and on for the next twenty years, Beaumont tried to get St. Martin to move to St. Louis, but the move never occurred. Beaumont died in 1853 as a result of slipping on ice-covered steps.

When Alexis St. Martin died at St-Thomas de Joliette, Quebec, in 1880 his family delayed his burial until the body began to decompose in order to prevent his “resurrection” by medical men, some of whom wished to perform an autopsy. Alexis Bidagan St. Martin is buried at Saint Thomas Parish Cemetery in Joliette, Quebec, Canada.

The eminent physician Sir William Osler took a great interest in retracing the details of this early incident in the history of gastric physiology and published his research in the form of a well-known essay entitled A Backwoods Physiologist. He also attempted to have the famous stomach placed in Army Medical Museum in Washington, DC.

 

Mistahi-maskwa

Big Bear or Mistahi-maskwa (c.1825 – 17 January 1888) was a Cree leader who was notable for his involvement in the North-West Rebellion and his subsequent imprisonment.
Early life and leadership
Big Bear was born in the Canadian Northwest, probably near Fort Carlton.[1] Although he may have been Saulteaux, he was raised among the Plains Cree bands who wintered along the North Saskatchewan River.
By 1863, according to Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) records, Big Bear was leading a large number of Cree near Fort Carlton, but soon moved to the area near Fort Pitt where he lived with a much smaller group.
He participated in the 1870 Battle of the Belly River, and would later find conflict again in 1873, this time with Métis leader Gabriel Dumont. Canadian government records indicate that as of 1874, Big Bear led 65 lodges (approximately 520 people).
Conflict with the Canadian government
In the 1870s, the newly created Canadian government began to investigate signing treaties with the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains, and sent gifts to encourage friendship. While some leaders accepted the gifts, Big Bear was not interested, declaring “when we set a fox-trap we scatter pieces of meat all round, but when the fox gets into the trap we knock him on the head; We want no bait; let your chiefs come like men and talk to us.”
When representatives of the Canadian government came to negotiate a series of numbered treaties for the return of land to the native peoples, Big Bear, one of the chief negotiators during Treaty 6, refused to sign, believing that the treaty was unfair and biased towards Canadian settlers. He campaigned against the Canadian government, preaching to other Native bands that the treaties were unfair.
Big Bear initially attempted to make alliances with other Natives, so that when the treaties were signed, they could all take their reserve land next to each other, effectively creating a First Nations country within Canadian borders. When the Canadian government heard of this plan, they immediately disallowed it, even though the treaties had previously stated that the Natives could take the reserve land wherever they wished. To further his cause, Big Bear even formed an uneasy alliance with his longtime rival, Crowfoot, Chief of the Blackfoot people.
Despite his opposition to the treaty and his mistrust of the governments intentions and methods, the dwindling of the buffalo herds ultimately prevented his people from continuing to rely on this traditional food source and pushed the Cree to the point of starvation in less than a decade. This desperate circumstance compelled Big Bear to finally accept Treaty 6 in order to obtain minimal food supplies for his people from the Canadian government.
When the Métis initiated the North-West Rebellion of 1885 under Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, Big Bear and his supporters played a minimal role in the overall uprising, but warriors from among Big Bear’s people under the command of Wandering Spirit killed nine white men at Frog Lake in an incident that became known as the Frog Lake Massacre. Although Big Bear himself personally attempted to prevent the killings and subsequently expressed regret for the actions of the younger Cree warriors, the events at Frog Lake alarmed the Dominion Government. When 6,000 troops were sent to Batoche, Saskatchewan to smash the Métis resistance, the Canadian government used the Frog Lake Massacre as a reason to put down the Cree as well. Despite evidence of Big Bear’s efforts to actually prevent the killings at Frog Lake, he was convicted for participation in the rebellion with a request from the jury for mercy. In 1885 the sixty-year-old chief was sentenced to three years in Stony Mountain Penitentiary, but was released from prison before serving his complete sentence as a result of failing health, and died shortly afterward.

 

Cape Breton Island

Cape Breton Island is an island on the Atlantic coast of North America. It likely corresponds to the French word “Breton,” referring to Brittany.

Cape Breton Island is part of the province of Nova Scotia, Canada. Although physically separated from the Nova Scotia peninsula by the Strait of Canso, it is artificially connected to mainland Nova Scotia by the Canso Causeway. The island is located east-northeast of the mainland with its northern and western coasts fronting on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence; its western coast also forming the eastern limits of the Northumberland Strait. The eastern and southern coasts front the Atlantic Ocean; its eastern coast also forming the western limits of the Cabot Strait. Its landmass slopes upward from south to north, culminating in the highlands of its northern cape. A saltwater estuary, Bras d’Or Lake, dominates the center of the island.

As a French colony it was known as Île Royale, later taking the name of its eastern cape. The island is believed to have been the first land visited by John Cabot on his 1497–1498 voyage. In 1758, the island was captured by the British; formal cession was made in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which marked the beginning of an extensive period of British dominance outside of Europe. Cape Breton Island was joined to Nova Scotia but in 1784, became a separate British crown colony and remained so for the next 36 years. It was rejoined to Nova Scotia in 1820. In the early twenty-first century the “Province of Cape Breton Island,” a political movement which calls for the re-establishment of the Province of Cape Breton Island to be governed separately from the Province of Nova Scotia, was formed.

Its residents can be grouped into five main cultures; Scottish, Mi’kmaq, Acadian, Irish, and English. It is primarily recognized for its Scottish Gaelic heritage. The island contains five reserves of the Mi’kmaq Nation. The Islanders are proud of both their ancestral heritages and the beauty of their island, the scenery of which draws nearly half a million visitors each year.

History

Cape Breton Island’s first residents were likely Maritime Archaic Indians, ancestors of the Mi’kmaq Nation, the later of whom inhabited the island at the time of European discovery. Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) reportedly visited the island in 1497 to become the first Renaissance European explorer to visit present-day Canada. However, historians are unclear as to whether Cabot first visited Newfoundland or Cape Breton Island. This believed discovery is commemorated by Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail.

