Wrong Side of the Law (4 page)

The Wild Bunch rider whose name is most often associated with the cave was Sam Kelly, one of the most successful outlaws never to have a movie made about him. “Sam Kelly” was the alias of Charles Nelson, who was born in Nova Scotia around 1859. He was six feet tall, with a muscular 180-pound frame. His hair earned him the nickname “Red.” According to those who knew him, Kelly had eyes “as cold as a fish.”

Sometime in the 1880s Nelson headed west. Like so many other young easterners, he might have been drawn by the idea of living the adventurous life of a cowboy. Popular magazines were full of stories that romanticized life on the prairies. At that time, however, the cattle industry had been hard hit by dry summers, extremely cold winters, and a steep drop in the price of beef. Cowboys found themselves out of work all across the West. Some rode the “grub line,” wandering from one ranch to another in search of honest work, but having to settle for a meal and a night in the bunkhouse before moving on. Others, with nothing but a horse and a Colt .45 to their name, became outlaws. Red Nelson was one of those. Because it was not safe for a bandit to operate under his own name, he became Sam Kelly.

As a Wild Bunch rider, Sam Kelly mingled with some of the border country’s worst criminals. Among them were Dutch Henry, Frank Jones, and an outlaw called the Pigeon-Toed Kid, whose Colt bore five notches for men he had killed. Those bandits and others periodically shared the cave at Big Muddy with Kelly. Apparently Kelly was not the killer some of his outlaw cronies were. But he could certainly handle a gun, as he demonstrated on one occasion when he shot the rifle out of the hands of a Montana sheriff who had the drop on him.

Kelly would not turn down an armed robbery if the job looked promising, but as a professional he specialized in rustling. Kelly would steal cattle and horses on either side of the international line — sometimes as many as two hundred at a time — then run them over the border to be sold in the other country. He was even known to re-steal rustled stock he had just sold, and take the animals back over the border to be sold again. Kelly became very adept in the use of a running iron. Mere possession of that rustler’s tool could send a man to jail in Canada. In the United States it could very well get him lynched.

In May 1895, Kelly was instrumental in breaking two outlaws out of the jail in Glasgow, Montana. He learned that a friend named Trotter had been locked up by the Glasgow sheriff, Sid Willis. Kelly somehow managed to have a duplicate made of the key to Trotter’s cell. On May 25 a rumour spread through Glasgow — possibly started by Kelly himself — that Sam Kelly was holed up somewhere outside of town. Sheriff Willis sent a deputy with an armed posse to apprehend the outlaw, but Kelly had stayed in town.

With most of the men in Glasgow off on a wild goose chase, Sam Kelly and a man known as Smitty rode in to liberate Trotter. Sheriff Willis had gone for lunch when the two outlaws dismounted in front of his office. When they entered the jailhouse they found the sheriff’s wife sitting at her husband’s desk. The woman could do nothing as the intruders unlocked the cell and released not only Trotter, but also a suspected killer — a man named Seffick who was a sometime partner of Dutch Henry. Kelly thought Seffick might be a worthy recruit for the Wild Bunch. As the outlaws left the jail, one of them gallantly tipped his hat to Mrs. Willis. Then they jumped on their horses and galloped out of town.

The sheriff’s lunch was rudely interrupted when he was told of the escape. He had no one to call on to form a posse, but he bravely went after the fugitives alone. He had them in sight when one of the outlaws looked back and took a shot at him. The bullet missed, but the sound of the gunshot frightened the sheriff’s horse. The animal reared up and threw the lawman to the ground. The outlaws made good their escape and were soon over the border in the safety of Big Muddy.

Sheriff Willis would have further cause to develop an intense dislike for Sam Kelly. About a year after the bust-out, he learned that Kelly and Seffick were in a Dakota town. He sent a deputy to investigate, but told the man that under no circumstances was he to try to arrest the outlaws on his own. For whatever reason — perhaps he wanted the rewards on the bandits’ heads — the deputy ignored the sheriff’s orders. When he encountered Kelly and Seffick, the deputy pulled a gun, fired — and missed!

The outlaws reached for their guns and the deputy dove for cover. He was a lucky man that day. Kelly and Seffick were more interested in getting away than they were in shooting a lawman. They leaped onto their horses and dashed away, leaving the deputy with the problem of explaining his rashness to Sheriff Willis.

Most of the men associated with The Wild Bunch died bloody, gunned down by lawmen or vigilantes. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fled to Bolivia where they continued their bandit ways until they died in a gunfight with Bolivian soldiers in 1908. However, one story has it that another man was killed with Sundance and Cassidy quietly returned to the United States and lived to a ripe old age under an alias.

