The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  If Wood didn’t expect trouble, why this overkill? Several interesting points emerged later. The police, it turned out, had no idea of how many of the wanted men would be present at the rally. Actually, only two – Evans and Black – were on hand. The crowd was largely civilian; most of the trekkers were elsewhere, watching a baseball game. Of the fifteen hundred people in the square, well over a thousand were curious spectators, enjoying the end of a holiday weekend – citizens such as John Cheers, who was on his way to see a movie but stopped off “because the wife had never seen these strikers in a body before and she said she would like to see the boys.”

  The policemen at the scene were badly confused about the tactics to be followed. Wood wanted all the police to be held back and not used unless the arresting officers (in plainclothes) ran into trouble. But Chief Bruton and also Inspector Duncan McDougall of the city police believed they were to rush the meeting as soon as a signal whistle was blown, whether the plainclothes detail needed them or not. That is what happened and that is what caused the violence that followed.

  Until the whistle blew, the scene in the square was peaceful, with many of the spectators seated in rows of chairs around the speakers’ platform. Gerry Winters, representing the trekkers, and John Toothill, on behalf of the Citizens’ Emergency Committee, appealed for funds over a hastily contrived loud-speaker system. Evans, seated on the platform, was handed a note reporting that the square was surrounded by Mounties. Evans gave the note to George Black, the chairman, who asked if he should tell the spectators. Evans said no: “This is a peaceful meeting and if you announce it you’re liable to cause a certain amount of unrest.” Looking over the heads of the crowd, he could see the moving vans stationed on the perimeter of the square but couldn’t be sure who was in them.

  Steve Brodie, standing at the south end of the square facing the platform, also saw the vans. The night was so sultry that the rear doors were slightly open for ventilation, and Brodie could see the familiar yellow stripes on the blue breeches of those within. “Look what is here!” he said to Johnny Dean, a member of his division. “I can smell trouble.”

  At that moment the doors were opened another foot and the two men could see that the police were wearing steel helmets. “If there’s no trouble,” said Johnny Dean, “then they’re going to bring it.”

  Even as he spoke, there came the shrill sound of a police whistle. Immediately a wave of city police, dressed in blue, burst from the rear of the police garage and tore into the crowd, swinging their batons above their heads. Evans tried to leave the platform but was knocked off his feet. The plainclothes squad seized him and Black, frog-marched them to a truck on Halifax Street, and took them at once to the city police station. Wood’s elaborate preparations to arrest seven trek leaders had resulted in the capture of only two.

  The moment the whistle blew, the steel-helmeted Mounted Police, who were supposed to be held in reserve, poured from the big vans and waded into the crowd.

  In less than a minute, the scene in Market Square was transformed into a confused mêlée marked by scenes of unmitigated savagery. The people in the square, who had no idea what was happening and saw the police coming toward them, batons raised, began to flee in panic. The first impression Willis Shaparla had was of a terrible roar; his instant reaction was that the square had been hit by an earthquake. He could not associate the sound with human beings. Nor could he identify the source, for he was being pushed and shoved by those around him trying to escape. Then he caught a glimpse of blue uniforms and realized what was going on. As he said later, “that was the most fearful moment of my life.”

  Few, if any, of the people in the square realized that the police attack was to support the plainclothesmen arresting Evans and Black. Most thought that both the city police and the RCMP were attacking them. That wasn’t surprising. Jacob Brunner, a mechanic who ran a repair shop near the square, was twenty-five yards from the platform when he saw the police rushing toward him, swinging their batons “as though they were out to fight a bunch of wild Indians.” The spectacle inspired fear, panic, and more violence. John McCarthy’s first impression was of a stampede. The people rushing toward him “seemed to be mad.” McCarthy, who lived at the nearby Regina Hotel, thought the wild animals had escaped from a travelling circus that was visiting the city. Looking into the crowd, he “never saw such fear depicted on human beings as on those faces.”

  If the testimony later sworn to by a score or more of witnesses is to be believed, the police laid about them with a will, swinging batons at anybody who got in their way and even striking people who had fallen on the ground. The police flatly denied it.