A fishing colony was established on the island about 1521–1522 by the Portuguese under João Alvares Fagundes. As many as 200 settlers lived in the nameless village in what is now present day Ingonish on the island’s northwestern peninsula. The fate of the colony is unknown, but it is mentioned as late as 1570^.

On February 8, 1631, Charles I granted Cape Breton Island to Robert Gordon of Lochinvar and his son Robert.

The island saw active settlement by France with the island being included in the colony of Acadia. A French garrison was established in the central eastern part at Ste-Anne in the early 18th century, before relocating to a much larger fortification at Louisbourg in order to improve defenses at the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and defend France’s fishing fleet on the Grand Banks. They also built the Louisbourg Lighthouse in 1734, the first lighthouse in Canada and one of the first in North America. The French named the island “Île Royale.” It remained part of colonial France until it was ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Britain merged the island with its adjacent colony of Nova Scotia (present day peninsular Nova Scotia and New Brunswick).

Some of the first British-sanctioned settlers to the island following the Seven Years’ War were Irish, although upon settlement, they merged with local French communities to form a culture rich in both music and tradition. From 1763 to 1784 the island was administratively part of the colony of Nova Scotia and governed from Halifax.

The first permanently settled Scottish community on Cape Breton Island was Judique, settled in 1775 by Michael Mor MacDonald. He spent his first winter using his upside-down boat for shelter, which is reflected in the architecture of the village’s Community Center. He composed a song about the area called “O’s alainn an t-aite,” or “Fair is the Place.”

In 1784, Britain split the colony of Nova Scotia into three separate colonies: New Brunswick, Cape Breton Island, and present-day peninsular Nova Scotia, in addition to the adjacent colonies of St. John’s Island (renamed Prince Edward Island in 1798) and Newfoundland. The colony of Cape Breton Island had its capital at Sydney on its namesake harbor fronting on Spanish Bay and the Cabot Strait. Its first Lieutenant-Governor was Joseph Frederick Wallet DesBarres (1784–1787) and his successor was William Macarmick (1787). From 1799 to 1807, the military commandant was John Despard, brother of Edward.

An order forbidding the granting of land in Cape Breton, issued in 1763, was removed in 1784. The mineral rights to the island were given over to the Crown by an order-in-council. The British government had intended that the Crown take over the operation of the mines when Cape Breton was made a colony, but this was never done, probably because of the rehabilitation cost of the mines. The mines were in a neglected state, caused by careless operations dating back at least to the time of the final fall of Louisbourg.

In 1820, the colony of Cape Breton Island, and Prince Edward Island were merged for the second time with Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island was later removed from Nova Scotia rule. This development was one of the factors which led to large-scale industrial development in the Sydney Coal Field of eastern Cape Breton County. By the late nineteenth century, as a result of the faster shipping, expanding fishery, and industrialization of the island, exchanges of people between the island of Newfoundland and Cape Breton increased, beginning a cultural exchange that continues to this day.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Cape Breton Island experienced an influx of Highland Scots numbering approximately 50,000 as a result of the Highland Clearances. Today, the descendants of the Highland Scots dominate Cape Breton Island’s culture, particularly in rural communities. To this day Canadian Gaelic is still the first language of a number of elderly Cape Bretoners. A campaign of violence and intimidation by the provincial school board led to the near extermination of Gaelic culture. The growing influence of English-dominated media from outside the Scottish communities saw the use of this language erode quickly during the twentieth century. Many of the Scots who immigrated there were either Roman Catholics or Presbyterians, which can be seen in a number of island landmarks and place-names.

The 1920s were some of the most violent times in Cape Breton. The decade was marked by several severe labor disputes. The famous murder of William Davis by strike breakers, and the seizing of the new waterford power plant by striking miners led to a major union sentiment that continues to the present in some circles. In coal mining towns Davis Day is celebrated to commemorate the deaths of miners at the hands of the coal companies.

Tourism promotions beginning in the 1950s recognized the importance of the Scottish culture to the province, and the provincial government began encouraging the use of Gaelic once again. The establishment of funding for the Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts and formal Gaelic language instruction in public schools are intended to address the near-loss of this culture to English assimilation.

The turn of the twentieth century saw Cape Breton Island at the forefront of scientific achievement with the now-famous activities launched by inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Guglielmo Marconi.

Following his successful invention of the telephone and being relatively wealthy, Bell acquired land near Baddeck in 1885, largely due to surroundings reminiscent of his early years in Scotland. He established a summer estate complete with research laboratories, working with deaf people—including Helen Keller—and continued to invent. Baddeck was the site of his experiments with hydrofoil technologies as well as the Aerial Experiment Association, financed by his wife, which saw the first powered flight in the British Empire when the AEA Silver Dart took off from the ice-covered waters of Bras d’Or Lake. Bell also built the forerunner to the iron lung and he experimented with breeding sheep.

Marconi’s contributions to Cape Breton Island were somewhat less than Bell’s as he merely used the island’s geography to his advantage in transmitting the first North American trans-Atlantic radio message from a station constructed at Table Head in Glace Bay to a receiving station at Poldhu in Cornwall, England.

Geography

The island measures 10,311 square kilometers in area (3,981 sq mi), making it the 75th largest island in the world and Canada’s 18th largest island. Cape Breton Island is composed mainly of rocky shores, rolling farmland, glacial valleys, barren headlands, mountains, woods and plateaus. Geological evidence suggests that at least part of the island was originally joined with present-day Scotland and Norway, now separated by millions of years of continental drift.

The northern portion of Cape Breton Island is dominated by the Cape Breton Highlands, commonly shortened to simply the “Highlands,” which are an extension of the Appalachian mountain chain. The Highlands comprise the northern portions of Inverness and Victoria counties. In 1936 the federal government established the Cape Breton Highlands National Park covering 949 km² (366 sq mi) across the northern third of the Highlands. The Cabot Trail scenic highway also encircles the coastal perimeter of the plateau.

