A Bad Rap

Review of Jon Swainger’s The Notorious Georges: Crime and Community in British Columbia’s Northern Interior, 1909 – 25. UBC Press, 2023. $32.95.

Swainger sets out to prove four points. The first is that the early history of Prince George shows how the town quickly (by 1910 – 11) acquired a reputation for its “alcohol-fuelled masculine culture” — a culture that featured homicide, assault, bootlegging, disturbances of the peace, prostitution, gambling, social unrest and “dubious business practices.” The second point is that this reputation was internalized: the citizens of the Georges acquired a “collective anxiety” about their propensity for crime. The third point is that this anxiety was augmented by the feeling that they were, because of their reputation, “overlooked, dismissed and marginalized” by “the councils of the good and the great” — by politicians and CEOs in the south and east. The Georgians felt that their sacrifices in “delivering what they considered to be white civilization to the northern Interior,” had not been appreciated. The fourth point is that this anxiety became a self-fulfilling prophesy, a sort of civic PTSD, that shackled the town to a violent future.

This line of thinking seems more the purview of a collective behaviorist or mass psychologist than a historian — which may be why Swainger plays fast and loose with his argument. He admits that neither the legal history of the Georges, nor their history as gleaned from newspapers and magazines, actually shows that the Georges were exceptional in any way for criminal activity. All other towns in the north have comparable rap sheets: “there is nothing to suggest that the Georges were alone in holding . . . a hardened sense of being unappreciated overlooked and disregarded . .  . The evidence demonstrates that the community was no different than any other. .  .”

Which means that, somehow, it comes down to the peculiar sensitivity of Georgians, a matter of their subjective perception: “While other communities had their own sensations and moments of bad press, too often it appeared that the imprint was never as deep or dark as when Prince George was the subject.” The depth and the darkness of psychological imprints are hard to quantify, but it seems unlikely that anyone could be seriously imprinted with a sense of their town’s reputation for crime, violence and misdemeanors, especially if they knew that their town was in no way unusual. It seems even less likely that they would regard this reputation as some kind of self-fulfilling prophesy. Maybe I’m especially obtuse and insensitive, but I’ve been here for over 50 years, and can’t say that anxiety about my town’s criminal history has ever troubled my sleep or influenced my actions, except maybe when entering a drinking establishment.

In fact, Swainger advises us, his readers, that being imprinted is fairly easily avoided: “while people entangled in the criminal law . . . were seldom presented in the light of their own choosing, they were nonetheless workaday settlers, Indigenous people, and entrepreneurs making do and hoping to emerge a little better off . . . Indeed, we must rely on our imagination to treat them with as much empathy as we can muster and to acknowledge their humanity.” This sage advice seems beside Swainger’s point. If we readers can avoid the imprint by using imagination and empathy, why weren’t the citizens of the Georges, right from the start, able do the same?

Or, why would Swainger think they couldn’t? Does he have a personal bias — a feeling that he himself has not been appreciated in the councils of the great and good for his sacrifice in bringing what he considers civilization to the north, or a feeling that his own struggles to resist the imprint of the town’s “violent DNA” on himself have been only moderately successful? He has, after all, been a citizen since 1992 — long enough, one would think, to pick up the town’s bad vibes and be imprinted. So far as I know, he has no criminal record. Or does he adhere to the contemporary academic theory of postcolonialism, believing that scholars are now more ethical and sensitive than most people, especially people in the past. This entitles professors to judge people ethically and morally — to shun, boycott or cancel them if alive, and topple their statues or re-write their histories if dead?

Or, finally (and this is more likely), is he simply struggling too hard to prove that history — that his book — is important? He does say of his study that he didn’t want it to be merely a “voyeuristic” listing of the more dramatic crimes, riots, and strikes in the area. He does claim, somewhat immodestly, that his book “reminds us of the value of historical mindedness as central to understanding the present.” Historians like to think that such understanding saves us from repeating history — an idea that seems credible to some but for most finds no affirmation in history or contemporary events. Is it likely that, had more Prince George citizens read more about local history, they would have avoided being imprinted? How much history would they have to read, and how many would have to read that much to achieve herd immunity?