  Certainly, the scene was so confused that only a trained observer could have remembered exactly what he or she saw. The citizens fled in disarray. Men who got in the way of the police were shoved aside. Women stumbled and were trampled. Baby carriages were knocked over. Hundreds who tried to get away from the city police ran directly into the three-pronged onslaught of the RCMP. There seemed to be no escape. Enraged, the crowd began to pick up stones, bricks, and pieces of wood to fling at the police, who responded with their clubs and batons. With the city’s treasury empty, the sidewalks that bordered the square had been allowed to crumble, and now trekkers and citizens tore off pieces of concrete the size of softballs and hurled them at the police. The mob, after ebbing out of the square, surged back again, pushing the uniformed men before it, bent on revenge. When the police tossed tear-gas bombs into the crowd, people caught them and threw them back.

  The rage of the trekkers, which communicated itself to the others in the crowd, is understandable. For three months they had been under strict discipline. Except for the brief skirmish in the Hudson’s Bay store in Vancouver, they had held themselves in and bottled up their feelings in order to maintain public support. Now their protest had failed; they no longer needed the public. They were convinced that the police were deliberately attacking them, and they struck back.

  The chief victim was a city plainclothes detective, Charles Millar, a Great War casualty with a metal plate in his head. Millar was one of the reserves inside the police garage, but when the riot began he rushed out onto the square to his death, beaten to the ground with a length of cordwood wielded by one or more unidentified men. Although Evans would make capital out of this savage attack, claiming that Millar was killed by the police, the charge was hardly credible coming from someone who had already been hustled away when the tragedy occurred.

  But were the police entirely innocent of unprovoked assault? A good many Regina citizens, who might be considered more objective than either the police or the trekkers, later swore to what they saw in the square when the riot began. Could they all have been wrong?

  William Curtis, a garage man who had lived in Regina for fifteen years, was knocked down and trampled as the police advanced. As he struggled to get up he saw an old man on his knees. A Mountie ran over, so Curtis swore, and whacked at the man until somebody came and pulled the victim away. Christina Metcalfe testified to a similar experience. As she tried to flee from the square she swore she saw three RCMP and a city policeman beating a striker. “Murder!” she screamed just before she was struck in the knee by a block of wood swung by another policeman. She was lame for two weeks.

  Jacob Brunner saw policemen “pounding a man all over.” He went up to one of the policemen, whom he knew – Sergeant Tommy Logan – and cried out: “What are you doing here, are you trying to kill him? … Why don’t you shoot him and be done with it? … Why do you keep pounding him?” Logan looked at him in a dazed manner, as if to say, “Who are you? What are you talking about?” The beaten man could no longer walk and had to be dragged to the police station.

  Though much of the evidence is flimsy and some confused, though much of the supposed brutality reported to the commission might have been accidental, caused by the crowd pushing, shoving, and trampling on each other, the account of this last incident has the ring of truth. The policeman is named a
nd the description of his reaction sounds authentic. Police, citizens, and trekkers alike were all dazed by the fury of the attack and the response to it.

  The battle was by no means one-sided. One angry group forced two Mounties against a wall at the corner of Osler and Tenth, battering them with fists and sticks. As one fell to the sidewalk, William Reader, a clerk, waded in, pleading with the crowd not to kill him. For his pains he got a blow in the chest from a piece of automobile spring wielded by an elderly citizen. But the crowd left the policeman alone.

  Steve Fustas would never forget that Dominion Day because he thought he had lost his young daughter that night. He had taken her to Market Square with his wife and their baby-in-arms out of curiosity. What else was there to do in Regina on a summer night? Fustas was a barber by profession but a labourer by happenstance; people cut their own hair in those days to save money. He reached the speakers’ platform just as Toothill was addressing the crowd. He lifted the little girl onto the platform. His wife kept the baby in her arms and gratefully accepted a chair. Suddenly, he heard her call out, “Steve, here is the police!”

  “What police?” he asked.

  “Look up!” she told him. He turned toward the police garage and saw the blue-uniformed men bearing down, waving their clubs and shouting, “Clear up the Market Square and get out of here! Get out!” Terrified, he ran twenty-five yards, only to hear his wife, somewhere in the mob, cry out, “Steve, we’ve lost our girl!” In his panic, he had left her on the platform.

