Wrong Side of the Law (2 page)

Naughton was recaptured and taken back to jail, where an army surgeon tended to his bullet wound. He finally admitted that he and his partner were the Manchester bank robbers, and said he intended to plead guilty when he got back to England. Soon after, Naughton was put aboard the
Vesuvius
for the voyage to England. His police escort, High Constable Finlay, also had charge of the stolen money.

In spite of an intense search, Brady was never found. It’s possible that he managed to slip off the island undetected. However, legend has it that the squatters hid him and he married a fisherman’s daughter and became a fisherman himself.

Philip Brady

For centuries, outlaws have been the inspiration for songs and legends. Real-life desperadoes like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Pretty Boy Floyd have been made into Robin Hood–like folk heroes, whether they deserved it or not. In Newfoundland, where it has been said that an event doesn’t officially become history until someone writes a song about it, one such inspiration was Philip Brady (not to be confused with the Manchester bank robber).

In September of 1906, eighteen-year-old Philip Brady, an immigrant from England, was sentenced to eighteen months in His Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s for stealing money from a home in Holyrood. He stood just five foot four, and didn’t appear to be a person who would give the guards much trouble. But what Brady lacked in size, he made up for in nerve and resourcefulness. Brady had served about six weeks of his sentence when he decided he’d had enough of prison, with its harsh conditions and bad food. He and his cellmate, John Farrell, plotted an escape.

Brady managed to steal a coil of rope from the prison’s industrial room and hid it in a barrel of kitchen waste. Later, he was one of the prisoners who took the barrels to be emptied in a part of the yard that was used as a dump. Brady made sure the rope was covered with slops so the guards wouldn’t see it.

His Majesty’s Prison in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Philip Brady became a local folk hero after his escape in 1906.
The Rooms Archives, St. John’s, Newfoundland.

At 5:45 p.m. on October 6, when all of the prisoners were in their cells and many of the guards had gone home for the night, Brady and Farrell asked to be taken to the toilet. A single guard escorted them to the privy. While he waited outside for them to answer nature’s call, they slipped out of the latrine area, made their way along a roof to the dump, and jumped down. They pulled the coil of rope out of the slops and scurried to the lower end of the prison yard where there was a turnip patch. Darkness was falling and the two lay low there until they thought it was safe for them to make their break.

Brady was the first to go over the wall. But by this time the guard at the privies had become suspicious and had raised an alarm. The prison dogs were turned loose and guards seized Farrell before he could clamber up the wall. Brady ran to Mount Carmel Cemetery where he hid until midnight. Then he disappeared into the darkness. Meanwhile, the warden ordered a thorough search of the prison and the surrounding area and alerted the police.

In the weeks that followed, little Phil Brady rose from being a lowly felon to a Newfoundland folk hero. Hard-working, law-abiding people who would never have condoned Brady’s crime of theft, nonetheless cheered him on as he made fools of the police who were trying to catch him.

There were repeated sightings of Brady everywhere, especially after the offer of a reward for information leading to his capture was posted. A farmer named Patrick Coughlan told police that Brady had broken into his house in the night and stolen food and clothing. As proof, he had Brady’s discarded prison uniform, which he’d found on the floor. Then Coughlan claimed that Brady had also stolen a can containing one hundred dollars. That part of Coughlan’s story was soon proven untrue. But it inspired one of the first songs in the saga of Phil Brady. “Who Stole Paddy Coughlan’s Can?” became a popular humorous ditty.

Days passed, with police searching high and low. Reports came to St. John’s of Brady being seen in the countryside and other communities and each time constables had to go and investigate. One day John Roche McCowan, inspector general of the Newfoundland Constabulary, received a report that Brady was in Pleasantville, on the eastern edge of St. John’s. A resident there said he was holding the fugitive in his home. All of McCowan’s men were out chasing down (false) leads, so the inspector had to recruit a pair of firemen as special constables. When they arrived at Pleasantville, two policemen joined the little posse.