Whatever the pretensions of historians, no one is going to avoid repeating history by reading this book. Its premises are too outlandish. The book will add, certainly, to readers’ understanding of history, but only if they can ignore Swainger’s bias or (should they be locals) put up with being put down. This will be especially true in connection with his analysis of the Georges’ community leaders, most of whom, from 1909 – 25, were businesspersons. Swainger is rather easy on people who commit violent crime or foment public disorder, always pointing out attenuating circumstances — mainly, their intersectional victim status as First Nations people, immigrants, racialized minorities, or women. But he is hard on those involved in “dubious business practices” — false advertising, non-payment of small debts, bankruptcy, etc.

Take the founders of the original Georges, for example. In order of arrival, they were Alexander G. Hamilton and Nick Clark (South Fort George) and George J. Hammond (Central Fort George). Hamilton turned up in 1906, Clark in 1907, and Hammond in 1908 – 9. All came to the area hoping to cash in on the eventual appearance of the Grand Trunk Pacific (GTP) railway. All pre-empted or purchased land close to where the railway station and yards were likely to be, and all cleared, subdivided and retailed that land, and/or built enterprises on it. Finally, as Swainger has it, all contributed in serious ways to the town’s notoriety: “As 1910 turned into 1911, the enormities associated with the Georges lived on as half remembered echoes in the public mind. A tone had been set and, with it, a note of disquiet — an unsettling ‘something’ — about the region and its inhabitants.”

Enormities? It’s easy to suggest, though hard to actually prove, Hammond’s guilt. It’s based on print-media reports of charges of wire-tapping and stock manipulation in the US (Hammond was never convicted of either), and on newspaper reports of false advertising and bribery in Canada (no convictions and a successful lawsuit shutting down such reports from the newspaper in South Fort George). Hammond falsely declared that his townsite would be the location of the GTP train station — Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine revealed the deception and warned away purchasers of his lots. Hammond launched legal proceedings against the magazine and lost. He then offered to pay for a station if the GTP agreed to build it about three city blocks from the boundary of his townsite. The GTP wanted to see the money, but Hammond couldn’t produce. He offered to pay the GPT for the right to market lots on its townsite, and was repudiated. He tried to get the Board of Railway Commissioners to force the GTP to build its station nearby. They ignored him. None of these attempts at bribery were considered illegal back then. Finally, he sicc’d his town’s resident preacher and its newspaper (he owned the newspaper and built the church and manse on a lot he donated) on Hamilton, Clark, and their townsite. But then, the South Fort George newspaper was attacking him.

Unlike Hammond, the founders of South Fort are tagged with notoriety strictly on the basis of their record as businessmen. Hammond had money; they did not. They had no out-of-town lobbying power. They had no control over their local paper — though it did, on their behalf, engage in a duel with Hammond’s paper. They also had no control over the fact that their township attracted a brothel, some gambling dens, and a hotel with a massive bar and the only liquor licence for 100 miles. This made it the preferred destination for hundreds of paycheque-laden GTP workers on their time off. On these issues, Hammond’s preacher was voluble, making headlines, at a 1913 Presbyterian Church Congress in Toronto, by describing South Fort as “the gates of hell”.

If Hamilton and Clark were notorious, either locally or in the larger world, it was only because Hammond made them so. Otherwise, they would come across to most people as visionary, gutsy, resourceful, hard-working and mostly honest. This is, it seems to me, how they’d appear to residents in their townsite and to any government officials or out-of-town businessmen who had dealings with them. This is how they’ve been described by historians.

Here’s their story. In 1906 (three years before Hammond turned up), Hamilton sold his successful store, trading post, and lodging and guiding concern at the head of the Giscome Portage, and used the money to build a new store and to pre-empt, clear and survey 60 acres along the Fraser and immediately adjacent to the Hudson Bay post. He was the first to twig to the implications of the survey for the GTP rail line. However, by the fall of 1907, he was running out of money to continue work on his townsite (he had about 10 acres cleared) and to advertise for settlers, so he decided to acquire a liquor licence for the purpose of selling liquor in his store.

Subsequent events are unclear. The license was either issued quickly, and Hamilton purchased his liquor and began to sell it, or Hamilton purchased it in anticipation of the license being approved, and started selling.  As Swainger puts it, “rumours of an illegal trade in liquor swirling around local merchant A. G. Hamilton in the autumn of 1907” alerted authorities, but nothing was done until May 1909. The sale was illegal because only hotels could get licenses. A constable was asked to do something about the fact that “75 cases of whisky, secreted inside 15 beer barrels labeled ‘merchandise’ had been dispatched from Victoria.” The liquor was not intercepted.

