Dead Ends (19 page)

Wiretaps, listening devices, surveillance, secret searches. The net was tightening. The group's plans for robbing a Brink's truck and bombing an air base and new Coast Guard icebreakers were being monitored by police. The listening devices captured discussions of the past bombings that would be persuasive in court.

And then the
RCMP
moved. The five—Hansen, Taylor, Stewart, Belmas, Hannah—left at dawn for Squamish, for their last gun practice before the Brink's robbery. On a narrow, twisting part of the highway, traffic was stopped for construction, with a flagman letting cars through a few at a time. Their truck crept forward, until it was the lone vehicle left.

But the construction workers were in fact heavily armed
RCMP
emergency response team officers. In barely a minute, the five were in handcuffs.

Direct Action was done.

Ultimately, Belmas was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, Taylor to twenty-two years, and Hansen to life. Stewart was sentenced to six years and Hannah to ten years.

All are now free. None has fully renounced his or her actions.

T
he Kettle Valley train was on its daily run west through the mountains from Nelson, on the leg from Brilliant to Grand Forks. It was only about 100 kilometres, but the steam engine hauled the train at less than thirty kilometres per hour—much less on the steep uphill grades.

It was just before 1:00 a.m. on October 29, 1924. Passengers were dozing, or sleeping, the pine forests rolling by in the dark, a skiff of snow on the ground.

“Lordly”—Peter Verigin, the powerful, charismatic head of a large Doukhobor community—was sitting halfway down Car 1586, a first-class coach, on the right side. Beside him, at the window, sat seventeen-year-old Mary Strelaeff, his constant travelling companion.

Two seats in front, newly elected Conservative
MLA
John McKie was heading to Victoria for his first legislative session.

Another nineteen people were scattered around the car, taking occasional breaks in the small enclosed smoking cabin at the rear.

Some of them stirred as the train stopped for eighteen minutes at the Farron Summit. It took on water and added a café car to the six-car train before starting the downhill run toward Grand Forks. It was a dark night, the moon a sliver.

Four minutes after leaving Fallon, Car 1586 exploded. Bodies and debris flew into the night, and a fireball swept through the car. Brakes shrieked as the train shuddered to a halt.

Conductor Joseph Turner had just passed through the coach and into the baggage car. The blast blew its door off,
sending it hurtling almost the length of the car and showering him with broken glass.

Verigin, McKie, and two others died instantly. Four people were grievously injured and loaded into the sleeper car and rushed to Castlegar, a jolting, nightmarish trip. Two died en route; the other two once they arrived. Another eleven people were treated for injuries.

The blast was tremendous. Cst. G. F. Killam of the British Columbia Provincial Police was the first officer on the scene the next morning. The coach was still smouldering, “with nothing but charred embers and ironwork remaining.”

One body burned almost beyond recognition rested against a rear wheel of the car.

Hakim Singh, who had been sitting at the rear of the car, was found without his head, a chunk of his chest, and his right arm. His missing arm was found almost eleven metres away.

Verigin was face down, “with a considerable number of wounds … but easily recognizable.” His body had been tossed about eight metres by the blast. McKie's corpse was thrown seven or eight metres beyond Verigin.

Pieces of the coach had been blasted ten metres up the mountainside, and clothes and baggage were strewn all around the area.

Police and Canadian Pacific Railway investigators concluded almost immediately that a bomb had caused the explosion. As they picked through the wreckage, they found bits of a clock and dry cell batteries—a possible detonator.

But who planted the powerful bomb? Peter Verigin was the obvious target, but he had a long list of enemies, inside and outside the Doukhobor community.

To many Doukhobors, Verigin was saintly. He wielded immense personal power. He was six feet tall, good-looking, with a better education than most of the community. With his slicked-back dark hair and full black moustache, he was an imposing figure who accepted his right to rule over the faithful.

But not everyone agreed. A small but fierce Doukhobor faction dubbed the Freedomites thought Verigin was embracing modern ways—like mechanized farming—and becoming
too materialistic. At public protests, they stripped naked to show their disdain for possessions, a gesture not well received in small communities.