  He tried to struggle back with the baby, forcing his way toward the platform through a struggling mass of people. He asked a Mountie for help and was rebuffed. “I haven’t time,” the policeman told him.

  He heard somebody say that a girl had been killed in the crush, and at that he began to cry, thinking it might be his own child. He clung to the Mountie’s arm, pleading for help. The policeman took a swing at somebody behind him and Fustas thought he was the intended victim. “I’m a father!” he cried. The Mountie said he wasn’t after him.

  Fustas headed northeast. Looking down the row of seats he saw a man holding onto a club, his face, shirt, and hands covered in blood. He shouted to the crowd that the man needed attention; an ambulance arrived and picked him up. To the east he saw another man standing by a telephone pole, a Mountie on each side clubbing him on the head. People around him were hurling missiles and a policeman was throwing them back.

  When the Mounties began to throw tear-gas bombs into the crowd, Fustas thought of his baby: “This is poison!” He ran through the fumes towards Osler Street, his hand over the infant’s mouth to protect him. At the corner of Osler and Eleventh, a group of Mounted Police trotted down the sidewalk, clubbing people who got in their way. At this point, Fustas came upon his wife and discovered, to his great relief, that she had found their missing daughter.

  The police managed to clear the square just before nine that evening, and the riot moved along Tenth and Eleventh avenues, evolving into a series of skirmishes in the alleys and laneways that ran off the main streets. The crowd surged onto Eleventh, the southern border of the square, and moved west along both Eleventh and Twelfth for several blocks as far as the intersections of Scarth, Cornwall, and Lorne, where the main battles took place. A troop of RCMP on horseback moved west along Eleventh past the city hall swinging their batons, riding over the civic lawns and flower beds, and clubbing the demonstrators who were pelting them with rocks and pieces of concrete, wood, and iron. From the rooftops, others were pitching debris down on the police.

  Wilfred Woodhill, a reporter with station CJRM, had a spectacular view of the fray. The station was located in the Saskatchewan Life Building at the corner of Eleventh and Cornwall. Woodhill with two colleagues had shinnied up an adjoining telephone pole to the roof of the one-storey annex, carrying microphones and amplifiers, to watch the action. They had expected trouble and were now prepared to report on it.

  Woodhill began his broadcast just after the police cleared the square. He could see a mob of perhaps one hundred and fifty rioters, armed with rocks, pouring along Eleventh as far as Cornwall and driving a dozen policemen into the shelter of the buildings. On they came, past his vantage point for another block, smashing windows as they went, until they reached the intersection at Lorne. The police retreated south on Lorne as the crowd surged back again as far as Scarth. Woodhill heard one man shout, “Hey, there’s a good one!” pointing to Willson’s stationery store on Eleventh. A barrage of rocks followed, breaking every window in the store.

  Woodhill’s listeners could hear the sound of the glass breaking. They could also hear Woodhill commenting on the remarkable restraint of the police, who while trying to defend themselves were taking the brunt of the crowd’s attack. (Woodhill later testified that he had at no time seen a policeman raise a club to a striker.) His remarks about police restraint, blaring from store radios, enraged the mob. A man was sent to climb the telephone pole to tell Woodhill that such words would not be tolerated. The radio station, however, had posted a picket with a lead pipe at the top of the pole, who warned the intruder off.

  By 10:10 that night, the scene had become one of incredible confusion. The crowd dragged half a dozen parked cars into the centre of the intersection at Eleventh and Cornwall to try to prevent the advance of the blue-clad city police, who had circled around from Lorne. Some of the cars were badly battered, their windshields cracked or broken. Traffic was at a standstill. A single streetcar had managed to run the gauntlet of a hail of rocks at Eleventh and Cornwall, but others were stalled. One was used as protection against the mounted RCMP troop, which was tossing tear-gas bombs to try to disperse the mob. “Come on, you yellow-legged sons of bitches,” one man cried as he hurled rocks at the Mounties. Woodhill heard somebody shout, “They’ve got the machine-guns out!” Then he saw a man stagger and fall, apparently wounded, and try to creep under a stalled streetcar. A policeman seized him and dragged him out again.

