Jim Charles and the Gold Mine
By Thomas H. Raddall
Legends of Jim Charles and
his “secret gold mine” still persist in Queens County, all garbled and some
absolutely false. He is described as “a bad Indian” — “a bloody murderer” — and
so on. People have sought for his “mine” all over the Caledonia district, and
especially about the shores of Kejimkujik[1] Lake. The full truth about Jim Charles was
known to two men only. One was a New Grafton woodsman farmer named David Lewis, the
other was the Rev. Clayton Albert Munro, a native of Maitland Bridge. Both were
friends of Jim Charles, and he confided in them. Lewis died without revealing
the secret of the “mine”. Munro, after serving in various Methodist pastorates
in Nova Scotia, retired in Bermuda, where he died in 1950 at the age of 86.
Traces of gold were first
discovered in Queens County in the 1850’s. The Queens County Historical Society
has an old share certificate, dated 1854, of a company that was formed to
exploit it. The company went bankrupt soon afterwards. Nobody now knows where
this mine was, if indeed the company dug a mine at all.
The next discovery came in
1884, when a farm hand named Maguire, digging a hole for a fence post on the
farm of George Parker at South Brookfield, found a quartz seam with a pocket
containing some nuggets, one of considerable size.
This
started a gold rush. Men poured in from everywhere. Some were experienced
miners and prospectors. Most were not. They came from places as far apart as
Newfoundland and Colorado, and they included a number of American adventurers
who swaggered about the streets of Caledonia wearing cartridge belts and
revolvers in the fashion of the wild West. Slick promoters floated mining
companies and raised great sums of money, chiefly in the United States. The
first mine was dug on the Parker land. Others followed, in various places in
the region of South Brookfield and Caledonia, and Molega and Whiteburn.
Caledonia, a little
crossroads hamlet of farmers and lumbermen, became the bustling centre. Two
hotels appeared, one of them called The Golden Home. There were half a dozen
busy bars. Miners and prospectors put up shacks and tents.
A printer named Banks moved
in from Annapolis, bringing his press on a wagon, and started a weekly
newspaper called the Caledonia Gold Hunter. (Oddly enough, the newspaper
survived long after the gold rush was only a memory; and the Banks family
continued to print it, under the same title, until when their plant was
destroyed by fire.)
All in all it was an amazing
scene in a hitherto quiet Nova Scotia countryside, and it lasted about ten years. A
mine called the Libby was the biggest and most successful, but even that went
bankrupt at last. The gold-bearing seams were narrow and irregular. Most of
them went deep and were expensive to work. The necessary steam engines were
fired with hardwood, cut by gangs of loggers working at boom-time wages. The
nearest railways was at
Annapolis, whence all machinery and supplies had to be hauled by wagon over
something like forty miles of narrow road through the forest, climbing over the
South Mountain en route, and later New Germany. The gold did not pay the cost
of mining, and that was the end of it.
These gold-bearing seams,
wandering in their thin spidery fashion, had a peculiar characteristic. In some
places one crossed or joined with another; and where this joint occurred there
was usually a pocket containing free gold in the form of dust or nuggets. Such
a pocket, the one found by Maguire near the surface, started the whole rush.
The slick mine-promoters could take ore samples from one of these seam-joints,
send them to the government assay office in Halifax, and get a fine rich report
to show the gullible.
I give these details of the
Caledonia gold rush for a reason. In considering the strange affair of Jim
Charles it is important to remember the excitement of the times, the greedy
fever of the gold-seekers, and the number of desperadoes who came with them.
Jim Charles had good reason to fear. He had found gold himself, years before
the Caledonia discovery, and for years he had been taking little bags of
nuggets and dust to the bank in Annapolis and sometimes to a bank in Liverpool.
He would never say where or how he got it.
In the summer of 1944 I had a
visitor. He was the Rev. Clayton Albert Munro, born at Maitland Bridge,
Annapolis County, in 1864. I had never met him before, indeed I had not known
of his existance. He had started life on a small farm, and earned money for
his education by working in the woods as a logger and river-driver. He entered
the service of the Methodist Church as a probationer, and eventually held
pastorates in Annapolis, Chester, Guysborough, Lockeport and elsewhere in Nova
Scotia. In 1925 Pine Hill College awarded him an honorary D.D. to mark his long
service to the Church. A few years later he retired with his wife and daughter
to Bermuda; and now, at the age of 80, he had come back for one last look at
the scenes of his youth. (He died and was buried in Bermuda in October 1950.)