Butch Cassidy’s actual fate might be a mystery, but historians do know how Charles Nelson, alias Sam Kelly, ended his days. Kelly and his pals had things pretty much their own way until 1902, when the North-West Mounted Police set up a post at Big Muddy. The Mounties didn’t like the idea of ne’er-do-wells from the United States using Canadian territory as a sanctuary from their own police. Kelly could do nothing about the police post right on his doorstep. This was nothing like the United States, where the outlaws simply had to shoot the man with the badge to blow a town wide open again. If you shot a Mountie, not only did others immediately take his place, but the redcoats also hunted you to the ends of the earth and delivered you up for trial and hanging.

By 1904, Kelly was sick and tired of outlaw life. Most of the men who had ridden with the Wild Bunch were either dead or in prison. It was remarkable that Kelly had not already shared their fate. He knew that sooner or later the Mounties would trap him, or some deputy or bounty hunter would shoot him down for the reward on his head.

Kelly rode into the town of Plentywood, Montana, and gave himself up to the sheriff there. To his astonishment (or maybe not) he was soon released. No one could produce enough evidence to convict him. Many potential witnesses could not be found. Others refused to testify. All charges were dropped. Sam Kelly rode out of town a free man, and a waste of a bullet as far as bounty hunters were concerned.

Kelly returned to the only home he had known for years, the cave in Big Muddy. He had nowhere else to go and his home in Nova Scotia was probably just a distant memory. Kelly might have made his living by hiring out as a cowboy, and he might even have done a little small-scale rustling when the Mounties weren’t looking. He still knew how to use a running iron. Or maybe he had a nest egg he’d built up during his bandit days.

Kelly bought a ranch in the Big Muddy in 1909. Then in 1913 he bought another spread near Debden, Saskatchewan. The property was around a body of water that became known as Kelly’s Lake. Sam’s partners in the purchase were all former outlaws. Neighbours said that Kelly and his friends were frequently visited by strangers from south of the border. Moreover, Kelly used a specially painted rain barrel as a signal to let visitors know if the Mounties were poking around.

Sam Kelly, formerly Charles Nelson of Nova Scotia, outlived all of his outlaw friends. In 1937 he fell ill and was taken to a hospital in Battleford, Saskatchewan. He died there in October of that year, at the age of seventy-eight. He was the last of the Wild Bunch.

The Smugglers of Nova Scotia:

The Tale of the
Four Sisters

F
or
much of the eighteenth century, Nova Scotia was a popular lair for pirates. Its wild coastline provided hundreds of hidden coves that were excellent hiding places where freebooters like Captain Edward Low could put in to replenish stores of food and water, or careen a ship, unseen by naval patrols. Such isolated natural harbours were also perfect bases from which to ambush merchant vessels. There is hardly a bay or inlet along the Nova Scotia coast that doesn’t have its tale of buried treasure, usually associated with the legendary Captain William Kidd. The dock at Halifax was frequently decorated with the gibbeted bodies of pirates, hung in chains and left to rot.

The Royal Navy had pretty well put an end to piracy in Nova Scotian waters by the early nineteenth century, although the last significant trial in Halifax for piracy didn’t take place until 1844. However, during the War of 1812, Nova Scotia was the base for some of the most successful privateers in history. In times of war, a privateer sailed with a document called a Letter of Marque, issued by his government, which allowed him to plunder the commercial shipping of an enemy nation. It was basically a licence to commit piracy. Nova Scotian privateers wreaked such havoc with American shipping that the maritime commerce of the United States was almost brought to a halt. The Nova Scotian economy boomed as a steady stream of captured prizes sailed into Halifax. Privateer vessels like the notorious
Black Joke
became the subjects of songs and stories.

Nova Scotia’s pirates and privateers contributed to the lore and mystique of sea-faring adventurers who risked their lives in the pursuit of fortunes. It was largely due to Nova Scotia’s long history of sea-going marauders that the smuggler became a fact of life in colonial Nova Scotia and continued to be a thorn in the side of the law well after Confederation.

The smuggler of the nineteenth century wasn’t like the modern-day smuggler who tries to sneak illegal narcotics into a country. There were no illegal narcotics then. Drugs like morphine were widely used as painkillers and were readily available. The nineteenth-century smuggler’s challenge was to bypass the customs collector, the government official whose responsibility it was to ensure that duties were paid on imported goods.

The smuggler dealt in just about any commodity that could be sold on the black market: manufactured goods, liquor, tobacco, tea and coffee, sugar, clothing, and silk. Once he got his merchandise into the country, he sold it to storekeepers and travelling peddlers. They in turn sold it to their customers at lower prices than legal imports on which duties had been paid. For that reason, the smuggler was often seen as a Robin Hood type of outlaw, while the customs collector was cast in the role of the villainous agent of the Crown.