More dangerously, the Freedomites had burned schools and the homes and barns of neighbours who they thought had strayed from the faith. Just six months earlier, Verigin's summer house and office at Brilliant, just across the Columbia River from Castlegar, had been torched.

Doukhobor communities were also having increasing conflicts with governments and their neighbours.

About 7,500 Doukhobors had been welcomed into Canada in 1899, part of Interior Minister Clifford Sifton's plan to populate the West.

The Doukhobors needed somewhere to go. Their commitment to communal living and pacifism and their rejection of the authority of established churches and the state infuriated the Russian government. Their refusal to serve in the military was a particular irritant, and they faced increasing persecution. Advocates like writer Leo Tolstoy championed their cause.

When Verigin suggested emigration as a solution, the Russian authorities were quick to agree.

But the initial Canadian welcome had grown chilly. The First World War had brought suspicion of anyone not of British origin. The Doukhobors' refusal to fight made them a particular target. Businesses in neighbouring communities feared competition from rapidly expanding Doukhobor enterprises. And there was simple prejudice.

Governments were also becoming troubled by the independence of the Doukhobors—their refusal to swear allegiance to the Crown or to send their children to public schools (or often, to any schools). Public education was a tool of assimilation, and the Doukhobor boycott undermined the government's agenda.

Theories about the explosion abounded. Verigin had initially supported the revolutionary government in Russia, and even discussed the Doukhobors' return. But he became increasingly critical of Vladimir Lenin. Some in the Doukhobor community saw a Russian plot behind the bomb.

Others suspected Verigin's son, Peter P. Verigin, of masterminding the blast to clear the way for his own ascension to power. He did eventually succeed his father.

And still others remain convinced the blast was simply an accident. Rail safety standards were low, and people in rural communities thought nothing of boarding a train with the explosives bought to clear their land or explore a claim.

The bomber—and it was almost certainly a bomb—was never identified. But the loss of Verigin dealt a major blow to the Doukhobors. The community was weakened by leadership disputes, and government pressure intensified. The Freedomites attracted more supporters, and became enmeshed in decades-long conflicts with government and neighbouring communities.

And the deaths of Peter Verigin and seven other people on that October night remain unsolved.

S
imon Gunanoot walked into the vast wilderness near Hazelton on June 19, 1906, as an accused “murdering Indian.”

He walked out thirteen years later a folk hero.

Gunanoot was Gitksan, handsome and successful, a skilled and respected trapper and rancher and businessman. He had a lot to leave behind.

But a long drunken night in a sleazy frontier bar had ended with two men shot dead. White men. Gunanoot knew he would be the prime suspect.

So he headed home and told his wife and family to gather what they could and be ready to flee into the woods. The family would hide out for more than a decade, eluding a series of massive, costly manhunts.

Gunanoot was born in Kispiox, a Native village about thirteen kilometres up the Skeena River from Hazelton. He had grown up learning to live in the woods, trapping, hunting, fishing.

But Gunanoot—or Simon Johnson, as he was christened—had also gone to a mission school and could read and write, though not well.

He was a big, handsome guy of thirty-one in 1906, with thick dark hair, a generous mouth, and a frankly appraising and open gaze. And, by all accounts, he was hard-working and smart. Gunanoot trapped in the winter, but instead of selling his furs to local intermediaries, he travelled to Victoria or
Seattle to get a better price. Then he would buy goods there to sell in his store in Kispiox, again cutting out the middlemen.

Hazelton wasn't much to look at. Main Street was a wide wagon track with wooden boardwalks, frozen in the winter and a muddy mire when it rained. There were a handful of wood-plank businesses with soaring false fronts and big hopes.

But the outpost had a run of good fortune. It was the prime launching place for prospectors trying to cash in on the 1869 Omineca gold rush.

And in 1891, the first sternwheeler fought its way up the Skeena from the Pacific, and freight service was launched. Hazelton was as far as the boats could go, and they pulled up on the riverbank to unload just metres away from drying fishing nets. Packers were needed to take the goods on to their destinations. Gunanoot used a fine riverside ranch as the base for his pack operation.