Cape Breton Island’s hydrological features include the Bras d’Or Lake system, a salt-water fjord at the heart of the island, and freshwater features including Lake Ainslie, the Margaree River system, and the Mira River. Innumerable smaller rivers and streams drain into the Bras d’Or Lake estuary and onto the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Atlantic coasts.

Cape Breton Island is joined to the mainland by the Canso Causeway, which was completed in 1955, enabling direct road and rail traffic to and from the island, but requiring marine traffic to pass through the Canso Canal at the eastern end of the causeway.

Cape Breton Island is divided into four counties: Cape Breton, Inverness, Richmond, and Victoria.

Demographics

The island is divided into four of Nova Scotia’s eighteen counties: Cape Breton, Inverness, Richmond, and Victoria. Approximately 72 percent of the island’s population is located in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality which includes all of Cape Breton County and is often referred to as Industrial Cape Breton, given the history of coal mining and steel manufacturing in this area.

The island’s residents can be grouped into five main cultures; Scottish, Mi’kmaq, Acadian, Irish, and English, with respective languages—Gaelic, Mi’kmaq, French, and English. English is now the primary spoken language, though Mi’kmaq, Gaelic and French are still heard.

The island contains five reserves of the Mi’kmaq Nation, these being: Eskasoni, Membertou, Wagmatcook, We’kopaq/Waycobah, and Potlotek/Chapel Island. Eskasoni is the largest in both population and land area.

Later migrations of Black Loyalists, Italians, and Eastern Europeans mostly settled in the eastern part of the island around the Industrial Cape Breton region. The population of Cape Breton Island has been in decline for almost two decades with an increasing population exodus in recent years due to economic conditions.

Economy

Cape Breton Island has two major coal deposits: The Sydney Coal Field in the southeastern part of the island along the Atlantic Ocean drove the Industrial Cape Breton economy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—until after World War II its industries were the largest private employers in Canada; the Inverness Coal Field in the western part of the island along the Gulf of St. Lawrence is significantly smaller but hosted several mines.

Sydney has traditionally been the main port, with various facilities in a large, sheltered, natural harbor. It is the island’s largest commercial center and home to the island’s daily newspaper, the Cape Breton Post, as well as its only active television studio, CJCB-TV, and several radio stations. The Marine Atlantic terminal at North Sydney is the terminal for large ferries traveling to Channel–Port aux Basques and seasonally to Argentia on the island of Newfoundland.

Point Edward on the west side of Sydney Harbor is the location of Sydport, a former navy base (HMCS Protector) now converted to commercial use. The Canadian Coast Guard College is located nearby at Westmount. Petroleum, bulk coal, and cruise ship facilities are also located in Sydney Harbor.

Glace Bay is the second largest urban community in population and was the island’s main coal mining center until its last mine ceased operation in the 1980s. Glace Bay served as the hub of the Sydney & Louisburg Railway and also as a major fishing port. At one time, Glace Bay was known as the largest town in Nova Scotia, based on population.

Port Hawkesbury has risen to prominence since the completion of the Canso Causeway and Canso Canal created an artificial deep-water port, allowing extensive petrochemical, pulp and paper, and gypsum handling facilities to be established. The Strait of Canso is completely navigable to St. Lawrence Seaway-max vessels, and Port Hawkesbury is open to the deepest-draught vessels on the world’s oceans. Large marine vessels may also enter Bras d’Or Lake through the Great Bras d’Or channel whereas small craft have the additional use of the Little Bras d’Or channel or St. Peters Canal. The St. Peters Canal is no longer used by commercial shipping on Cape Breton Island but is an important waterway for recreational vessels.

The industrial Cape Breton area faced several challenges with the closure of the Cape Breton Development Corporation’s (DEVCO) coal mines and the Sydney Steel Corporation’s (SYSCO) steel mill. In recent years the Island’s residents have been attempting to diversify the area economy by investing in tourism developments, call centers, and small businesses, as well as manufacturing ventures in such fields as auto parts, pharmaceuticals, and window glazings.

While the Cape Breton Regional Municipality is in transition from an industrial to a service-based economy, the rest of Cape Breton Island outside of the industrial area surrounding Sydney-Glace Bay has been more stable, with a mixture of fishing, forestry, small-scale agriculture, and tourism.

Tourism in particular has grown throughout the post-Second World War era, especially the growth in vehicle-based touring, which was furthered by the creation of the Cabot Trail scenic drive. Cape Breton Island tourism marketing places a heavy emphasis on its Scottish Gaelic heritage through events such as the Celtic Colours Festival, held each October, as well as promotions through the Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts.

A popular attraction for tourists is not on the land, but in the water: Whales. Whale-watching cruises are operated by numerous vendors from Baddeck to Cheticamp. The most popular species of whale found in Cape Breton’s waters is the Pilot whale.

The primary east-west road on the island is Highway 105, the Trans-Canada Highway, although Trunk 4 is also heavily used. Highway 125 is an important arterial route around Sydney Harbour in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality. The Cabot Trail, circling the Cape Breton Highlands, and Trunk 19, along the western coast of the island, are important secondary roads. Railway connections between the port of Sydney to Canadian National Railway in Truro are maintained by the Cape Breton and Central Nova Scotia Railway.

The Cabot Trail is a scenic road circuit around and over the Cape Breton Highlands with spectacular coastal vistas; over 400,000 visitors drive the Cabot Trail each summer and fall. Coupled with Fortress Louisbourg, it has driven the growth of the tourism industry on the island in recent decades. The Condé Nast travel guide has rated Cape Breton Island as one of the best island destinations in the world.

Traditional music

Cape Breton fiddling is a lively regional violin style which falls within the Celtic music idiom. Cape Breton Island’s fiddle music was brought to North America by Scottish immigrants during the Highland Clearances. These immigrants were primarily from Gaelic-speaking regions in the Scottish Highlands and the Outer Hebrides. Although fiddling has changed considerably since this time in Scotland, it is widely held that the tradition of Scottish fiddle music has been better preserved in Cape Breton.