At some point during this time, the license was issued, and at some point, shortly after, it was withdrawn, and Hamilton sold his remaining stock. The editor of a Vancouver paper later reported: “The Indian chief at Fort George told me several of the young men of his reserve were killed by whisky sold to them by A. G. Hamilton last winter.” On the other hand, James Cowie, who ran the HBC post, said that “there has been no disturbance owing to liquor as yet.” As the Tribune said, also later, Hamilton had no choice. He’d lost the fee he’d paid for the licence, a fee that wasn’t going to be returned, and was in debt for “several thousand dollars” for the booze.

Hamilton then, sometime in 1908, while the liquor authorities were considering his case, sold an option on his townsite to Nick Clark, who’d bought two riverfront lots from him and built a lumber mill, a bunkhouse, and a wharf and warehouse — the wharf and warehouse being for a small paddle-wheeler, the Nechacco, that he was building in Quesnel. Clark had the idea — maybe from the story of the small and plucky Enterprise that made it as far as Takla Lake in 1871 — that navigation was possible north up the Nechako and Stuart Rivers and east further up the Fraser. He soon proved himself correct. The Nechacco (later named the Chilco) made experimental trips in the summer of 1909 up the Nechako River to Stoney Creek and up the Stuart River almost to Fort St. James. It also went up the Fraser 106 miles to the Grand Canyon of the Fraser, placed hooks in the canyon walls, and winched its way through, opening the possibility of navigation up to Tete Jaune Cache, where the GTP was building a massive yard.

All of this got Clark into financial difficulty, so he sold his option on Hamilton’s townsite to a Vancouver company called Northern Development (NDC), in which he acquired a stake or of which he was joint owner — again, the details are vague, and Clark likely meant them to be. The NDC bought the 80-acre riverfront lot directly south of Hamilton’s (Hamilton’s store was located on it), and started laying out lots for a townsite that would now be over twice the size of Hamilton’s original one. They also advertised their lots in Vancouver. Hamilton seems also to have retained a stake but, whether or not he did, he remained the realty face of the business locally, continuing to advertise lots in the Tribune, as the “sole owner” of the townsite. This was an outright lie, likely meant to attract business.

Ultimately, no charges were laid by the Liquor authorities or any bureaucrats in the Indian Department. Also, Hamilton, whether he was part owner of the townsite or not, was the legitimate representative of the NDC, commissioned to sell their lots.

In 1910, Clark went into receivership. Contracts for lumber and ties for the railway stopped due to construction delays, and there was new competition — another mill in South Fort George, built by a group that included one of Clark’s partners in the NDC. Also, the BX company, which dominated steamer traffic on the Fraser, realized, partly due to the success of the Nechacco, that there was money to be made in extending its operations past Quesnel to Fort George and, maybe, further upriver.  Its giant steamer, the BX, arrived at the HBC dock in 1910 with 138,000 pounds of freight — at the same time as the little Nechacco was dropping its minuscule load at the Giscome Portage 41 miles upstream. The BX company set and largely maintained a schedule that had steamers arriving in South Fort twice a week. Clark was out of business.

Court proceedings revealed that Clark’s company was valued at $58,000, and he owed over $80,000. Clark admitted in court that his “company records were in disarray.” Swainger’s case against Clark uses mainly reportage about the proceedings from Hammond’s paper and Vancouver’s BC Saturday Sunset. The editor of the latter listed a series of dubious cheques and overdue accounts that had to be settled before the purchasers of Clark’s businesses could acquire their assets. Fair enough: this was based in courtroom evidence. But the editor of Hammond’s paper summed Clark up as, “not only the tin horn gambler, which I have accused him of being, but he is as well a flim-flammer, a bogus cheque artist and the poorest kind of businessman.”

Clark, like Hamilton, was made notorious by Hammond, who hated the fact that the little guys had created a bustling community in South Fort, whereas Central was populated mostly by non-resident property speculators, and boasted businesses and facilities that were mostly subsidized (like the hotel and church) by Hammond. Obviously, Hamilton and Clark were involved in a lot of wheeling and dealing, some of it (like Hamilton’s liquor enterprise) shady. Undoubtedly, Clark’s bankruptcy hurt some people. But going bankrupt is not illegal, and Hamilton, in South Fort, always managed to steer clear of the law. Their activities seem par for the course for entrepreneurs in a developing area. They took risks; some worked out, some didn’t. Meanwhile, their townsite grew on the basis of what they built.