I beheld a grey man of medium
height, moving with unusual vigor for that age, and I found his mind and memory
as keen as that of a youth. He had read some of my stories and came to chat
about bygone days in the Queens County woods. After a time he asked, “Do you
know the story of an Indian named Jim Charles and his secret gold mine?”
I said I’d heard a number of
legends about him, but I supposed that no one would ever know the truth. Mr.
Munro said, “I know the truth about him, and if you like you can take it down.”
So I got pencil and paper. This is what he told me:-
Jim Charles was a Micmac who
lived on the point in Kejimkujik Lake where the so-called “Kedgie” Club and
cottages are now. He and his squaw Lizzie cultivated a little vegetable plot,
and Jim earned money as a guide to sportsmen in the fishing and hunting
seasons. My family knew him well; he often called at our house on his travels,
and my father and I often saw him when we went to Kejimkujik.
Jim was not only an excellent
guide, he was quiet and courteous, and sportsmen from Annapolis, like Judge Ritchie and
others, made a point of engaging him on their fishing and hunting expeditions.
Some time in the l860’s, when I was a baby, Jim Charles found gold somewhere in
the wooded wilderness beyond Kejimkujik.
He showed some of it to
Ritchie. It was alluvial gold in the form of small nuggets. Ritchie took a
sample home with him and had it assayed quietly, probably somewhere in the
States. He told Jim not to breathe a word of his discovery, but to work the
deposit secretly, bringing out a little at a time. Jim used to send it into Annapolis concealed in
little tubs of butter, shipping it by the mail coach.
Ritchie used to dispose of
the gold, returning the cash to Jim. This part of my story is hearsay of
course, told to me by my mother when I was a boy in the teens. I believe it to
be correct.
After some years Jim grew
bolder, bringing out larger quantities of gold. And he began to spend the money
recklessly. He bought a good carriage and a trotting horse. Eventually he had
one of his sportsman friends order for him a silver-mounted harness in the
States. He bought fine clothes for himself and Lizzie. He had a love for fine
watches and fancy chains, and often had three or four on his person at one
time, when he and Lizzie drove into Caledonia in their carriage, with the horse
in its expensive harness, and Lizzie sitting up proudly in her fine gown and
beaded Indian cap, they were quite a sight. By the year I870 everyone knew that Jim
Charles had found gold somewhere. He was watched, and men tried to follow him
when he set off on his lone expeditions, but Jim always managed to elude them.
Not far from Jim’s place at
Kejimkujik was a small farm kept by another Micmac, Peter Glode. Glode and his squaw were good
enough people, but they had a daughter whose morals were a bit loose. A
wandering white ne’er-do-well named Jim Hamilton, said to have deserted a ship
in Liverpool, N. S., struck up an acquaintance with the Glode girl and eventually
moved in to live with the Glode family. He soon learned of Jim Charles and his “gold
mine”. He tried to follow him a number of times but had to give it up. One day
in the 1870’s Hamilton, well primed with rum, went to Jim’s house and
threatened him and Lizzie, demanding to know the secret. He followed this up
with blows, and Jim Charles struck back. There was a fearful struggle in the
little shack. Jim was then about 45, and Hamilton far younger and stronger. At
last in desperation Jim caught up his gun and struck Hamilton on the head with
the butt. Hamilton fell and died in a space of minutes.
Jim Charles and Lizzie now
had something worse to frighten them — the white men’s law. One of Jim’s
friends was a Caledonia merchant named Harlow, who was also a magistrate. Jim
hurried away to Caledonia, dashed into the store, and cried “Mister Harlow! Mister Harlow! I just
killed Jim Hamilton. Save me! Save me!”
Harlow, a kindly and sensible
man, calmed Jim down. There were no police in the country districts in those
days, of course. The administration of law was a free-and-easy matter. Harlow
called a magistrate’s court, heard the evidence of Jim and Lizzie, and of the
Glodes. At the end of it he set Jim free. Most people agreed with his verdict,
feeling that Hamilton had got what was coming to him. But there were a few who
thereafter pointed out Jim Charles as a murderer never brought to justice.
(The family of Clayton Munro
were descended from William Burke, the pioneer settler in North Queens, who
spoke Micmac and was very influential with the Indians. The Munros themselves,
always friendly to the Indians, had a good deal of the same influence.)