Dance styles associated with the music are Cape Breton step dancing, Cape Breton square dancing (Iona style and Inverness style), and highland dancing.

In 2005, as a tribute to the area’s traditional music, the construction of a tourism center and the world’s largest fiddle and bow was completed on the Sydney waterfront.

 

 

Fenian Raids

Between 1866 and 1870, the Fenian raids of the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish American-Irish Republican organization who were based in the United States, on British army forts, customs posts and other targets in Canada, were fought to bring pressure on Britain to withdraw from Ireland. They divided Catholic Irish-Canadians, many of whom were torn between loyalty to their new home and sympathy for the aims of the Fenians. The Protestant Irish were generally loyal to Britain and fought with the Orange Order against the Fenians. While the U.S. authorities arrested the men and confiscated their arms, there is speculation that some in the U.S. government had turned a blind eye to the preparations for the invasion, angered at actions that could have been construed as British assistance to the Confederacy during the American Civil War. There were five Fenian raids of note.

Campobello Island Raid (1866)

Led by John O’Mahony, this Fenian raid occurred in April 1866, at Campobello Island, New Brunswick. A Fenian Brotherhood war party of over 700 members arrived at the Maine shore opposite the island intending to seize Campobello from the British. British commander Charles Hastings Doyle, stationed at Halifax, Nova Scotia responded decisively. On 17 April 1866 he left Halifax with Royal Navy warships carrying over 700 British regulars and proceeded to Passamaquoddy Bay, where the Fenian force was concentrated. This show of British might discouraged the Fenians, and they dispersed. The invasion reinforced the idea of protection for New Brunswick by joining with the British North American colonies of Nova Scotia, and the United Province of Canada, formerly Upper Canada (now Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec), to form the Dominion of Canada.

Niagara Raid (Battles of Ridgeway and Fort Erie) (1866)

The Fenians now split into two factions. The original faction led by Fenian founders James Stephens and John O’Mahony focused more on fundraising for rebels in Ireland. The more militant “senate faction” led by William R. Roberts believed that even a marginally successful invasion of the Province of Canada or other parts of British North America would provide them with leverage in their efforts. After the failure of the April attempt to raid New Brunswick, which had been blessed by O’Mahony, the senate faction implemented their own plan for invading Canada. Drafted by the senate “Secretary for War” General T. W. Sweeny, a distinguished former Union Army officer, the plan called for multiple invasions at points in Canada West (now southern Ontario) and Canada East (now southern Quebec) intended to cut Canada West off from Canada East and possible British reinforcements from there. Key to the plan was a diversionary attack at Fort Erie from Buffalo, New York, meant to draw troops away from Toronto in a feigned strike at the nearby Welland Canal system. This would be the only Fenian attack, other than the Quebec raid several days later, that would be launched in June 1866.

Approximately 1000 to 1,300 Fenians crossed the Niagara River in the first 14 hours of June 1 under Colonel John O’Neill. Sabotaged by Fenians in its crew, the U.S. Navy’s side-wheel gunboat USS Michigan did not begin intercepting Fenian reinforcements until 2:15 p.m. — fourteen hours after Owen Starr’s advance party had crossed the river ahead of O’Neill’s main force. Once the USS Michigan was deployed, O’Neill’s force in the Niagara Region was cut off from further supplies and reinforcements.

After assembling with other units from the province and travelling all night, the Canadians advanced into a well-laid ambush (Battle of Ridgeway) by approximately 600-700 Fenians the next morning north of Ridgeway, a small hamlet west of Fort Erie. (The Fenian strength at Ridgeway had been reduced by desertions and deployments of Fenians in other locations in the area overnight.)

The Canadian militia consisted of inexperienced volunteers with no more than basic drill training but armed with Enfield rifled muskets equal to the armaments of the Fenians. A single company of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Toronto had been armed the day before on their ferry crossing from Toronto with state-of-the-art 7-shot Spencer repeating rifles, but had not had an opportunity to practise with them and were issued with only 28 rounds per man. The Fenians were mostly battle-hardened American Civil War veterans, armed with weapons procured from leftover war supplies, either Enfield rifled muskets or the comparable Springfield.

The opposing forces exchanged volleys for about two hours, before a series of command errors threw the Canadians into confusion. The Fenians took advantage of it by launching a bayonet charge that broke the inexperienced Canadian ranks. Seven Canadians were killed on the battlefield, two died shortly afterwards from wounds, and four would later die of wounds or disease while on service; ninety-four more were wounded or disabled by disease. Eight Fenians were killed and sixteen wounded.

After the battle, the Canadians retreated to Port Colborne, at the Lake Erie end of the Welland Canal. The Fenians rested briefly at Ridgeway, before returning to Fort Erie. Another encounter followed that saw several Canadians severely wounded and the surrender of a large group of local Canadian militia who had moved into the Fenian rear. After considering the inability of reinforcements to cross the river and the approach of large numbers of both militia and British regulars, the remaining Fenians released the Canadian prisoners and returned to Buffalo early in the morning of June 3. They were intercepted by the gunboat Michigan and surrendered to the American navy.

Until recently it was alleged that the turning point in the battle was when Fenian cavalry was erroneously reported and the Canadian militia ordered to form square, the standard tactic for infantry to repel cavalry. When the mistake was recognized, an attempt was made to reform in column; being too close to the Fenian lines, it failed. In his recent new history of Ridgeway, however, historian Peter Vronsky argues the explanation was not as simple as that. Prior to the formation of the square, confusion had already broken out when a unit of the Queen’s Own Rifles mistook three arriving companies of redcoat Hamilton 13th Battalion for British troops. When the Queen’s Own Rifles began retiring to give the field to what they thought were British units, the 13th Battalion mistook this for a retreat, and began withdrawing themselves. At this moment that the infamous “form square” order was given, completing the debacle that was unfolding on the field.