The resident met McCowan in front of his house and proudly explained how he had lured Brady inside with the promise of a meal. McCowan and his men burst into the kitchen and surprised a young man who was sitting at the table having lunch. It wasn’t Brady, but a simple-minded fellow named Paul Gorman. He somewhat resembled Brady and both young men had blond hair. The case of mistaken identity was frustrating for McCowan. It was downright embarrassing when, one day later, the police responded to another tip, and once again found Paul Gorman.

Sightings of young, blond-haired men had constables running everywhere on wild goose chases. One led to a man eating lunch on a schooner in St. John’s Harbour. He was a well-known local vagrant. Other searched turned up a Danish sailor and two German sailors.

The citizens of St. John’s were having a great laugh at the expense of the police. They told jokes about the constables arresting bums, the simple-
minded, and innocent foreigners while the elusive Brady thumbed his nose at them. Inspector General McCowan’s patience was wearing thin.

Then McCowan received a telegram that Brady had been arrested at Brigus, a community on Conception Bay. Constables were bringing him to St. John’s on the train — the
Newfie Bullet
— that very day. Stung by the ridicule to which the police had been subjected, McCowan helped spread the word that Brady was in police custody and would be handed over to him on the arrival of the afternoon train.

A crowd of people turned up at the station to get a look at the notorious Brady. A horse-drawn police wagon was on hand to take the escapee back to His Majesty’s Penitentiary. When the
Bullet
squealed to a stop, two constables stepped out of a coach with a blond-haired man in handcuffs. The crowd roared with laughter. The police had once again picked up Paul Gorman. Humiliated and exasperated, Inspector General McCowan went to Gorman’s father and told him to keep his son at home until Brady was captured.

McCowan’s woes continued. Patrick Coughlan accused the police of stealing the money he’d originally said Brady had taken. People wrote letters to the local newspapers, making fun of the constabulary’s failure to catch Brady. One sarcastic letter asked, “Where is our wandering boy tonight?”

The merry chase on which Phil Brady led the police ended suddenly in mid-November. The police somehow learned (possibly from an informer) that Brady was working on a farm near Petty Harbour and had a hiding place in the potato cellar. When the police cornered him, Brady tried to fight with a pitchfork, but two constables subdued him and got handcuffs on him.

Brady was taken to St. John’s in a police wagon. Crowds of people lined the streets to watch him pass by. When he was taken before Inspector General McCowan, Brady said he had read the newspaper reports on the trouble he’d caused the police and had been very amused by them. No doubt Brady wasn’t laughing when told he would serve an extra year in prison for escaping.

Brady’s story has a tragic ending. He was released on March 5, 1908, suffering from tuberculosis. Three months later, he died in the old hospital on Signal Hill, still not twenty-one years old. He was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery. However, he did get to bask a little in his notoriety. Shortly after Brady’s capture, Johnny Burke, the “Bard of Prescott Street,” wrote a short play about him that delighted St. John’s audiences. There was also a popular song that went in part:

The jailers are all nearly wild

Their grief is awful sad

Because they’ve lost their darling boy

Their little English lad.

Oh Brady wise, you fooled us boys

And left us in a trance

Filled up with holy horrors ’cause

You stole Pad Coughlan’s pants.

Bad-men on the Border:

Six-Guns and Running Irons

T
o
American outlaws on the run from sheriffs and marshals in their own country, Canada often seemed to beckon as a safe haven. American lawmen had no authority in Canada and the desperadoes believed that as long as they broke no laws in Canada, they would be safe from arrest. There are many yarns about notorious American bandits slipping across the border to enjoy a little peace and quiet in a country where nobody with a badge was looking for them. There is even a legend that Jesse James once hid out in the vicinity of Hanover, Ontario.