My family now tried to
persuade Jim to take out a legal mining lease, covering the site of his gold,
wherever it was. It would protect his rights, and at the same time it would end
the spying and persecution of men like Hamilton. But Jim shook his head
stubbornly and said, “Bad luck for Injun show white men where is gold.”
Soon after this Lizzie died.
In their middle age, being childless, Jim and Lizzie had adopted a half-breed
girl named Madeleine. After Lizzie’s death Jim married Madeleine, and they had
one child, a son. Jim continued to market his gold through the banks in
Annapolis and Liverpool.
One day in 1884 a tragic
accident occurred in Kejimkujik Lake near Jim Charles’ Point. Three hunters
—Gideon Burrell, Stewart Ruggles and a man named Stoddard — set out across the
lake in a small bark canoe. The water was rough, the canoe capsized, and all
three were drowned. Almost at once malicious tongues began to wag. Soon there
was a story that Jim Charles had shot at the men with a rifle, hitting one or
more of them, and so causing the canoe to capsize. It was a lie, of course. The
bodies were recovered some time afterward, and they bore no trace of wounds.
But the story persisted amongst those who had always held Jim a murderer. Some
openly accused him.
Jim was badly frightened. He
was getting old now. And now that gold had been discovered at South Brookfield
the woods were full of prospectors, many of them rough characters from American
mining camps. He dared not go to his own secret “mine” any more. In fact he
hardly dared to set foot outside his shack.
He had spent his money
recklessly in the years gone by. He had nothing now but the expensive watches,
the fancy harness and the rest of it. After a time he had to sell these to buy
food.
Some years before he died, a
false story appeared in a Halifax newspaper to the effect that the notorious
Indian, Jim Charles, had died, and had made a death-bed confession to the
murder of Stoddard, Burrell and Ruggles. I had a church in Guysborough County
at the time. I wrote home at once, to ask if it was true. The answer was that
Jim Charles was alive, though very poor, and that the story was a bit of
imaginative malice on the part of someone in the Caledonia district.
Not long after this another
man named Hamilton turned up at Kejimkujik. He was no relation to the dead Jim
Hamilton, so far as anybody knew, but he went to Jim Charles’ shack, told the
old Indian that he was going to be arrested for the murder of the three
hunters, and proposed, “Show me where your gold mine is, and I’ll get you off.”
Jim was terribly alarmed, but he clung to his secret. However, after much
brooding, he made his way to the farm of a man named Lewis, whom he trusted. He
had come to a decision. So long as he kept his secret to himself the spying and
the persecution would continue. He dared not go near his mine — and he needed
money badly. The solution was to share his secret with a white man, a friend he
could trust. Lewis was such a man; moreover he was active and resolute, not the
sort that the shifty characters of the Caledonia “rush” would dare to trifle
with.
Lewis agreed to take out a mining
claim in his own name and Jim’s. The next thing was to visit the spot, measure
off the claim and drive the stakes. He and Jim slipped away across Kejimkujik
Lake in a canoe. It proved to be a long journey. All the men who had been
beating the bushes about the shores of Kejimkujik in search of Jim Charles’
gold were wasting their time. The way led by portage to Mountain Lake, thence
to Pescawess Lake, thence by the Shelburne River through Beverley Lake and Pine
Lake to the very source. Thence by a rough and toilsome portage to Oakland
Lake, the source of the Tusket River, which flows in the opposite direction,
towards the western end of Nova Scotia.
Lewis was astonished and
amused. The secret of Jim Charles’ gold mine was that it wasn’t on the Mersey
watershed at all. It was on the Tusket! At last Jim said, “Soon now.” They were getting far down
the Tusket towards the present village of Kemptville. Suddenly they heard an odd sound
ahead. It was faint at first, and old Jim looked puzzled. It grew louder as
they came around a bend and saw men, and buildings, and the smoke of a steam
engine.
Old Jim had kept his secret
too long. His mine had been discovered by prospectors working up the Tusket
River, and now there was a mill on the spot. What he had found was a large and
rich pocket of free gold at a spot where two seams joined, and the junction
came at a point that was actually part of the streambed. The stuff had caught
his eyes, shining in the shallow water. He must have cleaned out most of this
alluvial gold, but there was enough left to catch the notice of the Tusket
prospectors, and from that they had gone on to mine the actual seams. It was
the Kemptville mine, which ran successfully for many years.