A board of inquiry determined that allegations over the alleged misconduct of Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Booker (13th Battalion), on whom command of Canadian volunteers had devolved, had “not the slightest foundation for the unfavourable imputations cast upon him in the public prints”. Nevertheless, the charges dogged Booker for the rest of his life.

A second board of inquiry into the battle at Fort Erie exonerated Lieutenant-Colonel J. Stoughton Dennis, Brigade Major of the Fifth Military District, although the President of the Board of Inquiry, Colonel George T. Denison, differed from his colleagues on several key points.

Five days after the start of the invasion, U. S. President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation requiring enforcement of the neutrality laws, guaranteeing the Fenian invasion could not continue. Generals Ulysses S. Grant and General George Meade went to Buffalo, New York to inspect the situation. Following instructions from Grant, Meade issued strict orders to prevent anyone from violating the border. Grant then proceeded to St. Louis. Meade, finding that the battles were over and the Fenian army interned in Buffalo, went to Ogdensburg, New York, to oversee the situation in the St. Lawrence River area. The U.S. Army was then instructed to seize all Fenian weapons and ammunition and prevent more border crossings. Further instructions on 7 June 1866 were to arrest anyone who appeared to be a Fenian.

Ironically, though they did nothing to advance the cause of Irish independence, the 1866 Fenian raids and the inept efforts of the Canadian militia to repulse them helped to galvanize support for the Confederation of Canada in 1867. Some historians have argued that the affair tipped the final votes of reluctant Maritime provinces in favour of the collective security of nationhood, making Ridgeway the “battle that made Canada.”

In June 2006 Ontario’s heritage agency dedicated a plaque at Ridgeway on the commemoration of the 140th anniversary of the battle. Many members of today’s Canadian army regiment, The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, return to the Ridgeway battle site each year on the weekend closest to the June 2 anniversary for a bicycle tour of the battle sites.

Alexander Muir, a Scottish immigrant, author of the “The Maple Leaf Forever” and member of the Orange Order, fought at Ridgeway with the Queen’s Own Rifles.

A Fenian commander was Brigadier General Thomas William Sweeny, who was arrested by the United States government for violating American neutrality. Nevertheless, he was soon released and served in the Regular Army until he retired in 1870.

The total casualty figures for the Fenian Raids into Canada 1866, including deaths from disease while on service in both Canada West (Ontario) and Canada East (Quebec), were calculated by the Militia Department in 1868 as 31 dead and 103 wounded or struck by disease (including a female civilian accidentally shot by the militia.)

Pigeon Hill Raid (1866)

After the invasion of Canada West failed, the Fenians decided to concentrate their efforts on Canada East. However, the American government had begun to impede Fenian activities, and arrested many Fenian leaders. The Fenians soon saw their plans begin to fade. General Samuel Spear of the Fenians managed to escape arrest, and, on June 7, Spear and his 1000 men marched into Canadian territory, achieving occupancy of Pigeon Hill, Frelighsburg, St. Armand and Stanbridge. At this point the Canadian government had done little to defend the border, but on June 8 Canadian forces arrived at Pigeon Hill and the Fenians, who were low on arms, ammunition and supplies, promptly surrendered, ending the raid on Canada East.

Mississquoi County Raid (1870)

This Fenian raid occurred during 1870, and the Canadians, acting on information supplied by Thomas Billis Beach, were able to wait for and turn back the attack.

Pembina Raid (1871)

Fenian John O’Neill, after the failed 1870 Fenian invasion of Canada, had resigned the Senate Wing then joined the Savage Wing. In return he was given a seat on the Savage Wing governing council. In 1871 O’Neill and an odd character named W. B. O’Donoghue asked the Savage Wing Council to undertake another invasion of Canada across the Dakota Territory border. The Council, weary of Canadian adventures in general and O’Neill in particular, would have none of it. O’Neill’s idea was turned down, but the Council promised to loan him arms and agreed they would not publicly denounce him and his raid.

O’Neill resigned from the Fenians to lead the invasion, which was planned in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to invade Manitoba near Winnipeg. About 35 men, led by John O’Neill, William B. O’Donoghue, and John J. Donnelly, hoped to join forces with Louis Riel’s French-Indian Métis. On October 5, O’Neill’s force managed to capture a Hudson’s Bay Company post and a Canadian customs house just north of the international border… or so they thought. A U.S. survey team had determined the border was two miles further north, placing the Hudson’s Bay post and the customs house both inside U.S. territory. O’Neill, J. J. Donnelly and ten others were taken prisoner near Pembina, Dakota Territory by U.S. soldiers led Captain Lloyd Wheaton.

The farcical raid was doomed from the very start. It actually took place inside the United States, and the Métis under Riel had signed a pact with the British just as the invasion began. Riel and his Métis captured O’Donoghue and gave him to U.S. authorities. In a somewhat muddled federal response, O’Neill was arrested twice – once in Dakota and once in Minnesota- but was released and never charged for “invading” U.S. territory. The men captured with him were released by the court as simply “dupes” of O’Neill and Donnelly.

Agitation in Pacific Northwest

The Fenian Brotherhood organized openly in the Pacific Northwest states during the 1870s and 1880s, agitating to invade British Columbia. Although no raids were ever launched, tensions were sufficient that Britain sent several large warships to the new railhead at Vancouver, British Columbia for the celebrations opening the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1886.

Results and long term effects

Support for the Fenian Brotherhood’s invasion of Canada quickly disappeared and there was no real threat after the 1890s. Nevertheless, the raids had an important effect on all Canadians.

The Fenian raids caused an increased anti-American feeling in Canada and the Maritimes because of the U.S. government’s perceived tolerance of the Fenians when they were meeting openly and preparing for the raids. The raids also aroused a martial spirit among Canadians by testing the militia’s strength. Because of their poor performance, the militia took efforts to improve themselves. This was achieved without the huge cost of a real war. The greatest impact of the Fenian raids was in the developing a sense of Canadian nationalism and leading the provinces into a Confederation. This was shown to be necessary for survival and self-defence; the raids showed Canadians that safety lay in unity. The Fenian raids thus should be viewed as an important factor in creating the country we know today as Canada.