Of course, because of the Webster–Ashburton Treaty that existed between the United States and Great Britain, suspected criminals could be extradited from Canada to the United States, and vice versa. In 1868, the train-robbing Reno gang of Indiana, wanted for a long list of crimes that included murder, fled to Windsor, Ontario, a favourite hang-out for American bad-men on the lam. They were trailed there by Pinkerton agents and arrested by Dominion Police. The Canadian government turned the Renos over to the Americans on the condition that the outlaws be given a fair trial. Unfortunately, American vigilantes had no regard for the legalities of international treaties. A mob stormed the jail in which the Renos were being held and lynched them from the rafters. This lawless act placed a severe strain on Canadian–American relations and almost resulted in the cancellation of the extradition treaty. Ottawa’s position on the matter was, “We don’t care if you hang the villains; just have the decency to do it legally.”

The problem was even greater in the West. The sparsely populated Canadian West drew American bad-men like a magnet. Fugitives from American justice drifted north of the forty-ninth parallel not only to escape their own lawmen, but also because some of them believed they could carry on their marauding ways with impunity. Who was there in the Great Lone Land to stop them?

The Canadian West, during its very brief “wild” period, didn’t have gunslinging lawmen like Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, or Bat Masterson to enforce law and order. After 1874, Canada did have the North-West Mounted Police. Those men weren’t always the knights in scarlet most Canadians like to believe they were. But they were, in general, much more effective as policemen than the pistol-packin’ sheriffs of American cowtowns and mining camps. A Mounted Police constable was trained in police work, whereas the average sheriff was not. Moreover, a Mountie had the authority of the federal government behind him throughout Canada. An American sheriff or marshal worked in a limited jurisdiction. An American desperado who had committed a crime at one location in Canada would be surprised to learn that a Mountie could come after him in a place hundreds of miles away. Not surprisingly, in towns like Fort Benton, Montana, a place so wild and woolly it was dubbed “The Sagebrush Sodom,” criminals who heard of the exploits of the Mounted Police referred to the redcoat constables as agents of British tyranny.

Dutch Henry

Dutch Henry was one of those Old West desperadoes whose story is such a mixture of fact and legend that it’s difficult to separate one from the other. Part of the reason for this confusion lies in the fact that more than one American outlaw went by the moniker “Dutch Henry.” At least three bandits used the name. There was a Dutch Henry Yauch, a Dutch Henry Baker, and a Dutch Henry Born (or Borne). Even though these men were real historical figures, not the creations of the dime-novel writers, their criminal careers were nonetheless embellished by those chroniclers of Wild West fantasies. “Dutch Henry” was a name that helped sell pulp magazines, just like Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, and the fictional Deadeye Dick.

The Dutch Henry who made a nuisance of himself to the North-West Mounted Police was one Henry Yauch (or Yeuch). He was probably born in Holland and immigrated to the United States with his family as a child. He became a cowboy in Texas and moved north during the time of the great cattle drives. He allegedly participated in the Second Battle of Adobe Walls on June 27, 1874. In that clash, a group of about twenty buffalo hunters, including young Bat Masterson, armed with high-powered rifles, stood off about two hundred southern Plains warriors led by the legendary Comanche Chief Quanah Parker.

When the ranching industry spread to the northern plains with the coming of the railroads, Dutch moved to Montana. However, in the mid-1880s, a decline in beef prices caused many ranchers to go broke. Unemployed cowboys who knew no other trade turned to rustling. Dutch Henry found that a man could make more money driving stolen cattle and horses over the Canadian border than he could ever hope to earn as an honest cowpoke. He soon learned how to use a running iron, an illegal tool used to alter the brands on livestock.

Apparently Dutch passed himself off as a legitimate stockman, while at the same time operating as a rustler with an assortment of shady characters. Among them was a former NWMP constable named Frank Carlyle. Carlyle had given up his scarlet tunic for an outlaw’s duster. He would wind up dead at the bottom of a coulee, gunned down by a criminal colleague.

Thanks to the vast stretches of wide-open country and a sparse population, the outlaws could carry on their trade almost with impunity. It helped, too, that the rustlers’ victims were often reluctant to go to the police (or sheriff) out of fear of reprisal. Like the gangsters of a later day, the rustlers knew that a threat could go a long way in keeping memories blank and lips sealed. When a rancher named Frank King complained to the police about the outlaws, the gang kidnapped him and kept him in their camp for two weeks. He was blindfolded most of the time and subjected to rough treatment. When the outlaws finally let King go, they warned him to stay away from the police posts. King left for parts unknown.

