Rumour Has It

As regular readers know, more often than not, I assign books to outside reviewers rather than review them myself. But from time to time, I will take on a title, which is what I did in our June issue with Chad Reimer’s Deadly Neighbours: A Tale of Colonialism, Cattle Feuds, Murder and Vigilantes in the Far West.

In setting up the context for Reimer’s book, about the lynching of the fifteen-year-old Semá:th boy Louie Sam, I made brief reference to several other instances of nineteenth-century vigilante justice in this country:

On Valentine’s Day 1873, for example, a man “killed a comrade during a quarrel” in Abinger Township, in eastern Ontario. According to the Toronto Globe, he was “tried by his companions the next morning, and suffered death, under lynch law, by hanging.” Reports reached Kingston that same month...