railway construction stimulated a booming regional economy, drawing into central Muskoka “thousands of tough railway navvies.” Fighting between them and the shantymen of the lumber camps followed as night the day, and, as Cotton documents in Whiskey and Wickedness, “use of firearms and knives became quite commonplace in the 1870s and 1880s, resulting in a number of deaths.” By 1900, with completion of Muskoka’s major railway construction projects, many of these rowdy men had moved on, and, combined with more stringent control over the liquor situation, the raw life of Bracebridge seemed to be ebbing into a more genteel social order.
The sex trade, however, remained a constant. No amount of Victorian hypocrisy or supposed social gentility could mask matters that constables had to address in a country where the law, in criminalizing such commerce, created the brothels of Bracebridge. “Wherever there is plenty of money and lots of young single men,” observed Cotton of this phenomenon in Muskoka’s capital, “houses of ill-repute seemed to flourish.”
From the early 1870s through the 1880s, bordellos, often operating as boarding houses and inns, required steady attention from the Bracebridge law enforcers. Two such establishments were closed down in March 1880 when the women who acted as the “proprietors” of each were convicted by Magistrate James Boyer of keeping houses of prostitution. As Orillia’s Packet reported on March 31 that year, these women were given heavy fines, but also made to know that the fines would not be enforced if they left Bracebridge within three days. That was James Boyer’s preferred way of addressing the problem: in effect, moving it to some other municipality.
Not only Orillia’s newspapers, but also businessmen from that town thirty-five miles to the south, took attentive interest in the red lights of Bracebridge. Orillia’s Sam Smith, for instance, operated a prospering Bracebridge house with four female hostesses during the winter of 1885. “The business became so popular,” reports Cotton, that Bracebridge police “could no longer ignore it.” Constables Ouderkirk and Binyan organized a team of special constables for a raid on Smith’s premises.
News of the episode not only titillated readers of Orillia’s ever gossipy Packet, but also those of Barrie’s high-minded Northern Advance, both of which reported on March 5 that year how Sam Smith had been arrested outside the house, another man chased without capture because he knew a road down a hill better than the pursuing constables, and how charges and convictions quickly followed. Smith, as owner of the establishment, was fined seventy dollars and told to get out of town. Four females were given thirty-six hours to do likewise.
Bracebridge police could not rest for long, however. Two months later, constables Howard, Ouderkirk, and Johnson raided another house, arresting two inmates and “a regular customer” by the name of Jack Beaudry.
Nudity of a more public variety occurred down at the river, where swimming was popular, especially among those too poor to afford bathing costumes. No one much cared about this perfect human encounter with nature, other than some older church-goers and their smooth-faced ministers, who mistook the muddy banks of the Muskoka River for a slippery slope to degenerate living. In time council came to put that point of view into Bracebridge Bylaw Number 128, dealing with morals. It stipulated that bathers in the river could no longer be naked.
Despite this quest for moral uplift, it took time for this bylaw on bathing attire to take hold within Bracebridge town limits. In 1911 during the intense heat of summer, after police chief McConnell received several complaints that boys swimming in the river had neglected to clothe themselves sufficiently, if at all, he loudly announced through the newspapers that he was “going to lay charges.” McConnell was popular with the boys of the town, who gave him his nickname of “Pink” after the famous Pinkerton detectives, their short and cryptic name facilitating urgent warnings of “Here comes Pink!” Probably all the advance warning McConnell circulated helped ensure that no charges were ever laid, allowing some great swims to occur in Bracebridge that year.
A mixture of fear and pride accompanied these men who, usually with little or no training for the job, donned uniforms and enforced the law across Canada’s uneven frontier terrain. With “peace and order” two cornerstones of the country’s constitution, it fell to local law enforcers to make this conceptual attribute a reality where it counted: on the streets of the country’s towns, especially after nightfall. The local justice of the peace enabled prompt, close-at-hand resolution of conflicts, while the constable was equally a stabilizing influence in an instable society. That influence derived its power from being able to bring lawbreakers to face a range of punishments.
Chapter Five
The Punishments: Common Gaol, Fines, and Social Ignominy
A wide variety of outcomes were possible in Magistrate’s Court.
Occasionally, charges were dismissed. This happened when there was a lack of sufficient evidence to convict the madam running a Bracebridge brothel, or when a township council prosecuted a hapless farmer for unlicensed selling of his vegetables by boat to summer cottagers at their docks and breaching an anti-hawking bylaw council had only enacted a few days earlier. Sometimes an untrained police constable or overly zealous prosecutor brought cases before James Boyer that seemed to be in the nuisance category. Some cases were excessively trivial. As a justice of the peace, he needed to be discerning and compassionate in dismissing them.
But most often the charges stuck. Typically, a guilty party was ordered to pay a fine. Some had to post a bond or surety. On rare occasions, even though the accused was found guilty, the punishment was suspended. When the case demanded it, the nearby Bracebridge lock-up was a major part of the magistrate’s arsenal of punishments. A number of those convicted served time in jail as an immediate sentence, or as a result of being unable to pay their fine.
The days when a thief or arsonist could be sentenced to suffer social humiliation, and perhaps physical injury, in public stocks, were gone. With his head, hands, and feet protruding through imprisoning boards, locals could formerly insult and harass the exposed convict at will. In this way the culprit’s punishment was made palpable by citizens of the community ventilating their rage and mockery — a midpoint in the transition from mob rule to the rule of law. Even though stocks were never in use on the Bracebridge commons, there were a number of other ways private citizens still performed an activist role in the justice system, for instance arraigning individuals they caught breaking a law and collecting half the fine as a reward. Nor was use of public shaming as punishment entirely foreign to Bracebridge Magistrate’s Court in the 1890s; convicted prostitutes were ordered to either serve time with hard labour or get out of town.
In relative terms, some of the 1890s jail sentences that Bracebridge justices of the peace imposed seem as draconian by today’s standards as public execution was for murder: weeks in the lock-up for seemingly minor transgressions.
Those at the lower edge of Muskoka society often paid their fines not with money but with their time, because in sentencing, jail time was always a backup, the stipulated default punishment for those unable to pay cash. For a number of the poor, going behind bars was the only option.
Some stiff sentences seem outrageously unfair: weeks or months in detention for simple vagrancy. But could these sentences have been charitable acts? As the days shortened and temperatures fell, Bracebridge constables found derelict men and brought them to the justice of the peace. James Boyer, hearing evidence that their crime was having no visible means of support nor any place to go, ordered them to a period of incarceration long enough to carry them through the harshest of the winter months in sheltered and dry quarters with adequate food.
In the 1890s common vagrancy was an offence under Canada’s Criminal Code, partly to protect communities, partly to protect vagrants. No welfare programs existed to support the indigent. This expedient of putting homeless, unemployed poor people in the local lock-up improvised a primitive charity. Local police and magistrates preferred that those with no means of support not freeze or starve to death during winter in the streets or abandoned sheds of their community. In Bracebridge, in such cases, the jail door was seldom locked on these inmates.
If time in jail was possibly a blessing for the homeless man sentenced to food and shelter for the winter, it was definitely a setback for the prostitute