Often the smuggler had to unload his cargo at an isolated cove or at some quiet little port where the locals could be trusted to keep their mouths shut. Would-be snitches were bought off or threatened. With a well-placed bribe or two, the smuggler might also sail into a major port like Halifax and unload his goods while the customs collector looked the other way.

Because of its geography, Nova Scotia was a smuggler’s paradise. It was a major point of entry for merchandise coming to Canada from Britain and continental Europe, and from ports along the eastern seaboard of the United States, particularly Boston. Also, lying just a few miles off the coast of Newfoundland were the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, the last specks of the French empire in North America. The two mainstays of the islanders’ economy were fishing and smuggling. The French brandy sipped in the finer homes of Halifax, Montreal, and Toronto was as likely to have been smuggled into the country via Nova Scotia as to have legally passed under the eye of an official in a customs house.

As unpopular as the customs collector was, he didn’t stand alone against the smugglers. In all coastal Nova Scotian communities, every person of authority responsible for enforcing the law and keeping the peace, from magistrates down to village constables, was duty-bound to watch out for these robbers of the government purse. One of the most diligent was police detective Peter Owen “Peachie” Carroll.

Born in Pictou, Nova Scotia, in 1860, Carroll was an adventurer. He was big, bull-strong, tough, and took guff from no man. A veteran sailor, Carroll had been “round the horn,” and had once thwarted mutineers. He had served as chief of police in Pictou and Yarmouth. As a police detective, Carroll had apprehended enough lawbreakers to earn a reputation equal to that of John Wilson Murray, the nineteenth-century Ontario sleuth who became known as Canada’s Great Detective. One of Carroll’s most notable accomplishments was his 1892 capture of one of the murderers of Constable Joseph Steadman of Moncton, New Brunswick. If Peachie Carroll had been American, his life story might well have been the inspiration for a movie, because at times he was as much a bounty hunter as he was an officer of the law. The Canadian government offered rewards for the capture of smugglers.

Peter Owen “Peachie” Carroll, right, Nova Scotia’s legendary detective.
A.E. Dalton.

In the summer of 1892, Carroll was self-employed as a private detective, one of just a few in the Maritimes. He’d been officially sworn in as a constable by the Pictou Police Department so he had the legal authority to make arrests. That July he was hired by Captain LeMaistre of the coastal steamer
St. Olaf
, and ship’s purser William Tait to investigate a theft.

A year earlier, the Quebec firm of Richards & Company had shipped two crates of fishermen’s long boots to Grand Entry in the Magdalen Islands, an archipelago belonging to Quebec, though geographically closer to Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. The crates had been taken by train to Pictou, and then loaded aboard the
St. Olaf
, which made a regular run to Souris, Prince Edward Island, and the Magdalens. Grand Entry had no wharf at the time, so ships anchored a half-mile offshore, and passengers and freight were ferried ashore in boats. Somewhere between Pictou and Grand Entry, one crate containing forty-eight pairs of boots disappeared. Richards & Company held the
St. Olaf’
s owners responsible for the lost merchandise.

The theft of a crate of fishing boots might seem a trivial reason for engaging the services of a private detective. However, the ship’s owners would have been concerned that someone within their firm or connected to it was pilfering. If so, the problem had to be nipped in the bud. For Carroll, the case quickly became something larger than one of petty larceny.

While Carroll was still in Pictou, preparing for the trip to Grand Entry on the
St. Olaf
, he received a tip that smugglers carrying liquor from Saint Pierre and Miquelon often put in at the Magdalens before heading for the St. Lawrence River and Quebec City. Carroll smelled opportunity. He obtained a warrant from the Pictou customs collector that gave him the power of arrest and seizure within Canada’s three-mile offshore limit. When Carroll boarded the
St. Olaf
, he carried a rifle and a fishing rod so he’d appear to be a sportsman on holiday. He also packed two revolvers, a .38 and a .44.

En route to the islands, Carroll met Captain Alexander O’Brien, an evangelical missionary on his way to Grosse-Îsle. Considering the preacher trustworthy, Carroll told him what his own real mission was. He asked O’Brien to contact him by telegraph if he heard any information about smugglers in the area. O’Brien agreed.

Carroll also made the acquaintance of a man named Fly, who was the manager of the Portland Packing Company in the Magdalens. The detective knew that the crate of boots that had
not
been stolen was safely delivered to Fly’s company. Mr. Fly didn’t make a very good impression on Carroll, who found his demeanor suspicious. Carroll would later say that the man was “Fly by name and fly by nature.”

