was Mrs. Elizabeth Barnes, a farmer’s wife who was known locally as a clairvoyant and fortune teller. She called herself Mother Barnes and was feared yet frequented by members of the farming communities around Plumb Hollow, near Athens, which is near Brockville, Ontario. In 1889 she was sought out by George Dagg, a farmer from Shawville, Quebec, who believed he had a poltergeist on his farm. Blessed with “second sight” and the “sixth sense” (for she claimed to be “the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter”), Mother Barnes identified the cause of the disturbance: an adolescent girl with a troubled psyche. In the process, she inspired at least one novel and a number of short plays. Her abandoned log cabin was still standing in the late 1990s.
050. Who claimed Canada as his personal possession?
Alexander Humphreys claimed Canada as his personal possession. The otherwise-humble schoolmaster made the astonishing claim and came close to proving it in 1839 during an amazing trial in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Humphreys maintained that he was the descendent of Sir William Alexander, who in 1625 and 1628 had been granted land across much of today’s Eastern Canada. The direct line of inheritance died out in 1739. Nonetheless, there were two pretenders.
The first claimant was William Alexander Stirling, an American soldier, who tried to claim the title and the immense land grants. But he was unable to prove his legal right to the title.
The second claimant was Alexander Humphreys, the humble schoolmaster, who claimed he was the Earl of Stirling, Hereditary Viceroy of the Canadas, Lord Lieutenant of Nova Scotia, Proprietor of Maine and New Brunswick, Master of the Grand Banks Fisheries, Absolute Owner of All Lands, Waterways, and Minerals found between the Great Lakes and California.
Humphreys supplied documents to prove his claim, but he was in turn accused of imposture and forgery. Losing his case, he settled in Washington, D.C., where he and then his sons continued to press their grandiose claim. The Man Who Claimed Canada was the title of a CBC Radio drama broadcast on December 6, 1954. The play was researched and written by R.S. Lambert.
051. Who are the “titans” of the Canadian big business?
Peter C. Newman, the Boswell of members of Canada’s business establishment, has focused on the new breed of powerful men, whom he calls “titans.” He does this in his book Titans: How the New Canadian Establishment Seized Power (1998), which documents the deals and personal lives of such titans as Ted Rogers, Paul Desmarais, Conrad Black, Eddy Cogan, Peter Nygard, Peter Munk, and Thomas d’Aquino.
052. Did L.M. Montgomery base Anne of Green Gables on Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm?
L.M. Montgomery’s classic novel Anne of Green Gables (1908) has surprising parallels with an earlier and even more famous children’s book, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), the American classic written by Kate Douglas Wiggin. According to scholar David Howes and writer Constance Classen, similarities of plot, description, and dialogue are so obvious that Montgomery, in the writing of her children’s book, must have been consciously or unconsciously influenced by Wiggin’s writing. As Andy Lamey noted in “Is Anne of Green Gables Really from Sunnybrook Farm?” National Post, April 10, 1999, “Both Anne and Rebecca tell the story of a young girl who goes to live with an older couple after one or both of her parents dies.”
053. Who is Dudley Do-Right?
Writers Alex Anderson and Jay Ward created the character of Dudley Do-Right — the upright, uptight, and unbright Mountie — as long ago as 1948. It was not until 1961 that the animated character first appeared as a segment of the TV program The Bullwinkle Show. Then Dudley had his own series of brief episodes (each four and a half minutes in duration) on ABC-TV in 196970.
The incompetent Dudley was modelled on Nelson Eddy’s Mountie character in the movie Rose Marie. Inspector Fenwick supervises Dudley in his battle against his arch enemy, Snidely Whiplash, who repeatedly kidnaps Dudley’s girlfriend, Nell (the Inspector’s daughter), and ties her to railroad tracks. If that weren’t proof enough of his villainy, Snidley also has green skin. According to Michael Dawson in The Mountie: From Dime Novel to Disney (1998), Ward has described Dudley as “stalwart, clean-living, chaste, dense — and a crashing bore.”
054. Who was the strongest man in the world?
Weight-lifting records are made and broken every year. Yet, in downtown Montreal there is a statue raised to “the strongest man in the world.” He is the French-Canadian strongman Louis Cyr (1863–1912), whose strength became a legend. Before the sport of weightlifting was developed, he won every challenge match in North America in 1885 and even claimed the world championship in 1892. Three years later, in Boston, he lifted 1,967 kg, believed to be the heaviest weight ever hoisted by a human being.
Harry Houdini, writing in Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (1920), had this to say about Cyr: “It is generally conceded that Louis Cyr was, in his best days, the strongest man in the known world at all-round straight lifting. Cyr did not give the impression of being an athlete, nor of a man in training, for he appeared to be over-fat and not particularly muscular; but he made records in lifting which, to the best of my knowledge, no other man has been able to duplicate.”
055. Did Jesse James hide in Ontario?
The American outlaw Jesse James was shot by a fellow gang member, Bob Ford, in April 1882. As John Macdonald wrote in “The Traveller,” CARP News, May 1998, “The story made the headlines around the world, including Princeton, Ont., a small Oxford County village 50 km southwest of Kitchener. Villagers saw the pictures of James and recognized him as a former local resident, a Mr. Richardson. To this day, over a century later, stories persist around Princeton that Jesse James lived there while on the run from U.S. authorities.”
It is said that he arrived in the early 1880s and moved into the local hotel. He bought a horse and buggy and was noted for his marksmanship. He courted a local young lady and after their engagement was announced, he made known his plan to buy a farm on Governor’s Road, now Highway 2. Thereupon, he vanished, leaving behind his broken-hearted fiancée.
The legend of James’s days in Princeton is one of many stories included by Anna Williamson in History of Princeton (1967).
056. Where is there a replica of Lester B. Pearson’s study?
Upon the death of former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson in 1972, a replica of his study from his Ottawa home, complete with books, furnishings, and memorabilia, was fitted into Laurier House in Ottawa, as incongruous as it might seem. The result is that Laurier House could be called Liberal House, for it is associated with three prominent Liberal prime ministers of Canada: Sir Wilfrid Laurier, W.L. Mackenzie King, and Lester B. Pearson.
057. Who was the so-called Lone Cowboy?
Aficionados of the art and fiction of the Wild West know the “Lone Cowboy” as Will James — cowboy, bronco-buster, rodeo performer, cattle-rustler, ex-onvict, Hollywood stuntman, illustrator, and storyteller about Western subjects. Curiously, James was not the adventurer’s real name, and contrary to the impression he gave, he was not born in the United States, though he did live in the West and his last decades were spent on his ranch at Pryor Creek, Montana.
A French Canadian by birth and background, he was born Ernest Dufault (1892–1942) at Saint-Nazaire, Eastern Townships, Quebec. At the age of seventeen, he headed out to Alberta, where he ran afoul of the RCMP and then crossed the border, eventually spending time in a U.S. prison. Between 1924 and 1942, he wrote and illustrated twenty-four popular Westerns. Two of them, Smoky (1933) and Lone Cowboy (1934), were made by Hollywood into movies. His rambunctious life became the subject of a NFB documentary titled Alias Will James (1988), directed by Jacques Godbout with music supplied
