Reminiscences of a Raconteur, Between the '40s and the '20sHam, George H. (George Henry)
History
Reminiscences of a Raconteur, Between the '40s and the '20s
Ham, George H. (George Henry)
Canada; Ham, George H. (George Henry), 1847-1926; Journalists -- Canada -- Biography
hours of the night, the liquor was of a good quality, and there were
fewer drunken people staggering on the streets than could be seen in
other places which made greater pretensions of a monopoly of all the
virtues. The police court records prove this. So while it was called
wicked, it held no real genuine carnival of crime. It was simply a wide
open frontier outpost of civilization.
Early in its infancy, it was invaded by a band of crooks from the south,
who started in on the bad man act, but Chief Justice Wood soon put them
where the dogs couldn’t bite them with long sentences in jail or Stoney
Mountain penitentiary. Those who didn’t come up before the Judge made a
mad dash for liberty across the line. There were a couple of executions,
but only one Winnipeg murder, and the Gribben murder, where a whiskey
peddler along the line of railway construction shot a cabin boy of one
of the river boats to death. Taking it all in all, life in Winnipeg was
as safe as it is in Westmount to-day—but a dashed sight more exciting.
Down at Fisher’s Landing in Minnesota, immigrants who there transferred
from train to boat were unmercifully fleeced by Farmer Brown, who,
driving a sorry looking yoke of oxen and wearing a bucolic make-up,
victimized the immigrants with sad, sad tales of sorrow and misfortune,
and when their sympathies were aroused through his unfailing flow of
tears, he would trim them to a standstill at three card monte, at which
he was an adept. There were other sharpers, of course, as there always
are where there is a movement of people, but they did nothing actually
sensational.
Interviewing a Murderer
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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