When they returned to
Kejimkujik, Lewis and Jim Charles decided to keep mum about the whole thing.
Who would believe that Jim’s famous mine was on the Tusket, or that it was now
being fully exploited by an organized mining company?
(Here ends quotation from
Rev. Dr. C. A. Munro)
Record of the N.S. Dep’t. of
Mines and Forests shows that:-
Gold was discovered at
Kemptville, Yarmouth County, in 1881, by James and Joseph Reeves. In 1885 a
crusher began to operate, and for three years very high grade ore was crushed.
In the year 1885 the mine produced 624 ounces of gold. In following the seam
the mine produced less rich ore, and never again achieved the profit of 1885.
Nevertheless it continued running, with some interruptions, for many years. It
appears to have closed down finally in 1928.
**************
Information from Claude W. Hartlen,
funeral undertaker at Milton, Queens County, in 1926:- Jim Charles, when he was
very old and decrepit and poor, came to live at Two Mile Hill (near Milton)
with John and Andrew Francis, Indians. He used to hobble about on two sticks.
He died soon after. Mr. Hartlen prepared the body for burial. It was very
lousy, and some of the lice crawled on to Hartlen’s clothing. The coffin was a
plain pine box. Harlen ran a sawmill then, mostly making barrel staves. He also
made coffins, but at that time had no hearse. In those days there was only one
R.C. priest in Queens County, and he resided at Caledonia. Hartlen thought the
Indians had sent for the priest to perform the funeral rites, but on arrival he
found that they had not. They said they could not afford the priest. Two
Indians had dug a shallow grave in the churchyard. When Hartlen expressed his
concern about the absence of a priest, John Francis said “Oh, chuck the old
bugger in anyway.” So the coffin was interred without ceremony. This was in the
1890’s. Hartlen could not remember the exact year. In those days Hartlen ran a
little sawmill, sold fire insurance, and acted as the Milton undertaker as a
side line. Indian burials were casual affairs, usually conducted without
benefit of clergy. It was customary to haul the pine coffin all the way to
Liverpool on a hand-cart. If the dead Indian had been popular, the little
Micmac group at Two Mile Hill, men women and children, used to walk to
Liverpool, taking turns at pulling the cart. They brought food in baskets, and
after the burial they sat about the churchyard and held a sort of picnic.
Usually the men had a bottle or two of rum. It was quite a cheerful affair. At
evening they went home.
*************
Legends of Jim Charles and
his gold mine are still current in Queens and parts of Annapolis and Yarmouth
counties, and there are still people who believe that some sort of El Dorado
exists in the woods of western Nova Scotia, untouched since Jim Charles took
away his last pouch-full. Here are some of the legends:
I. Lane Smart, of Caledonia.
Smart’s father was an
American mining engineer, brought to Queens County by a syndicate operating a
mine there during the gold boom of the 1880’s and 1890’s. Isaac (best known as “Ike”)
was brought up in North Queens, and was a guide to fishermen and hunters most
of his life. Information given in 1945.
“I’ve heard a lot of tales
about Jim Charles. Who hasn’t? My own guess is that he had no mine. That young
squaw Madeleine was very chummy with the miners when she came to Caledonia, she
was a pretty thing, and her lovers used to pay her in gold dust and nuggets. In
other words she was old Jim’s mine. The miners used to steal gold out of the
sluices, even out of the crucibles. It got so bad that all the miners coming
off shift were searched for nuggets and dust; but the thefts went on. Gold dust
and nuggets were common currency around Caledonia for years.” (Note: according to Dr. Munro’s testimony,
Jim Charles was selling gold in Annapolis many years before the Caledonia gold
rush.)
Here is a letter to T.H.R.,
written by James B. (“Big Jim”) Macleod of South Brookfield, a famous guide and
woodsman
“South Brookfield, June 3rd
1944
“Dear Comrade Tom — Mr.
Munro, or Dr. Munro, or I should say Rev., I think is Clayton Munro formerly of
Maitland, Annapolis Co. After his father’s death his mother married a Nixon.
Alister Nixon of Maitland is a half Bro. Mrs. John Ford of Milton I think a
Sister. I remember the first time I seen him he was on a river drive, Tenting
in the pines below S. Brookfield Church. He came to Sunday-School on Sunday.
