Only the very oldest readers of this column will remember the time when the Canadian chartered banks issued their own banknotes.
The Bank of Canada has had the sole right to issue currency since 1935. Before that, all the chartered banks also shared that privilege. There was a bewildering array of notes of various denominations and designs, and that made the passing of counterfeit notes much easier than it is today.
In December 1863, a couple of men from Hillsburgh worked their way slowly from Owen Sound south, spreading fake five-dollar bills in their wake. The victims were all hotel keepers on the Owen Sound Road, now Highway 6, which was then the primary artery into Grey County. None of the hotel men noticed the phony money immediately.
The two men, William Bridge and Terence Burns, had been working on construction projects in Owen Sound during the summer. It seems that they fell in with some questionable friends while there, and came to some sort of agreement to distribute the bad money. Bridge and Burns took their time for their trip home, travelling only a short distance each day, and enjoying long sessions in the bar rooms of each hotel where they stopped. In at least some of the hotels they settled the tab with a bogus bill.
The bad money was discovered when the hotel keepers tried to deposit the notes in a bank, or when they tried to pass them on to eagle-eyed customers. Even in an age of poor communications, reports of their phony money caught up with Bridge and Burns at Mount Forest.
The constable there arrested them on Christmas Eve 1863 at one of the town’s hotels. They had in their possession a number of fake five-dollar bills of the Bank of Upper Canada and the Bank of Montreal, as well as about $70 of what appeared to be genuine money, the net proceeds of their summer of work.
The pair appeared before a Mount Forest magistrate, who heard the evidence and confirmed the charges. He ordered them to be held in jail, awaiting transportation to Owen Sound for trial. Authorities suspected there would be further charges for offences in Grey County, and that the trial should be held there.
Bridge added to his troubles by giving his names as “Briggs,” but that ruse was soon uncovered. On Dec. 28 they arrived at the jail in Owen Sound, in the custody of a constable.
Their arrest, meanwhile, had caused a sensation at home in Hillsburgh and Erin Township when word reached there.
An Owen Sound magistrate set bail for each of the men at $1,600, part of which could be in securities and guarantees. That was a huge sum for the 1860s. Following an exchange of telegraph messages, friends of Terence Burns arrived in Owen Sound on December 30 to release him on bail.
Bridge’s friends took a little longer to raise the necessary funds and sureties, but they telegraphed that they would be in Owen Sound on Jan. 2 to retrieve him from his unpleasant New Year’s vacation.
Bridge realized that the prospects did not look good for him. The evidence against him and Burns was very convincing. On New Year’s Day he came up with a scheme to circumvent the judicial process.
About five o’clock every afternoon the head guard at the jail, a man named Miller, permitted all the inmates to go out into the yard to empty their slop pails. On Jan. 1, darkness was closing in, and snow storm further obscured visibility when the men marched out into the jail yard.
When Miller was out of site, around a corner of the jail building, Bridge made a run for the main gate in the wall that surrounded the jail yard. He quickly climbed on top of it, then jumped to the ground, and began running as fast as he could.
Bridge had persuaded another man, named Wilson, to accompany him on the jail break. It was a rash and foolish decision by Wilson.
He was serving a short term for a minor theft, and had only a couple of weeks remaining in his sentence. Further, he was wearing prison garments, which could be spotted easily.
Together, the men were out of sight when Miller realized that two of his inmates were gone. He immediately gave chase, recruiting passers-by to join in, but the combination of darkness and blowing snow permitted Bridge and Wilson to disappear into the night.
Miller was able to gather a considerable posse later that night, but no one managed to find even a trace of the two fugitives. It seems likely that they had assistance in disappearing from sight so quickly.
The Sheriff of Grey County tried to organize a systematic search for the Burns and Wilson, but was not able to do so until the storm died down.
The fact that the men had virtually vanished into thin air was a frustrating one for the authorities, aggravated all the more because it was unlikely that they could have left the town. All the roads from Mount Forest were plugged with drifts, and there was not yet a railway line to Owen Sound. Due to the storm, Bridge’s friends did not arrive until Jan. 4 to bail him out. To their surprise, their arduous trip had been in vain.
The trail quickly grew cold. Bridge and Wilson apparently, made good their escape, but their ultimate destination is not known. It would seem logical that William Bridge would head for his home near Hillsburgh. There is no newspaper report that he returned home, but obviously he would lay low and remain out of sight until memory of the arrest and jail break faded.
Another route for 19th century fugitives, south across the border to the land of the free, seems less likely in January 1864. The American Civil War was then at its most intense, and every able bodied man faced conscription.
Terence Burns returned to Owen Sound for his trial at the spring assizes of 1864. The judge treated him to a year’s holiday in a small room at public expense. It appears that he did not return to Wellington County on his release. The names of neither Bridge nor Burns appear in the 1871 Wellington Directory.
The episode served as a warning to young men to be careful of their choice of company when away from home. Both Bridge and Burns displayed youthful naivete in the blatant way they scattered the fake five-dollar bills, and assuming they would not be detected.
Counterfeit bank notes showed up at irregular intervals in 19th century Wellington County, and especially in Guelph, which was by far the largest centre, with more visitors and a greater degree of anonymity.
Those who passed the bad bills were usually careful to exercise discretion and not flood the town with them. Invariably it was bank employees who detected the fake notes, when they came over the counter in a deposit. By then the person who had passed them was long out of sight. But the long arm of the law still caught up with many of them.