Never Town Chronicles - Enter, an Indian in the SPEEDY's Story: Schooner Days DCCCLXXXIII (883)

by C. H. J. Snider

OGETONICUT of the Chippewa Muskrats insisted on showing the band, how he had beaten the brains out of a white man on the reedy reaches of Lake Scugog to still the cry of Whistling Duck his brother, killed by some unknown whites the year before.

"Thus did I!" he boasted, pounding a rotten stump with a pine knot till the dust rose in clouds. "And now no more does Whistling Duck complain that his blood is still wet on the grass though twelve moons have grown big and little again since he was slain. Thus did I! Thus did I!

"To whom?" demanded Wabbekisheco, the chief, who prided himself in correct speech.

"How should I know? He was white, and looked like a soldier."

"Oh, senseless one," groaned the old man, "whiskey hath destroyed thee, and thou wilt destroy us! Did not the Governor promise that Whistling Duck's slayers should die! though it should take years to find them? Even so may we all die through thy drunken boasting. Thou must go to the Governor!"

Farewell Brothers Scugog store and trading post at Ball Point had been found deserted and plundered with the body of John Sharpe, late of the Queen's Rangers, lying with battered head in a pool of clotted blood on the floor. He had been Farewell's factor, who trapped and traded with the Indians for furs.

With morning's light the Chippewa Muskrats, men, women and children, left their lodges by the marshy lake and journeyed to the great blue freshwater sea of Ontario. At a creek mouth by that mighty clay cliff called Raby Head, below the present Port Oshawa, they launched their canoes and paddled westward—all except Bitterskin, the witch woman, mother of Ogetonicut and Whistling Duck. She was left behind, lest her evil words should reach the Governor's ears and make his wrath burn hotter. On the second morning they landed on the sandy spit known as Gibraltar Point at Trees-in-water, or Place-of-meeting, opposite the Governor's town, and slung their kettles. Ogetonicut was surrendered to redcoats who rowed over from old Fort York.

He was arraigned before the Court King's Bench in the timber-built Government buildings which American invaders burned nine years later when York was captured. They were at the foot of Parliament street, in the old town; now gas works.

The savages' eyes rolled in wonder at the totem above the "bench" or judges throne, strange beasts, carved and painted, a lion and a unicorn rearing towards a gilded crown. They also admired the great woodstove which heated the branding irons which seared T for thief, and F for forger in offender's hands if they were lucky enough to escape with such penalties. The halter was more likely. Four years before this, York had had its first hanging—and the victim had offered a forged note. That was his crime. The gallows stood outside the court, with the stocks and the flogging post; and all punishments were public. They were the same for the white men and their black slaves, and for red men, the Muskrats learned to awe.

Yet the law worked strangely. In this same court at the time the first man was hanged in York, the clerk of the Executive Council, John Small, Esq., was tried for killing John White, Esq., the Attorney General of the Province, in a duel, fought within pistol shot of the courtroom. The parallel in 1949 would be for Major Alex. Lewis, Clerk of the House, and the Hon. Leslie Blackwell, to shoot it out at a ceremony presided over by Chief Constable Chisholm and Mayor McCallum in front of the City Hall. Mr. White, who was not the aggressor, died of the pistol wound next day. Mr. Small was declared "Not Guilty" by a jury, and acquitted by the Hon. Justice Allcock, and retained his position as a pillar of York and Upper Canadian society.

The law worked strangely in Ogetonicut's case. John Sharpe was dead and the Indian boasted he had killed him. But it took all summer to determine where the crime had taken place. Ball Point on Lake Scugog was proved by survey to be within the new-formed District of Newcastle. Ogetonicut languished in York jail without a trial, because York was in the Home District from which Newcastle had been pared. Presquisle had a courthouse, the only one between York and Adolphustown, but no cause to try. Ogetonicut had provided one. A "capital" one, chuckled the testy Governor, who relished puns and punishments. Here was an opportunity of inaugurating the county seat of the District with a full dress of King's Bench trial for murder in the first degree and probably a hanging.

So, on the 7th of October, a mild Sabbath evening, with a light northwest breeze blowing, His Majesty's schooner Speedy set sail from York for that city of the future, that new Newcastle that never was to be, with a company on board so strange that it requires a further chronicle to describe it.

VANISHED HORSE BLOCK A FLOWER POT?

PRESQU'ILE POINT today, showing its limestone formation similar to Flower Pot Island, Georgian Bay (ABOVE). It has been suggested that the Devil's Hitching Post or Devil's Horse Block, discovered by Capt. Selleck of the LADY MURRAY and shown to Capt. Paxton of the SPEEDY in May, 1804, but never seen since, was a similar "flowerpot" rising almost to the lake's surface, and cut away at its base until, topheavy, it collapsed and formed the reefs Camel Shoal or Gage Shoal, now three fathoms under water off the Point.