James Marshall, a former Mountie, was another rancher whose life was made miserable by the rustlers. His stock had been shot and run off and on at least one occasion the desperadoes had lain in ambush for him. Marshall wouldn’t be frightened off as King had been, but he never left his house without his rifle and even slept with it close at hand.

It would be impossible to say how many horses and cattle Dutch Henry stole or how much money he made during his criminal career. The profits must have been substantial, because stealing, driving, and disposing of rustled livestock involved a certain amount of hard work — something most outlaws hated with a vengeance. Had the returns not been worth the effort, they’d have drifted into other enterprises — like robbing banks and trains.

Dutch Henry and his gang got away with their depredations until the summer of 1904, when Dutch ran into a Canadian rancher who was not too timid to report a robbery to the Mounted Police. In 1903 Paschal Bonneau of Willow Bunch, in what is now Saskatchewan, entered into negotiations with R.E. Hamilton of Lewiston, Montana, for the purchase of 230 horses. Bonneau hired Dutch Henry to drive the herd from Montana to his ranch at Willow Bunch. Bonneau had heard rumours that Dutch was involved with rustlers, but Dutch also had a reputation as a top-notch cowboy who could be relied upon. He decided to trust Dutch with the horses. Bonneau went to Montreal for the winter, expecting that when he returned in the spring, the horses would be at his ranch.

Instead of taking the horses to Canada, Dutch and a partner named Frank Jones, leader of one of the worst of the rustler gangs, tried to sell off the horses in Montana. But Hamilton’s brand was well known, and nobody would buy the animals. Early in 1904, Dutch and Jones had a hundred of the horses taken across the border, paying the duty on them at the police post at Wood Mountain. The horses were taken to Moose Jaw and advertised as being for sale. The outlaws’ agents for this business were Edward Shufelt, John Sally, and Sally’s wife. They had a bill of sale “proving” they had bought the horses from Dutch Henry.

Paschal Bonneau was still in Montreal when he got word of a crooked deal involving
his
horses. He was soon on a train to Moose Jaw, where he took legal action against Shufelt and the Sallys. However, he couldn’t find anyone willing to testify against Dutch Henry, so great was people’s fear of the outlaw. Meanwhile it was discovered that Shufelt had a long criminal record, was known to have killed at least one man in Montana, and was wanted on a variety of charges. He was sentenced to five years and died in prison.

The honest ranchers in the area came to Bonneau’s support. His stand against the rustlers was a dangerous one, but everyone knew that sooner or later the day of the outlaw had to come to an end. On the Canadian side of the line, the Mounties increased the manpower at their posts and began to crack down on the rustlers. On the American side of the line, the notorious Frank Jones tried to shoot it out with a couple of lawmen, and lost. As had happened in so many other parts of the West, the border country was becoming very uncomfortable for those men who chose to ride the Outlaw Trail.

Just what eventually became of Dutch Henry is uncertain and that may be due to people confusing the three historical Dutch Henry stories. Dutch Henry Baker’s fate is lost in the mists of time. He is believed to have been shot dead, but no one knows when, where, or by whom. Dutch Henry Born spent a long time in prison and died of natural causes around 1930. As for Dutch Henry Yauch, he seems to have been killed several times over.

In 1905, it was reported that one of Dutch’s own friends had murdered him in Minnesota. Then in January 1910, a Montana newspaper claimed that Dutch had been killed in a blazing gunfight with a Mountie near Moose Jaw. Dutch allegedly shot the constable’s horse out from under him before the officer drilled him with a bullet in the chest. But there doesn’t seem to be any documentation supporting this story. Another tale has it that, with the Mounties making life difficult for rustlers in Canada, Dutch drifted south to continue his criminal ways in Mexico, where he was finally hanged. Yet another story says Dutch gave up his evil ways, got married, and settled down in Minnesota, only to be shot dead in 1928 or 1929. There is also a claim that he travelled to South America before vanishing from history. Whatever the truth may be, Dutch Henry remains as elusive in death as he was in the years when he was the most feared rustler on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel.

