The Lynching of Louie Sam

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki. Click for a larger image, or look at the original sketches.

Of all the things that touched Louie Sam during his short life, only the handcuffs remain. They reside now in the basement of the Vancouver Museum, rusty but still functional. I was haunted by this: that there was no tangible evidence of this boy’s life besides the twin voids through which he was dragged so roughly from it. I had the opportunity to put these handcuffs on, so I did, wondering if I might be the first person to wear them since Sam was cut down from a cedar tree just north of the Washington–British Columbia border on the morning of February 28, 1884. I was hoping for a sign, but the boy was long gone. There was nothing in those bracelets apart from my own hands.

Lynchings, maybe more than other murders, leave ghosts behind and business unfinished that gnaw at the collective mind. The restless memory of the victim issues insistent demands: Recall me. Remember me. Release me. In the United States, there are many in need of this attention; the list of victims from Texas alone numbers almost 500. And though we tend to think of lynchings as a phenomenon of the Deep South, they actually occurred in all but four of the contiguous forty-eight states.

Here’s a statistic: between 1882, when reliable records started to be kept, and 1968, there were 4,743 lynchings recorded in the United States. In Canada, during this same eighty-six-year period, there was one: Louie Sam’s. Tuskegee University, from whose archives these statistics come, classified 1,297 of the victims as “White” (a figure that includes immigrants and aboriginals, but vastly underestimates the numbers for these groups). No such archives exist in Canada, because there appears to be no need for them, though other lynchings did occur here.

Given our common native and European roots, and our shared indebtedness to Britain and its legal system, it is hard to imagine how the United States and Canada could differ so much on the subject of due process. And yet we do. The sheer magnitude of the imbalance stuns and perplexes, and it cannot be explained away by race or region. Lynching is a medium through which America has long expressed itself, like football, rock and roll, or war. Indeed, in the sense that lynching is a unilateral commandeering of the judicial process, with death as a by-product, the second invasion of Iraq can be seen as simply an extension of tradition.

What makes Canada’s lone statistical aberration more unusual still is who the victim was: a member of what is now known as the Sto:lo (stah-lo) Nation of southern British Columbia. Louie Sam died at fourteen or fifteen, during an era when tens of thousands of natives were dying throughout North America. Given that aboriginals were often completely overlooked by census counts and related data collecting, the fact that Sam’s death would become one of the most thoroughly documented lynchings of the nineteenth century, and the spark for an international incident, is nothing short of amazing.

This Canadian example may also allow us to glimpse the mechanics of divergence that caused a common past to become a fault line, to become a border, to become an altogether different branch of the North American family tree. The case of Louie Sam illustrates that the difference between “peace, order, and good government” and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is not superficial; it cuts to the bone. When you look at these sprawling, sometimes feuding fraternal twins through the lens of mob justice, it seems Canada stayed home to be raised by stable if somewhat overbearing parents, while the States ran away with the Lord of the Flies.

Because Louie Sam’s handcuffs were tangible and evocative, I thought about them a lot. A century ago, they would have been known to those in the apprehension business as “darbies,” and they were a staple of law enforcement throughout the British Empire and the United States. The design originated in Britain and appears to have been ergonomic: the cuffs are truly wrist shaped, with rounded, convex rims that feel almost soft against one’s tendons and bones. They are linked by a short chain on a swivel that allows for maximum mobility under the circumstances, and are probably the most humane manacles ever mass produced. Nineteenth-century prisoners, travelling on foot or on horseback, would have spent much more time in bondage than their modern counterparts and so may have appreciated the darbies’ relative comfort. But when all was said and done, none of this would matter much to Louie Sam.

By 9 p.m. on the night of February 27, 1884, Sam would have been shackled in his darbies for hours — ever since he’d been arrested in Kilgard on suspicion of murder. Kilgard, also known as Indian Reserve No. 6, was a squalid shack settlement near the base of a mountain, about eighty kilometres east of Vancouver and a kilometre or so from the US border. In those days, only about twenty people lived there. Spread out below the reserve was an extraordinarily beautiful and fertile flood plain that extended south across the border, with grass growing two metres high. The mosquitoes there were a force of nature, clogging the air in dark blizzards that forced residents to hide indoors. One settler described her white house as having been turned black by the swarms that settled on it.

There is a tendency to imagine frontier settlements as sets for Western movies — tidy, intimate, organized — but this was not the case in BC’s southern border country. Most homesteaders here lived exhausting, isolated lives in dirt-floored cabins on large parcels of land that had yet to be cleared of the often-enormous trees that covered them. In many cases, neighbours were beyond shouting distance, and at night the darkness was absolute. Jim Berg, a seventy-three-year-old local historian whose family helped to settle the area around Nooksack, Washington, ten kilometres south of Kilgard, recalled his homesteader great-uncle’s reason for building a two-storey cabin and living in the upstairs: “I could defend a stairwell,” his uncle explained. “I couldn’t defend four walls.” People regularly travelled with firearms into the 1930s.

Today the houses of Kilgard have been updated somewhat, and the population has increased, but the place appears under siege. The mountain itself is being systematically dismantled by half a dozen gravel companies, and roaring parades of dump trucks crowd the area’s narrow roads all day long. What hasn’t been claimed by extractors is being overrun by developers capitalizing on Vancouver’s eastward sprawl. It’s worth mentioning this, because something similar was happening in Louie Sam’s day.