The seat of his pants were badly torn. My Half Brother Parker McLeod and he
were great chums. His letter does not change my idear about the Jim Charles
mine. I still think it was in the vicinity of Loon Lake (i.e. on the Kejimkujik
River —THR) Ike’s theary regards the matter will not agree with date of Jim
Charles. As the Whiteburn mine found and worked by Hugh McGuire, James McGuire & William happened years after. I can remember when the
McGuire Boys worked that mine. With a pistol fastened to a spring pole to break
the quarts. They cut a wide swath them days. Jim driving his span of greys
rigged up to a fancy carry all, with their silver mounted harnice. Drink finely
got them. Hugh had a Hotel at Caledonia, now the Alton House. He died where
Jack McGuire now lives. His wife still lives. Jim moved to Liverpool. He was
the Dandy then. The country was not good enough for him. He died in Liverpool.
You no doubt know his family.”
***********
Legend related to Helen
Creighton, June 1947, by Thomas “Red Tom” Boyle, then living at Port Mouton but
formerly of West Caledonia:-
“Jim Charles’ wife used to
drive to town with gold, and would go to the States with it. He was a very
treacherous Indian. He made baskets. After his first wife died he married
another Indian squaw named Multi, and when he had to go out hunting he would
tie his wife so she couldn’t get away. Jim shot at two Burrells. He thought
they were trapping on his ground, and he shot three men altogether; two Burrells and their brother-in-law
Stoddard. Bullets were found in the body. Jim Charles wore a pair of small gold
earrings. His first wife dressed well.
They had a horse and carriage, and lots of gold, and they used to go through
the woods. There is a brook that leads to his tenting ground. Jim would wander
off, but he would never show anybody his mine. His gold came out freely. My
wife had a chunk of Jim Charles’ gold. Before the canoe shooting he shot a man
named Hamilton.
Jim Charles had a brother-in-law
named Bradford, a fine Indian, but scared to death of Jim Charles. Everybody was scared
of him.”
******************
Legend related to Helen Creighton, July 1947, by Louis Pictou, Micmac Indian,
Lower Granville, Annapolis County:-
“They made buttons out of Jim Charles’ gold, and
grandmother made bullets.
Jim Charles brought his gold to Annapolis himself. He had a gold mine and he brought nuggets from the size of a pin-head to a pea. How he found them, it was a sort of dry summer, water was scarce and
he was hunting and he wanted a drink and he went to a brook. He had to follow it down to a pool, sort of a little falls. While he was drinking he see this stuff in the water, and he
reached down and got some of this stuff and picked it up. After he looked
around, he saw
it on the shores. He used to go there
and take the gold to Halifax. After a while the white folks got wise to it and got after him. ‘Now’, they
said, “Mister Charles, they claim you found a mine out there to Hedge Lakes. How much will you take for that mine?’ He didn’t want to sell, but three or four of them went with him to Hedge Lakes, and he got
out of the canoe and got on shore, and he warned them. ‘I’m going, and I’ll be back in an hour’s time, but I don’t want anyone to follow.’ So he went, and he come back
sure enough, and he brought these people the gold. They had liquor and they tried to get him drunk, but he was wise to that, and they tried to coax him to show where he got that stuff, and he wouldn’t. That mine was never found, by an Indian or a white man.
“They claim he killed a man, and then the rest of the Indians
claim he didn’t. The Indians claim he wouldn’t have done a thing like that.
People round Lequille said he was a real nice man, not treacherous.”
*************
Legend related to Helen
Creighton, August 1947, by Louis Harlow, Micmac Indian, at Bear River, Annapolis County:-
“Jim Charles’ wife was a great medicine woman, and during this time
they had
a dance, and old Jim went down and was
running around with a girl. A white fellow who was courting the same girl came
in, and he struck Jim Charles. When Jim Charles fell he picked up a piece of
wood, and killed the white man right there. They put Jim Charles in jail, and
he pretended he was sick and couldn’t stand the confinement, so they put up a
tent for him. He escaped from the tent and went to the woods.
He thought the dogs were
after him, so he jumped in the water and swam till he came to a beaver house,
and he stayed there. There was a big rock called Jim Charles’ Rock. Finally he
went out and wrote to the people in Liverpool to come and get him. They tried
him and cleared him.
“Jim Charles must have killed
Ruggles. He was a lawyer who was against him. There was no Indian in the canoe
with Ruggles. After it happened, other men came to him and said, ‘Uncle Jim,
they’re lying about you’. It wasn’t true, but they told him they were coming
after him. He went in the woods then to escape, and died of exposure.
