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T.W. Paterson column: Friends couldn’t save ‘Bulldog’ Kelly from fatal fall

This cold-blooded killer’s friends in high places had helped him to defeat Canadian justice.
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Canada and U.S. clashed over justice in 1884. (submitted)

By T.W. Paterson

Years before, this cold-blooded killer’s friends in high places had helped him to defeat Canadian justice.

In the chill half-light of dawn, Nov. 27, 1884, three horsemen picked their way through the snowdrifts covering the narrow Kootenay trail, 24 miles south of Golden.

Manual Drainard led the way along the banks of the Kicking Horse River, followed by Montana liquor salesman Robert McGregor Baird and their packer, identified only as Harry.

Without warning, a rifle slug struck Baird in the chest and spun him, lifeless, from the saddle. Drainard snapped a frightened look back, saw Baird pitch to the ground and, unarmed and unnerved, galloped off as a second bullet tore into Harry’s hip. The concussion almost knocked him from the saddle but he charged their attacker and grappled with him until overcome by loss of blood and shock.

When he came to, he found Baird in the mud where he’d fallen. He was almost naked, the highwayman having methodically slashed open his clothing, even removing boots and socks, and cutting open his saddlebags in search of the $4,500 in gold and currency he was carrying.

Harry barely made it to Kicking Horse, booming construction camp of the building CPR, where North-West Mounted and B.C. Provincial Police quickly formed posses of construction workers and telegraphed a description of the slayer to Victoria and as far east as Winnipeg: about five feet, 11 inches in height…blue eyes, moustache of a light colour turned up at the ends, reddish complexion, and chin whiskers apparently cut with scissors…dark suit, sack coat and Scotch cap with peak.

Police easily put a name to this description: ‘Bulldog’ Kelly, an American who’d been drifting about the Kootenays for a year. Of Kelly himself, there was only his rifle which he’d dropped or thrown into the Kicking Horse River.

Quite by chance, NWMP Col. A.G. Irvine spotted him on a Winnipeg-bound train, but Kelly escaped by leaping from the moving car.

Canadian authorities concentrated their search below the border, advertising his description by circular to lawmen from Oregon to Minnesota. Baird had been buried almost eight months when Provincial Police Const. Jack Kirkup found Kelly in Crookstone, Minn., and had him arrested by local marshals. A brief extradition hearing, thought Kirkup, and Kelly would be en route to B.C. in irons.

But it soon turned out that Kelly wasn’t just an ordinary murderer. He had friends. Important friends. It took seven bitter months to even bring him before the U.S. Commissioner in St. Paul. However, Kelly’s friends couldn’t refute Harry’s sworn statement and Commissioner Spencer reluctantly ordered Kelly’s surrender to the Canadian authorities. Kelly’s lawyer ‘Big Tom’ Ryan caught the next train to Washington, D.C. to meet with Secretary of State Thomas Bayard. When Washington quashed the extradition order, B.C.’s Attorney-General P.A. Irving personally presented Commissioner Spencer with another affidavit, that of Manuel Drainard, and Spencer again committed Kelly for extradition.

Victoria’s Colonist complained: “The proceedings were conducted with a licence that would not be tolerated in a magistrate’s court in this country — the prisoner enjoying a cigar and conversing with his many sympathizers [although] towards the end of the case, it was evident that the long strain on his nervous system was beginning to tell, and once the court had to adjourn on account of his ill health.”

Then, for B.C., disaster. Ryan returned from a second trip to Washington with a decision from none other than President Grover Cleveland. Ryan had convinced him of Kelly’s past good work for the Minnesota Democratic Party. With rebellion raging in Ireland, the Emerald Isle population in the U.S. had a strong election voice and it would be politically unwise if Kelly were turned over to the barbarous British in Canada.

Said the Bulldog (born Edward Loughlin) upon his release, “It is a persecution of the worst kind, and ought to stop right here. I’ve been in confinement eight months for nothing, as the decision shows…”

Moaned the Colonist: “Money and political influence have been too potent, and Kelly is now treading the firm soil and breathing the pure air of a country where all are free — free to make justice a travesty, to treat murder as a joke, and to turn a criminal trial and sentence into a mockery — if they do but possess the subtle key to the necessary mechanism…

“Kelly may be legally free but he goes forth with a red stain on his conscience, if he has any, and with a liberty that is conditional upon his never placing his feet upon British soil. Until then his crime rests between himself and his Maker. As it is, the U.S. is responsible…for prostituting its freedom by wrapping its flag around the body of a…murderer.”

The St. Paul Irish Standard fired back: “The bloodhounds of the so-called British justice, true to the instincts of their bloodthirsty ancestors….endeavoured to trample down every vestige of justice and fair play in our midst, and drag the object of their enmity into their kennels and consign him, as many an honest Irishman has been consigned before, to an ignominious death on the scaffold whose bloodstains, like the blood of Abel, cry aloud for vengeance on the cowardly curs who have so often besmeared it with the heart’s blood of the brave and true.

“The Canadian government has already spent $30,000 through the instrumentality of a corduroyed, tight pants dude of a lawyer they sent here, who knew well that the guilty party was not Kelly.”

Whew!

But even Bulldog Kelly’s powerful friends couldn’t save him from ultimately standing before a greater bar of justice. In April 1890, while working as a brakeman on the North Pacific Railroad, he fell between two moving cars.

Unlike his leap to freedom from another train, six years before, this was the end. Both legs had been crushed below the knees and he died on the operating table.

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