Clark left town soon after going into receivership, but Hamilton, though he’d lost his townsite, soldiered on. He built an 18-horse stable in late 1910 as part of his transport business, had winter mail contracts, build a hardware store, and served on the Board of Trade and as secretary of the school board. Finally, sometime after World War I, when the new centre of town had shifted from his townsite to the GTP townsite (Prince George) a couple of miles north, he left for Stuart Lake, where he had long owned a store.

To prove claim number two, about what corporate bosses and provincial and federal politicians thought about the town, Swainger can only suggest what they might have thought, based on what members of those councils might have read in the Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Province, Winnipeg Saturday Post, Saturday Night, Saturday Sunset as well as copies of the local Tribune and Herald that circulated out of town. This can’t be very convincing, but there’s a bigger problem. The decisions made in those councils were usually applied nationally or provincially, and were not in any way influenced by the supposed notoriety of any specific place. Government and corporate decisions pertained to matters like the location of the GTP station and yards, the question of whether the GTP would acquire the entire reserve or just a strip along the Nechako, the hesitation in establishing a proper jail and courthouse until the town centre was finally decided upon, the elimination of Reserve # 1 and the movement of its population upriver to Reserve #2), and so forth. In other words, to governments or the big corporations, Prince George’s notoriety, should they happened to have been aware of such a thing, was irrelevant.

It was irrelevant to everyone. In the fall of 1909, William Blair bought a lot off Hamilton and built a general store that retailed hardware, trapping supplies, groceries etc. Blair had stores in Barkerville and Quesnel and would soon build in Stony Creek and Stella to the west. The BX company arrived in the Georges in 1910. The Bank of British North America (later Bank of Montreal) bought lots off Hamilton in April-May 1910, and the Trader’s Bank (later the Royal Bank) bought his lots a couple of months later. Both banks were big companies eager to get into town early and establish a base of customers no matter where the town centre would actually end up being. Alberta Telephone arrived in Central Fort on August 1910 and started wiring both townsites and building a line out to the telegraph station at Blackwater Crossing, so residents could get messages to the outside world.

To prove point number three about collective anxiety in Prince-George citizens, Swainger deals with a dozen or so of the most violent crimes that happened in the area. He focuses on homicides and disorder, with special attention to offences committed by ethnic minorities, particularly Chinese and Indigenous peoples who were falsely thought, nation-wide, to have “a penchant for crime and disorder.” Each of these crimes is said to have “worried ‘respectable’ Prince George residents.” Each of them resulted in sensationalized reports in eastern and southern papers that “the city’s ‘respectable’ residents deplored.” Even when those accused of crimes had sought out the police right away, proving that the “rules” were understood and enforced even on the edge of civilization, even when the accused got off or paid fines or served time and returned to live quiet lives in the community, the myth, as Swainger has it, grew: “for commentators and opinion leaders elsewhere in the province, it was easier — perhaps more convenient — to hold onto the imagined truths about the notorious Georges and the northern Interior.”

In his Epilogue, Swainger tries to demonstrate that, because of notoriety of the Georges settling into the consciousness of locals and outsiders, Prince George remained shackled to its criminal identity. Even as “the context of the times shifted in the province and the nation — through the Great Depression, Second World War, the postwar economic and baby boom, labour upset, and the national shame of the Highway of Tears — the Georges’ imagined identity persisted.” Each of these national and provincial contexts shaped the local expressions of the town’s imagined identity in newer forms —the marches of relief workers (led by communists, according to the media), the anger at the “zombie” soldiers stationed around town and visible everywhere in town, the violence connected to the unionization of the lumber industry, the subsequent strikes (more communist agitators), the rebellion of teenage hoodlums, the Canadian Tire strike, the six-week strike of College of New Caledonia support workers, the deaths of local women at the hands of  serial killers, and the 2002 indictment of Judge David Ramsay for the sexual assault of some Indigenous girls who had appeared before him.

With all these cases, Swainger poses questions that he assumes would have been troubling locals. In connection with Ramsay, Swainger has them asking, “Did his connections with the city somehow ‘explain’ his behaviour? Had the city’s alleged violent DNA entwined with his? For some, the subtext wrote the story. After all, it was Prince George.”

No one would ask these questions, hold these assumptions. No one would think that a judge had been influenced to sexually assault girls because of some mysterious local “tone” or “atmosphere.” If Swainger believes people would think like that, he’s got problems. Hopefully, these problems have nothing to do with personal or professional feelings of being isolated, ignored, and unappreciated, but are strictly methodological — loose thinking, in other words.