“Jim Charles had a gold mine,
and his wife knew about it, and where it was. He used to go to Halifax with
fur, and he had two stocking-legs filled with gold. George King, the mail
driver, saw him and told me himself. When he first went to Halifax he had an
old horse, and whenever a team came by he had to go to one side to let them
past. He didn’t like that, so after he sold his fur and got his gold he looked
round for the best horse in Halifax, and he bought a trotter. He had a sleigh
all varnished up and painted red. He never told about his gold, because it was
believed that if the Indians found a gold mine, and told the white man, the
Devil would come to the Indian and he would die.”
****************
Legend related to Helen
Creighton, August 1947, by Charles Charlton, of Milford, Annapolis County:
“The three men in the canoe
which Jim Charles is supposed to have shot at were Stewart Ruggles; Gid
Burrell, a shoemaker; and Zeke Hanley, a white guide. They were in a little
60-pound birch bark canoe, which was overloaded. Some of the birch bark canoes
were so cranky you had to keep your hair parted in the middle, and others were so
cranky you daresn’t change your mind. Sid Camden brought the corpse of Burrell
through here in a daggin with a single ox, all wrapped in moss. His body was
the last to be found. The only killing I ever knew of around here was old Jim
Charles killing a white man who was too familiar with his wife.” (Note by THR: “Daggin”
or Dagan” was a western Nova Scotia word, probably Acadian in origin, for a
wagon pulled by a single ox.)
(Note by THR) In
July 1957 Arthur B. Merry came to my house with an old gun that he had found on
the bottom of Kejimkujik Lake. It was a very dry summer and the lake was low.
Paddling a canoe over a shallow place near his property on the east side of the
lake, Merry had noticed the gun and fished it up. His property was the old
Charlie Minard place, and it included the Indian burial ground. Merry thought
the gun might be one of those lost when Stoddard and the others upset their
canoe in 1884. It was badly corroded by rust, but one could see that it was a
cap-fire, muzzle-loading, smooth-bore gun, very light and short in the barrel.
(Note by THR) Fifteen
or more miles west of Lake Rossignol, near the place where the boundaries of
the western counties come together on the map like the wedges of a pie, lies a
small lake called Koofang by the woodsmen. Somewhere in the vicinity of “Koofang”
is a huge boulder with a cave under it, known as “Jim Charles’s Rock”. This is
where Jim hid for some years after he killed the man Hamilton. The name “Koofang”
(which means nothing in English, French, or Micmac) is obviously derived from
the old French word “couffin”, meaning a type of basket, perhaps because the
lake had that shape. Modern surveyors misunderstood the pronunciation, and
marked it “Two Fan Lake” on the N.S. government map.
(Note by THR)
In May 1966 Reginald Dickie, a land surveyor employed for
many years by the Mersey Paper Company, told me that Jim Charles’s grave was on
the point in Kejimkujik where he had his cabin; the mound can be clearly seen,
and for many years the proprietors of the Rod & Gun Club maintained a wooden cross or headboard on which was carved or painted
Jim Charles’s name.
This was in
contradiction to my information from Claude Hartlen, long since dead.
On May 22, 1966 I drove to Maitland Bridge and had a long
talk with farmer and woodsman Cecil Baxter. It was a Sunday and various elderly
members of the Baxter family had gathered for a reunion, including a Doctor
Baxter, a dentist, who now lives in retirement in Halifax. Doctor Baxter could
recall seeing Jim Charles talking to Baxter’s father some time in the 1890’s. All of these
elderly people knew the story of Jim Charles. Cecil Baxter, who had traveled a
good deal in the backwoods west of Kejimkujik as a younger man, knew the whole
area intimately. In essence this is what he said:
Clayton Munro’s
mother, after her husband’s death, continued to live on the Munro farm, and
later she married James Nixon, who was a widower. Hence James Nixon’s son
Allister, and Clayton Munro, were half brothers.
David Lewis, the
friend and confidant of Jim Charles, had a small farm on the road from Maitland
Bridge to Kejimkujik. He was more of a woodsman than a farmer, and spent a good
deal of his time in the forest. It was David Lewis who went along when Jim
Charles offered to show the whereabouts of his “mine”.
But Lewis was never
sure whether Jim’s astonishment was real or false when they found a real mine
operating on the Tusket. Jim had resorted to so many tricks to deceive the
white folk about his “mine” that it had become almost a habit.