Frank Spencer

Frank Spencer left his home in Tennessee at the age of sixteen and drifted west. He worked as a cowboy and knew Dodge City in its wild and woolly heyday when Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were lawmen there. He followed the stream of fortune hunters drawn by the silver strike at Tombstone in Arizona Territory. By that time, Spencer had discovered that a rustler who was handy with a rope, a running iron, and a six-gun could make a lot more money than an honest cowboy. He allegedly ran with the Clanton-McLaury gang, whose specialty was rustling cattle on both sides of the Mexican border, and selling the beef to the U.S. Army and restaurants and hotels in Tombstone. After the climactic gunfight at the OK Corral between the Clanton-Mclaury bunch and the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday, Spencer made tracks for Colorado and then Montana. He resumed his old practice of working as a cowboy by day and a rustler by night.

In 1886, Spencer fled across the international line into the Canadian territory that would one day be called Alberta. He was allegedly just a jump ahead of vigilantes who preferred lynch law over putting rustlers on trial in a legitimate court. Once he was safe in Canada, Spencer headed west. That summer, he rode into Kamloops, British Columbia.

Spencer got a job as a cowhand on Lewis Campbell’s big ranch about ten miles out of town. He seemed to like it there, perhaps because his past wasn’t known. For the first time in years, nobody with a badge was after him. Spencer did his job and kept out of trouble — for a while.

Frank Spencer liked his whiskey. On his days off he would ride into Kamloops for a binge in a saloon. Sometimes he’d pass a bottle around with the other cowboys in the bunkhouse. Sharing a jug of “popskull” was part of the camaraderie of ranch hands everywhere. But a misunderstanding over the etiquette of sharing liquor would lead to bloody violence at the Campbell ranch.

On Friday, May 20, 1887, Spencer was saddled up and about to ride into Kamloops. A twenty-two-year-old cowhand named Pete Foster gave him five dollars and asked him to bring back four bottles of whiskey. Spencer agreed. He bought the four bottles, but got thirsty on the ride back from town. He decided that Foster owed him something for his trouble. Any cowboy would understand that! Spencer pulled a cork from one of the bottles and took a drink.

By the time Spencer got back to the ranch, the bottle was almost empty and he was drunk. Foster met him in the corral and became angry when Spencer gave him only three bottles. It didn’t ease the situation when Spencer said he’d guzzled the fourth bottle as his “share.”

His temper flaring, Foster demanded that Spencer pay him for the whiskey. Spencer merely shrugged and began to unsaddle his horse. Foster grabbed Spencer by the shoulder, spun him around, and punched him in the face, knocking him to the ground.

Foster was a tough, strapping young man and Spencer had never been one to slug it out in a fistfight. He’d always resorted to an “equalizer.” He wasn’t wearing a gun, but he had a knife in his belt. Drunk as he was, Spencer was on his feet quickly, with the menacing blade in his hand.

Foster wasn’t about to go unarmed against a knife, so he turned and ran. Spencer chased him, but the younger man easily got away. Winded and staggering, Spencer gave up the pursuit.

Foster evidently thought that was the end of the affair, and indeed it should have been. But now Spencer was consumed with a drunken rage. He lurched into the ranch house and grabbed a Winchester rifle that Lew Campbell kept hanging on a wall. He went outside and spotted Foster walking toward the bunkhouse.

When Foster saw the rifle in Spencer’s hands he started to run for cover. He didn’t get far. Before any of the cowboys who had witnessed the quarrel could make a move, Spencer levered a cartridge into the firing chamber, aimed the rifle, and squeezed the trigger. The .44-calibre bullet struck Foster in the right arm and deflected into his body, tearing through his stomach. Foster spun around from the impact and dropped to the ground.