On Grand Entry, Carroll stayed at the home of the port master while he poked around for information about the stolen boots. He’d been there only two days when he received a wire from O’Brien telling him to come to Grosse-Îsle at once. A smuggler’s ship was lying at anchor just off the island.

Carroll didn’t lose a minute. Armed with his warrant and his two pistols, he hired a man with an open boat to take him to Grosse-Îsle. There he met O’Brien and a local man named Alexander MacLean. They pointed to a schooner anchored about a mile and a half from shore. “There is a smuggler,” one of them said. They suspected the ship was outward bound from the French islands with a cargo of liquor.

With his veteran sailor’s eye, Carroll could tell from the set of the sails that the schooner was about to get underway. He had to act quickly or she’d be gone. Spotting four fishermen sitting by a boat on the beach, Carroll hired them to row him out to the schooner. He left O’Brien and MacLean on the beach.

As his boat drew alongside the schooner, Carroll saw her name:
Four Sisters
. He climbed aboard while the fishermen waited in the boat. At first Carroll could see no one on deck, but within moments he was confronted by the captain, a man named Cormier who spoke to him in French. Realizing that the stranger didn’t understand him, Cormier demanded in English, “Who are you? What do you want?”

Carroll showed Cormier the warrant and told him he was going to search the ship for contraband liquor. While the angry captain stood by, Carroll opened the main hatch. The hold was half full of cases of liquor. Then Carroll looked in the cabin and found more cases. The detective had caught a smuggler red-handed! Carroll went to the main mast and marked it with an official symbol of the Crown that branded the
Four Sisters
as legally seized and now the property of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s Canadian government.

But Captain Cormier wasn’t about to just hand his ship and cargo over to this meddling intruder. He shouted in French to the fishermen who were waiting for Carroll. The men immediately pushed off from the schooner and then put their backs to it as they rowed for shore. When Carroll saw that they were abandoning him, he shouted that he’d pay them twenty dollars each if they’d come back and get him. Twenty dollars was a lot of money in 1892, but for whatever reason — doubt in Carroll’s word or fear of the smugglers — the men didn’t respond. They kept rowing as though they hadn’t heard him.

It was now twilight, with darkness quickly rolling in across the water, and Carroll was alone on a smuggler’s ship that he had officially seized. Although the schooner had been made ready to sail when he first saw her from the beach, the crew had gone below to have their supper by the time he climbed aboard. Now the crewmen were all out on deck, seven of them plus the captain!

Cormier spoke to his men in French, and from the laughter that followed, Carroll guessed that the captain must have explained the situation to them. A detective had come aboard to catch them, but instead
they
had caught
him
! The question now was what to do about him. Carroll had no doubt that he was in a dangerous predicament. The captain
might
decide to put him ashore somewhere, but then Carroll could still make his way to some place where he could report to the authorities and Cormier’s days as a smuggler would be over. The captain just might consider other, darker, alternatives.

Keeping his distance from the crewmen, Carroll warily backed to the schooner’s bow. The confines were narrower there, so he’d have a better chance of defending himself if they tried to rush him. The smugglers didn’t know about the two pistols in his pockets.

Cormier tried putting on a friendly face. He invited Carroll to join him for supper and a glass of wine or brandy. Carroll refused the offer and then used a ploy of his own. He told Cormier that he was a government agent from the Canadian revenue cutter
Acadia
, which was based in Halifax. The
Acadia
was armed with a cannon and was famous for chasing down smugglers. The prospect that she might be nearby evidently worried Cormier, but he wasn’t sure if he should believe Carroll.

Cormier asked why, if Carroll had just come from the
Acadia
, he couldn’t see the cutter. Knowing that his life might depend on how convincingly he could spin a yarn, Carroll said that the
Acadia
’s captain had sent him ahead to intercept the
Four Sisters
. The cutter, he lied, was on her way from Grand Entry, sailing around Grosse-Îsle to cut off the smuggler’s escape.

Captain Cormier fell for Carroll’s story. He ordered the crewmen into their quarters in the main cabin and he went into his own, leaving Carroll on deck alone. The crewmen climbed into their bunks, fully dressed in case they should be suddenly called on deck. Cormier sat up, trying to think of a way to get rid of Carroll and give the
Acadia
the slip.

At around 10:00 p.m., with the night around the
Four Sisters
as dark as the water below, Carroll began to creep around the deck to do a little sabotage. He removed the brakes from both windlasses, throwing one overboard and hiding the other in case he should need it. With the windlasses disabled, the crew couldn’t hoist the ship’s two anchors. There was a possibility that the schooner could run aground in rising winds, but Carroll was a strong swimmer and believed he could make it to shore if that happened.