Also there was some
doubt about Jim Charles’s sanity by that time.
After Jim Charles
was formally cleared of the murder of Hamilton various people made threats to
see him hanged. Jim Charles took to the woods and hid himself away for three
years up the Shelburne River. Near Koofang Lake there was a big rock and a cave
beside it, where Jim lived during these three years. Woodsmen afterwards found
the place and always referred to it as “Jim Charles’s Rock” and “Jim Charles’s
cave.” It was not on the shore of Koofang Lake but back on the land where there
was a good view. During these three years alone, living by hunting and fishing,
constantly afraid of discovery by white men, Jim’s mind became a bit queer. His
squaw knew where he was, and eventually he returned to the cabin in Kejimkujik
when she convinced him that there was no more danger. He told some of his white
friends that during the time he was living in the cave near Koofang Lake some
people hunted for him with two dogs. One dog was of normal size, the other was
huge. He was much afraid of the big dog.
Eventually Jim
Charles’s squaw died, and his son Maiti went away to the States. I have heard
that Malti learned the blacksmith’s trade in Maine and stayed there the rest of
his life.
I have heard that
during the days of Jim Charles’s affluence he joined the Masonic order. I don’t
think there was a Masonic lodge in Caledonia then. Possibly he joined the lodge
in Liverpool or Annapolis. The Indians hereabouts were nominally Catholics, and
I have heard it said that Jim Charles must have been the only Catholic
Freemason in existence.
Jim Charles
definitely was not buried on the point in Kejimkujik. When he was old he went
to live with an Indian family named Francis in Milton, near Liverpool. He died
and was buried down there. The “grave” on Jim Charles’s Point in Kejimkujik was
a natural mound near the main building of the Rod & Gun Club. When the Club
became a hotel for sportsmen, one of the proprietors used to tell his guests
that Jim Charles, the famous Indian murderer and gold miner, was buried under
that mound. He put a wooden cross or headboard on it, with Jim Charles’s name,
and spun yarns about Jim’s ghost being seen walking about the point at night. It
used to delight the women guests.
The Rod & Gun Club was built about 1907 by a group of sportsmen,
mostly from Annapolis. After some years one of these men — I think he was a
Mills from Annapolis — bought out the interests of the others and turned the place
into a summer resort for families, mostly well-to-do Americans. It changed
hands a good many times during the years since. The most recent owner was
Norman Phinney. The Parks Branch of the Department of Northern Affairs expropriated
his and other properties at Kejimkujik when they took over the whole area.
Norman Phinney now lives at Wilmot, near Middleton in the Annapolis Valley.
My father remembered the drowning of Ruggles, Burrell and
Stoddard very well.
The day was very
calm, and the canoe foundered because it was overloaded. They had been warned
that the canoe was overloaded. They were heading from Jim Charles’s Point
towards Hog Island when it foundered. For quite a time they struggled in the
water, screaming for help. The cries were heard at a distance of two miles, at
the John Lewis house.
The magistrate was
Charles Harlow Ford, a member of the Masonic lodge. He was an outstanding
magistrate in his day, and people from all over the countryside came to him for
legal advice. He would hold court in his house, and disputes and grievances
would be settled through him. Charles Ford and David Lewis were both friends of
Jim Charles. The wife of David Lewis was an Indian, Esther Jeremy, a sister of
the late Joe Jeremy of Molega.
Hamilton was killed
at what is called the Glode Field, in a hollow, not far from the road going in
to Kejimkujik.
Other documents today:
Pinehurst
Lodge (and Jim Charles)- Raddall
The
Lost Gold at Kejimkujik – Randall from Footsteps on Old Floors
The Flight of Jim Charles /drf
[1] Note: I spell KE-JIM-KU-JIK, phonetically,
following the Indian pronunciation. The meaning is obscure. According to the
Indians the literal translation is “the-part-that- swells”, and some illustrate
by saying “like a bladder with a narrow end”. Sesbresay’s History of Lunenburg
County (page 341) says that the cove at Aspotagan was alternately called
KEBEJO-KOOCHK by the Indians meaning “a closing of the passage”. Both names
obviously have one etymological origin and seem to refer to the shape of the
lake or cove. However the ancient Indians built eel-weirs on the Kejimkujik
River (below the lake) whose stone remains can still be seen. In a sense these
might be called “a closing of the passage”. Such weirs, in the Fall rains,
would raise the lake and spread its area to some extent.
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