  At this point, the very climax of the riot, an incomprehensible event occurred – incomprehensible, at least, to a modern broadcaster. Woodhill received a direct order from his superior to kill the broadcast. At that moment, the scene below was one that any reporter today would give a month’s salary to be able to broadcast live: the sounds of hundreds of windows being smashed, of men and women shouting and cursing, of horses screaming as they fell, and, most chilling of all, the crack of pistol shots (there were no machine-guns), the groans of the wounded, and the sirens of the ambulances.

  But the height of the action was not heard or described on the radio. Woodhill obediently packed up his equipment, slithered down the telephone pole, and returned to the station. His later explanation would baffle a modern reporter: “We did not figure that it was the thing for broadcast purposes.” The time was coming when no station would be governed by the sensitivities of its listeners. But radio was young then, and its listeners had yet to hear the sounds of war – bombs exploding, machine-guns stuttering, and reporters of the Murrow breed describing burning cities from the rooftops.

  Meanwhile, the city police under Inspector Duncan McDougall, having come south on Lorne to Twelfth, after skirmishing with the crowd moved east toward Scarth. There, a mob of three hundred pelted them with rocks. McDougall’s eighteen men were forced back as the crowd advanced. The inspector ordered his outnumbered men to unbutton their holsters, draw their .38 revolvers, and fire over the heads of their attackers.

  It took a second volley to disperse them. In all, the police fired some twenty-five shots. McDougall and his men reached the intersection, moved around a small barricade of cars, wheeled left, and headed north on Scarth Street towards Eleventh. Now they found themselves caught in a crossfire of rocks hurled by a group protected by one stalled streetcar and some men coming up behind them along Scarth. McDougall, who had sent a runner for more ammunition, again ordered his men to fire. He saw a citizen stagger, fall, and try to crawl under the streetcar, shouting that he was wounded. This was the same man Wo
odhill had seen just as he ended his broadcast. McDougall and a constable pulled him free, called for an ambulance, and sent him to hospital.

  At about the same time, Jim Cross, a summer bachelor, was walking home on Scarth from a friend’s place. Just before he reached Eleventh, he heard the whine of a bullet above the almost deafening sound of screaming people and shattering glass. The bullet struck a steel lamp-post beside him and ricocheted. Then he felt “a terrific impact, like being kicked by a mule”; the bullet had hit him in the abdomen.

  “You’re the luckiest man in Regina tonight,” the doctor told Cross when he finally reached the hospital. “If that bullet had moved over another half inch you’d never have known what hit you.” The flattened bullet had gone directly through Cross’s abdominal cavity without injuring any of his vital organs, to emerge one inch from his spinal cord. But Jim Cross couldn’t sleep that night, for he was worried about his job. In those stark days there was no sick leave, pay for days off, unemployment or hospitalization insurance, or crime compensation. His boss came the following day with a bouquet of flowers and a blunt message: “If you’ve had anything to do with supporting these strikers, you’ll be out of a job.” The police also turned up to deny that they’d fired the shot that almost killed him. But ten days later when he left the hospital, he found his bill had mysteriously been paid.

  No policemen were wounded by gunfire, although thirty-nine members of the RCMP were so badly injured they were sent to hospital. There is no evidence that the trekkers had firearms. Twelve of these, however, plus five Regina citizens, were hospitalized with gunshot wounds that night. All but one had been shot during the mêlée at Eleventh and Scarth at 10:10 p.m. Joseph Rothecker was one. He had come out of the King’s Hotel beer parlour on Eleventh to buy a paper when a bullet struck him in the neck. His wife, Mary, would never forget the scene in the hospital when she was called to his bedside. She knew the building well because her husband worked there as an orderly. Now, she said, “I never saw the corridors so full of blood.” The place was filled with the wounded, some, like her husband, seriously hurt, others only slightly (half were discharged the next day). Rothecker suffered partial paralysis from his wound and was unable to go back to work for a year. When he tried to take legal action against the police, his lawyer told him that no one could sue the Crown.