found the chain of evidence about as strong and complete as circumstantial evidence could make a case. They returned to the courtroom, bringing in a verdict of guilty.
Chief Justice Meredith, seizing the opportunity, delivered a tongue-lashing to William Hammond while sending a moral message to the general public. In pronouncing, yet again, the sentence of death on Hammond, Meredith stated: “For your poor and aged father there is profound sympathy: had you been as faithful to your wife as he has been to you, the death and misery you have caused would not have taken place and you would not be standing where you are, a convicted murderer.”
Because Bracebridge’s jail was notorious for the ease prisoners had in escaping it, Hammond was imprisoned in the Simcoe County Gaol at Barrie until September 8, when he was delivered back to Bracebridge, securely shackled. Ontario’s official executioner came to town as well, and began building a scaffold in the yard of the Muskoka District Gaol on Dominion Street. The sound and sight of its construction attracted onlookers. Drama in the community mounted. Hammond himself could hear the sawing and hammering as his gallows took shape in the days before he was to die.
On the appointed day, as the eerie grey light of dawn broke over the staged spectacle, the town bell began to toll. Its hollow tone echoed ominously across the small community’s rooftops, the mood of solemn expectation thickening. In a further theatrical flourish, a black flag was run up the pole at the town hall, adjacent to the gallows, heightening the bleak moment’s macabre drama.
Up the fresh wooden steps to the hangman’s platform climbed young William Hammond. Townspeople had risen early to witness the spectacle as best they could through or over the walled-off jail yard. Performing their grim roles behind the whitewashed wooden fence were the sheriff, constables, a clergyman, and the hangman. The assembly looked on in stony silence. The convicted murderer was directed to stand on the hinged trap door. The coarse rope noose was secured around his neck. The door beneath his feet was released. The rope snapped taught as he plummeted down. The noose accomplished its crude purpose, ending William Hammond’s life early that September morning.
Public executions continued into the 1890s because conventional wisdom held that the value of such an exercise, to be a truly instructive lesson, demanded a strong closing scene, like a mutinous shipmate being flogged on deck or keelhauled in the forced presence of the crew. Public execution was believed to deliver an educational punch for the populace by being both enthralling and revolting. Hammond’s 1898 hanging took place behind a high wooden fence and out of direct sight for many people, but the event remained the talk of the town for years to come. Crime did not pay. The bleak finality of Hammond’s quest for cash and his execution set a mood that reached everywhere crimes were being tried and punished in Bracebridge, including Magistrate’s Court.
To the chagrin of public authorities, however, not every crime resulted in a criminal being brought to justice, rather counteracting the moral impact of Hammond’s ghoulish execution. Muskoka’s share of mysterious murders and unsolved thefts included, for instance, the infamous Bracebridge bank robbery of 1897.
Begun in the early 1880s, Alfred Hunt’s private bank in Bracebridge, prominent in a redbrick building on the main street of town, was the very first bank to operate in Muskoka. It provided excellent service and valued convenience to its customers, who no longer had to bank at distant centres. On Thursday morning, May 27, bank clerk T.H. Pringle arrived at his usual hour to open up, only to be greeted by the strong odour of gunpowder. He was astounded to discover the building had been entered during the night. Making his way directly to the vault, he found a hole had been drilled through the door and the combination lock blown off.
As the twentieth century arrived, Muskoka District’s prestigious new Court House opened at the corner of Dominion and Ontario streets in Bracebridge, just as James Boyer retired after a quarter-century as district magistrate. His successors would hold court here.
Across town, Thomas Magee, who had earlier reported to police several tools missing from his blacksmithy and wagon shop, soon learned that his brace, sledgehammer, and crowbar were now at Hunt’s Bank, being held as exhibits for a trial if a culprit could be apprehended. Although his tools were in the bank, gone missing from it were some one thousand dollars in cash, several gold watches, some notes of exchange, Mickle Lumber Company orders, and nine thousand dollars in the town’s most recent waterworks debentures, issued to Richard Lance of Beatrice, who had left them with Mr. Hunt for safekeeping. Magee got his tools back, in time, but no one was ever brought to justice for this well-planned robbery. The lesson from that one, to those who sought to believe it, was that crime did pay
Within the year the Hunt Bank closed. Its crash shook Bracebridge and the large surrounding area of Muskoka. The bank’s collapse wiped out Alfred Hunt’s own extensive fortune, but the depositors at his bank received the return of nearly all their money. Hunt, whom townspeople had earlier elected mayor in the mid-1890s, continued to be held in high local esteem. “The bank should not have busted,” asserted the bank’s solicitor, Arthur A. Mahaffy, who believed the Hunt Bank to still be fundamentally sound. But Alfred Hunt, focused on the bank’s sizeable problems rather than its basic soundness, and still shaken by the bank robbery the year before, persisted in assigning his assets for the benefit of the bank’s creditors. That was the end of independent local banking in Muskoka. The national banks promptly moved in.
These three cases and many other higher court proceedings in Bracebridge added to the local judicial culture of the 1890s, theatre that was rounded out by the all-too-human vignettes unfolding, at the same time, on the stage of Magistrate’s Court.
Chapter Four
The Constabulary: Producers of Police Court Drama
Without Police Chief Robert Armstrong and other law officers apprehending miscreants and hauling them into court, James Boyer and his fellow justices of the peace would have been much freer to engage in the other pursuits by which they earned their livelihoods. Yet constables were resolutely on duty, maintaining the peace and enforcing the law in and around Bracebridge, essential cast members in the town’s dramas of justice, their pivotal role in the process contributing the popular term police court to the place where justices of the peace presided.
In establishing the rule of law and producing the raw material for more trials, they were joined by other actors in the role of enforcer. For in 1890s Canada, the constabulary was not the only arm of the law. Private citizens also appeared in Magistrate’s Court in a prosecutorial role, not for some private grievance but for the share of fines they were entitled to collect from the conviction of someone caught breaking a public law. The ancient law of moieties, still part of Canada’s Criminal Code in the days James Boyer tried these cases, was a reward system that greatly multiplied the available eyes and ears of enforcement. Moieties lengthened the arm of the law by, potentially, making all citizens throughout the district into private constables.
The most reliable producers of drama in the courtroom, however, were the regular police officers who brought charges as a result of trolling known hotspots. The starring role that the magistrate played in upholding the rule of law depended on solid supporting performances by those policing the town and its environs as constables, revenue agents, health and sanitation inspectors, bylaw-enforcement officers, game wardens, and fence inspectors. These prowling constables arrested drunks at street level and poachers in the backwoods, to maintain peace and order, and to establish the rule of law. They showed up in court, accompanied by the sullen or surly individuals they’d taken into custody, where they pressed charges, gave evidence, and completed their prosecutions.
It was all of one piece, a common theatre of justice. To the police officer, the morning Magistrate’s Court was as important a stage on which to perform his role as the back alleys he patrolled