On June 18, 1906, a warm Monday, Gunanoot's nineteen-year-old wife, Sarah, sent him to another village to buy some fish.

Gunanoot decided to stop for a drink and pulled his stallion up at the Two Mile Hotel. Two Mile—named for its distance from Hazelton—was notorious for its bar and red-light district. The hotel was disreputable, a place for drunkenness, gambling, and prostitution, according to the local police.

The smoky, dark interior was inviting. Gunanoot stayed until dawn, drinking with a rough crowd that included Alex MacIntosh, a short, powerful packer with a rival outfit who had just finished time in jail for bootlegging.

Then things went bad, as they will in bars. It's not clear what started the fight. Some say MacIntosh insulted Gunanoot's young wife, or said she had sex with his friend Max Leclair. Others blame Gunanoot. What's not disputed is that he and MacIntosh fought, and that MacIntosh slashed Gunanoot's cheek open with a knife and bloodied his nose. MacIntosh cut his own finger.

MacIntosh's employer halted the brawl and made the men shake hands. But witnesses said they heard Gunanoot threaten revenge as he left the saloon.

The next morning, MacIntosh's body was found sprawled beside the trail from the Two Mile, a bullet hole in his back. He had been shot off his horse. A few hours later, Leclair's body was found.

Gunanoot was the obvious suspect. But by the time police showed up at his house in Kispiox, he was gone. Sarah, their three children, his parents, his brother-in-law Peter Himadam—also a suspect—and his wife had all vanished.

The hunt started small, with special constables sworn in to support the local officer. They had no success, at least in part because Gunanoot—a superb shot, hunter, and woodsman—was a formidable presence. It was easy for police to imagine danger or death behind every pine tree or rocky outcrop.

More and more police and special constables were thrown into the hunt through that summer and fall, to no avail. Police, bounty hunters—eventually even detectives from the famed Pinkerton's agency brought in from the United States—all tried and failed to find Gunanoot and his band. The provincial government posted a $1,000 reward, huge money in 1906. The lack of success was a galling failure for police and the government.

And a worrying one. First Nations in the northwest were locked in disputes with the government about incursions into their lands, including newly constructed canneries that brought pressure on fish stocks, and a need for larger reserves.

Gunanoot's successful flight made the government look dangerously weak, the
Kamloops Standard
warned. “Because of the non-capture of the murderers Simon Gunanoot and Peter Himadam, the Indians in this district are becoming very cheeky and defying the law.”

The
British Colonist
newspaper insisted this “Indian murderer, who is skulking in the wilds of northern British Columbia,” was undermining the principles of British justice.

But the province was hardly Britain. About 290,000 people were spread over 945,000 square kilometres. (Great Britain had 135 times as many people in a little more than one-third the area.) Just getting to Hazelton from Victoria took five days by sternwheeler, much longer in the winter. The mountains and river valleys were wild and unmapped.

Frustrated searchers reported another problem. They had counted on information from people who lived in the area and had seen Gunanoot and his group, especially as the reward climbed.

Instead, they ran into a wall of silence—not just from Natives, but from settlers and the white community. Gunanoot was respected by both groups, and settlers didn't want trouble with their Native neighbours.

“Everyone in the North sympathizes with Gunanoot,” the
Toronto Star
's correspondent reported. “People of Hazelton declare that a white man would have killed the two ruffians who debauched his wife long before Simon did the job.” (The claim that Gunanoot's wife had been assaulted was widely accepted on little or no evidence.)

Even the Methodist minister in Kispiox decided not to report a visit by Gunanoot to settle some business affairs.

It was an amazing feat. In the time that Gunanoot was eluding justice, the province's population more than doubled, more than 60,000 Canadians died in the First World War, and the first cars came to Hazelton. The Skeena paddle-wheelers gave up the difficult run, replaced in 1912 by a rail line that brought passengers and freight from Prince Rupert and sparked another boom in the region. Emily Carr visited Kispiox to sketch and paint the totems.