We are the Fenian Brotherhood, skilled in the arts of war,

And we’re going to fight for Ireland, the land we adore,

Many battles we have won, along with the boys in blue,

And we’ll go and capture Canada, for we’ve nothing else to do.

— “Fenian soldier’s song”

 

Pearl Hart

Pearl Hart, (c. 1871 – after 1928) was a Canadian-born outlaw of the American Old West. She committed one of the last recorded stagecoach robberies in the United States; her crime gained notoriety primarily because of her gender. Many details of Hart’s life are uncertain with available reports being varied and often contradictory.

Early life

Hart was born as Pearl Taylor in the Canadian village of Lindsay, Ontario. Her parents were both religious and affluent, providing their daughter with the best available education. At the age of 16, she was enrolled in a boarding school when she became enamored with a young man, named Hart, who has been variously described as a rake, drunkard, and/or gambler. (Different sources list Hart’s given name as Brett, Frank, or William.) The two of them eloped, but Hart soon discovered that her new husband was abusive and left him to return to her mother.

Hart reconciled and left her husband several times. During their time together they had two children, a boy and a girl, whom Hart sent to her mother who was then living in Ohio. In 1893, the couple attended The Chicago World’s Fair where he worked for a time as a midway barker. She in turn developed a fascination with the cowboy lifestyle while watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. At the end of the Fair, Hart left her husband again bound on a train for Trinidad, Colorado, possibly in the company of a piano player named Dan Bandman.

Hart described this period of her life thus, “I was only twenty-two years old. I was good-looking, desperate, discouraged, and ready for anything that might come. I do not care to dwell on this period of my life. It is sufficient to say that I went from one city to another until some time later I arrived in Phoenix”. During this time Hart worked as a cook and singer, possibly supplementing her income as a demimondaine. There are also reports she developed a fondness for cigars, liquor, and morphine during this time.

A story of this period claims that while in Phoenix, Arizona, Hart ran into her husband. He convinced her to come back to him and move to Tucson. Once the money she had saved ran out, he returned to his abusive ways. The story continues by saying that when the Spanish-American War began he volunteered for military service. Hart then shocked observers by declaring that she hoped he would be killed by the Spanish. A variation of this story has Bandman instead of her husband leaving Hart for war.

Life of crime

By early 1898, Hart was in Mammoth, Arizona. Some reports indicate she was working as a cook in a boardinghouse. Others indicate she was operating a tent brothel near the local mine, even employing a second lady for a time. While doing well for a time, her financial outlook took a downturn after the mine closed. About this time Hart attested to receiving a message asking her to return home to her seriously ill mother.

Looking to raise money, Hart and an acquaintance, Joe Boot (name is probably an alias), worked an old mining claim he owned. After finding no gold in the claim the pair decided to rob the Globe to Florence, Arizona stagecoach.

The robbery occurred on May 30, 1899 at a watering point near Cane Springs Canyon, about 30 miles southeast of Globe. Hart had cut her hair short and took the highly eccentric act, for a Victorian Era woman, of dressing in men’s clothing. Hart was armed with a .38 revolver while Boot had a Colt .45. One of the last routes in the territory, the run had not been robbed in several years and thus the coach did not have a shotgun messenger. The pair stopped the coach and Boot held a gun on the robbery victims while Hart took $431.20 and two firearms from the passengers. After returning $1 to each passenger, she then took the driver’s revolver. After the robbers had galloped away on their horses, the driver unhitched one of the horses and headed back to town to alert the sheriff.

Reports of the next few days vary. According to Hart, the pair took a circuitous route designed to lose anyone who followed, while making their future plans. Others claim the pair became lost and wandered in circles. Either way, a posse led by Sheriff Truman of Pinal County caught up with the pair on June 5, 1899. Finding both of them asleep, Sheriff Truman reported that Boot surrendered quietly while Hart fought to avoid capture.

As of 2010 many Old West historians believe Hart committed the last stagecoach robbery, but in fact two unknown men robbed a stagecoach a year later in 1900, just outside of Bisbee, Arizona; the outlaws escaped the law. A final stagecoach robbery occurred in 1916 Nevada when a drifter named Ben Kuhl ambushed and killed the driver of a small horse-driven mail wagon during the Jarbidge Stage Robbery. About $4,000 was stolen, but Kuhl was caught soon after, though the money was never recovered.

In and out of jail

Following their arrest, Boot was held in Florence, Arizona, while Hart was moved to Tucson, the jail lacking any facilities for a lady. The novelty of a female stagecoach robber quickly spawned a media frenzy and national reporters soon joined the local press clamoring to interview and photograph Hart. One article in Cosmopolitan said Hart was “just the opposite of what would be expected of a woman stage robber,” though, “when angry or determined, hard lines show about her eyes and mouth.” Locals also became fascinated with her, one local fan giving her a bobcat cub to keep as a pet.

The room Hart was held in was not a normal jail cell, but made of lath and plaster. Taking advantage of the relatively weak building material, and possibly with the aid of an assistant, Hart escaped on October 12, 1899, leaving an 18-inch (46 cm) hole in the wall. She was recaptured two weeks later near Deming, New Mexico.

Hart and Boot came to trial for robbing the stagecoach passengers in October 1899. During the trial, Hart made an impassioned plea to the jury, claiming she needed the money to be able to go to her ailing mother. Judge Fletcher M. Doan was shocked and angered by the jury’s not guilty finding and scolded the members for failure to perform their duties. Immediately following the acquittal, the pair were rearrested on the charge of tampering with U.S. mails. The pair were convicted during their second trial, Boot receiving a sentence of thirty years and Hart a sentence of five years.

Both Hart and Boot were sent to Yuma Territorial Prison to serve their sentences. Boot became a prison trusty, driving supply wagons to prison chain gangs working outside the walls. One day while driving a wagon he escaped and was never seen again. At the time of his escape, Boot had completed less than two years of his sentence.

