The Desperate Ones: Forgotten Canadian Outlaws [Paperback]

 

 

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The annals of Canadian history contain many sagas of intrepid explorers, heroic adventurers, groundbreaking inventors, wars fought and victories won, but for many years our rogues' gallery of villains contained only empty walls and blank microfiche. To have heroes, some say, we must have villains, and certainly that is true of law enforcement heroes.

Edward Butts is determined to provide us portraits of our villains. In 1984 he collaborated with Harold Horwood on Pirates and Outlaws of Canada 1610-1932. (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1984.) In 1987 he was back again with Horwood, providing the sequel, Bandits and Privateers: Canada in the Age of Gunpowder (Toronto: Doubleday Canada). Butts then went on to write Outlaws of the Lakes: Bootlegging and Smuggling From Colonial Times to the Prohibition (Toronto: Lynx Images, 2004).

Continuing to fill the walls of Canada's rogues' gallery, Butts has now added The Desperate Ones: Forgotten Canadian Outlaws (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2006). Butts has selected nineteen villains and their gangs to let us know we aren't without some epic manhunts, shoot `em ups, nefarious deeds, vigilantism, and of course the ones so slick they actually got away.

Canadians have never had the advantage of a J. Edgar Hoover, shaping criminal myths to enhance his own. Sure, we had a wild West but we never had a Wild West. We had Bill Miner, train robber, and we had the Black Donnellys. We've also had a few serial killers and, more lately, Toronto's Boyd Gang and the Stop Watch Gang from Ottawa, but no Bonnies, Clydes, Dillingers, Pretty Boy Floyds, Jesse James, or even a Wyatt Earp to save us.

Instead, we've had the North West Mounted Police, a few citizens good with guns, and--on the other side--such characters as Henry Johnson in the mid-nineteenth century who rustled livestock, then sold it back to its original owners; that was in the Markham area, now a bedroom community of Toronto. West of Toronto was far more exciting. In the late 1920's, Orval Shaw, the mystery man of Skunk's Misery, led police a merry chase for months.

Worse, further west, as late as 1909 stagecoaches and trains were still considered prey by gangs at least as well organized as the James and Younger crews of earlier years. Then there was the Morel Gang of Montreal, the Siberian Gang in British Columbia thwarted by a crack shot local lay pastor, and the Reid Gang that made off with more than $2 million in cash and bonds from bank robberies during the Twenties.

Butts provides us with the stories of these lesser lights in Canadian criminal history, dimmed only by their proximity to American "folk anti-heroes." Frankly, ours stack up favourably, gun for gun, greed for greed, scheme for scheme.

Butts does not editorialize his material. Yes, there are villains, and yes, some heroes. There is also happenstance, misfortune, and good luck. Absolutely, our rogues' gallery is filling up.

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