The attention Hart had received in jail continued once she was imprisoned. The warden, who enjoyed the attention she attracted, provided her with an oversize 8 by 10 feet (2.4 by 3.0 m) mountain-side cell that included a small yard and allowed her to entertain reporters and other guests as well as pose for photographs. Hart in turn used her position as the only female at an all-male facility to her advantage, playing admiring guards and prison trusties off of each other in an effort to improve her situation.

Hart’s release from prison came in the form of a December 1902 pardon from Governor Alexander Brodie. The reason for this pardon, given on the condition she leave the territory, is unclear. At the time, Hart claimed she was needed in Kansas City to play the lead in a play, written by her sister, about her life of crime. A later rumor emerged in 1964, following the death of all potentially involved parties, alleging Hart was pardoned because she had become pregnant in a manner which would embarrass the prison. There is no evidence Hart ever had a third child so this rumor, if true, may indicate a successful ploy upon Hart’s behalf. Upon release from prison, Hart was provided with a train ticket to Kansas City, Missouri.

Later life

After leaving prison, Hart largely disappeared from public view. She had a short lived show where she reenacted her crime and then spoke about the horrors of Yuma Territorial Prison. Following this she worked, under an alias, as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. In 1904, Hart was running a cigar store in Kansas City where she was arrested for receiving stolen property. She was acquitted of the charge.

Accounts of Hart’s later life are sketchy and contradictory. One common story has her returning to the jail in Tucson 25 years after her imprisonment to visit the jail cell that once held her. Likewise, a census taker in 1940 claimed to have discovered Hart living in Arizona under a different name. Folklore from Gila County claims that Hart returned to Globe and lived there peacefully until her death on December 30, 1955. Competing claims place her death as late as 1960.

 

Butterbox Babies

William and Lila Young

The Ideal Maternity Home is infamous for the Butterbox Babies.
The Ideal Maternity Home operated in East Chester, Nova Scotia, Canada from the late 1920s through at least the late 1940s. William and Lila Young operated it. William was a chiropractor and Lila was a midwife, although she advertised herself as an obstetrician. While they were tried for various crimes involving the home, including manslaughter, the entire truth of the horrors perpetrated there was not widely known until much later.
The Ideal Maternity Home promised both maternity care for local married couples and discreet birthing and placement for children of unwed mothers. The home was the source of babies for an illegal trade in infants between Canada and the United States. During this period the laws in the US forbid adoption across religious backgrounds. There was an acute shortage of babies available for Jewish couples to adopt. The home would provide these desperate people “black market” adoptions charging up to $10,000 for a baby. Many of the babies in the 1940s ended up in Jewish homes in New Jersey. At the same time they would charge the mothers $500 for their services. At this time the average wage in the area was $8 a week. Many of the mothers could not afford this sum, and were forced to work at the home for up to eighteen months to pay their bill.
During WWII business was booming because nearby Halifax was a major port serving as the point of departure for convoys crossing the North Atlantic to England. Many of these ships never completed the journey. The sailors and merchant seamen would squeeze as much of life into their days in port as they could, and many women were left as unmarried or widowed expectant mothers. The Ideal Maternity Home offered almost the only place that could provide for these women and their children.
What was discovered later was that the Youngs would purposely starve “unmarketable” babies to death by feeding them only molasses and water. On this diet the infants would usually last only two weeks. Any deformity, a serious illness or “dark” coloration would often seal their fate. Babies who died were disposed of in small wooden grocery boxes, typically used for dairy products. Thus the term Butterbox Babies is used to refer to these unfortunate infants. The Butterbox Babies bodies were buried on the property, adjacent to a nearby cemetery, at sea or sometimes burned in the homes furnace. In some cases married couples who had come to the home solely for birthing services were told that their baby had died shortly after birth. In truth these babies were also sold to adoptive parents. The Youngs would also separate or create siblings to meet the desires of customers. It is estimated that between four and six hundred babies died at the home, while at least another thousand survived and were adopted. Even these lucky survivors often suffered from ailments caused by the unsanitary conditions and lack of care at the home.
Survivors of dark episode in Canada’s history trace their past

WHEN RIVA Barnett Saia was old enough to read, her parents gave her a copy of the “The Chosen Baby,” a book that explained why her olive-skinned family didn’t share her blue eyes and blond hair.
Saia was adopted. The book was her parents’ way of telling her she should feel special because she was chosen. But Saia, now a 52-year-old social worker from Union Township, said she has always felt incomplete without knowing who she was and where she came from.
Now, Saia and as many as 40 other adoptees living in Monmouth, Ocean, Middlesex, Camden and Union counties are discovering their identities within the pages of a paperback book, linking them to a dark chapter in Canada’s history.
The adoptees came from the Ideal Maternity Home, an illegally run home for unwed mothers in the rural east Canadian province of Nova Scotia, where many babies were sold on the black market to desperate couples from New York and New Jersey in the 1930s and ’40s.
For sums as steep as $10,000, couples chose their infant from the rows of bassinets, arranged like produce bins at a supermarket. Twins were separated, or arbitrarily “matched,” depending on what the unwitting customers wanted.
Those were the lucky ones.
Hundreds of others were left to die, either because the medical care at the home was lacking, or because the children appeared “unmarketable,” according to witnesses.
Infants who were sick, deformed or disabled, or of mixed race were fed molasses and water until they starved to death. A caretaker years later admitted to Canadian journalist Bette Cahill that he was paid to bury the babies in open graves, or in butter boxes from the local LaHave Dairy.
Cahill’s 1992 book called them the “Butterbox Babies,” a name with which adoptee Ilene Seifer Steinhauer, 52, of Shrewsbury readily identifies.
“I am a Butterbox Baby,” said Steinhauer, who learned of her past through immigration records that contained details about her adoption. “I feel very drawn to it. Before this, I felt like I didn’t have any history.”
A bygone era’s dark legacy
The history of the Ideal Maternity Home is the story of a religious but ambitious couple, Lila Coolen Young and her husband William Young.
In 1928, Lila Young, 29, a recent graduate of the National School of Obstetrics and Midwifery, and her husband, 30, an unordained Seventh Day Adventist minister and missionary, opened the “Life and Health Sanitarium.” They barely had the money to supply enough cots for their patients in the small cottage in East Chester, Nova Scotia.
Within a year, Lila had parlayed her training as a midwife into a maternity practice, and the Youngs were well on their way to becoming known as “the Baby Barons of East Chester.” Within 15 years, they had expanded a four-bedroom operation to 54 bedrooms, with 70 babies in the nursery.
The Youngs knew far more about babies than just how to deliver them.
Karen Balcom, a doctoral candidate at the History Department of Rutgers University studying the baby selling trade between the United States and Canada, said the Youngs operated for years unimpeded by laws governing adoptions because there weren’t any at the time.
“This institution is able to establish itself in a vacuum,” Balcom said.
The Youngs also benefited from being at the right place at the right time. The Nova Scotia coast drew vacationers from New York and New Jersey, many of whom were childless Jewish couples frustrated by the long waits for Jewish infant adoptions back home.
The Youngs were willing to disregard the “unbreakable” rule of that era followed by American and Canadian adoption agencies: that children must be placed with a family of the same religious background, Balcom said.
“The evidence I have seen is that Jewish parents were told there were Jewish babies (at the home), and that was extremely unlikely to have been the case. Other families knew they were getting non-Jewish babies but were either comfortable enough or desperate enough to take them,” Balcom said. “Quite consciously, the Youngs realized they had a specific market to serve.”
The Youngs also met a demand for Canadian women, for whom both abortion and birth control were illegal.
“For those women who decided to bear and keep their babies, there was little community sympathy,” Cahill wrote in her book, describing how families would disown their pregnant daughters. “It would be another 20 years before the Nova Scotia government recognized the need for social programs for unmarried mothers.”
Understanding the moral tenor of the times, the Youngs sold what all unwed mothers wanted: secrecy.
According to a Canadian television documentary, a newspaper advertisement Young composed to lure women to the home read: “Dame gossip has sent many young lives to perdition after ruining them socially, that might have been BRIGHT STARS in society and a POWER in the world of usefulness HAD THEY BEEN SHIELDED from gossip when they made a mistake.”
That shame kept pregnant women quiet when they witnessed the infant neglect, or the unsanitary conditions of the delivery rooms.
By 1933, the Youngs’ lucrative business had attracted the attention of the Nova Scotia child welfare director and health minister, who forced them to to hire a registered nurse — the home’s first.
Health officials intervened in 1945-46 and won convictions against the Youngs for violating new adoption licensing laws. But the Youngs’ downfall came in 1947, after they filed a libel suit against the Montreal Standard Publishing Company for its coverage of the home, according to the Cahill book.
By insisting that their good names had been besmirched, the Youngs succeeded in reliving the newspaper’s coverage of the home.
Pediatricians who had inspected the Home testified to its “striking overcrowding” its ‘fly-filled nurseries,” and the “malnourished children.” The mothers called as defense witnesses also revealed wrongdoing: one told how her baby died after receiving no medical attention, and was buried in a butter box. The same mother also said the Youngs told her to pose as a nurse during a health department inspection. Another witness admitted to lying in adoption records when she said her child was Jewish.
A jury dismissed the Youngs’ libel suit. The Youngs tried to continue their business, but the trial “really shredded any remaining reputation they had,” Balcom said. They both died in the 1960s.
Child welfare authorities in Canada and America were so concerned with what the Youngs had done, they developed new laws to protect adopted children.
“This case says something about what can happen when you back women in trouble into a corner, the danger of punitive attitudes toward women, and the danger of controlling their reproductive options,” Balcom said.
Miracles out of the horror
Ideal Maternity Home survivors, once confused and saddened by the choices their mothers made, have a newfound sympathy for their sacrifice.
“Our mothers still can’t deal with the shame,” said Steinhauer, a recently laid-off manager for Weight Watchers in North Jersey. She went hunting for her birth family in Nova Scotia and found receptive relatives, but her mother told a cousin that she wanted to remain in hiding.
“I wish my biological mother would have come running with open arms, ‘Oh darling, I’ve been looking my whole life,’ instead of a ‘Dear John’ letter,” she said.
“But it’s a miracle we are all alive.”
Steinhauer, Saia, and a growing number of New Jersey butter box baby survivors — some of whom have just learned of their ties to the maternity home — will arrive in Nova Scotia Labor Day weekend. They will attend a memorial service and a monument dedication ceremony in honor of the infants who died at the home.
If the money can be raised, survivors from Nova Scotia intend to come to Rutgers University to present a play, “Aftermath,” depicting the events at the Home, said Robert Hartlen, spokesman Survivors and Friends of the Ideal Maternity Home.
Although horrified by the truth, the adoptees say knowing their origins helps them appreciate their adoption in a way they never imagined.
Steinhauer said she feels inextricably tied to other “survivors” of the maternity home, many of whom were adopted in the summer of 1945. “We feel related. It’s somebody who has lived your whole story,” Steinhauer said.
They also realize their adoptive parents may have saved their lives, bringing new meaning to the words they were told as children: “you were chosen.”
Freehold Township resident Sandy Tuckerton said her mother chose her because she was the only baby in the ward that day with dark hair, like her own. A pediatrician diagnosed Sandy with pneumonia — a fact that must have escaped the Maternity Home’s proprietors.
“If I had stayed there, I probably wouldn’t have made it,” Tuckerton said. “The sick babies weren’t marketable. I feel very lucky that I was adopted.”
Saia was also fortunate that her mother was drawn to a wet and sickly looking child in a corner of the room. A pediatrician in town who examined Saia urged her mother to “get the child out of there as quickly as possible,” Saia said.
“I realize I could have been bound for a butter box,” Saia said, “and I’m here to tell the story.”