And while Arthur was testifying in court on Eleanor’s behalf, others were testifying about her. Andrew Porter, for one, denied during a heated exchange with George Amer’s lawyer that he had told random neighbours and possibly even Charlie Bryan that Amer had been “too familiar” with Eleanor and if he had been in Charlie’s place, Porter would have shot Amer. Charles Boyd further testified that on the morning following the murders, Eleanor had shown him bruises she claimed were the result of a beating by her husband and Charlie. Both men were trying to paint a picture of George Amer, Porter with the intent of seeing him hang and Boyd with the intent of seeing him set free. Neither man offered proof to back his claims and both seemed not to care what impact their testimony would have on Eleanor in an era where reputation was everything.
Soon after the murders, Eleanor Bryan would leave the family homestead, never to return, which, considering the depths to which her neighbours were willing to sink, was probably a good thing. Widowed, penniless, and with limited options for earning her way in a world where women had few rights and even fewer opportunities, she would spend the rest of her life as a ward of her children. She and Arthur initially settled with her eldest daughter, Harriet (Hattie) Skippen, and her brood in Green Bay before resettling with her eldest son, William Bryan, Jr., and his young family on a farm in Sandfield just a few years later. Not long after that, Eleanor was living with her youngest daughter, Annie Skippen, Annie’s husband Frank, and their two young daughters in Bidwell. And just a few years later, Eleanor would once again be living with Hattie. And so it went.
There are two photos of Eleanor taken later in life. Both show a stern woman with severely constrained hair and unusually large arthritic hands. In each photo Eleanor is wearing an unfashionable black Victorian dress and a facial expression that would alarm a felon. This isn’t terribly surprising for a woman who was no stranger to strong opinions. Her great-granddaughter once recalled hearing Eleanor, who by that time was a very old woman, bluntly stating how she used to do things when she was living in her home, which was evidently far superior to how they were being done in whichever household she was living at the time.
Eleanor Bryan would never leave the island that had brought her so much sorrow and is buried in the Green Bay Cemetery.
Arthur Bryan would hop from family farm to family farm alongside his mother in his youth before eventually farming his own land in Spring Bay. In 1908, he and his wife moved to Gore Bay, where he became the proprietor of the Queen’s Hotel, which he continued to operate until his death in 1938 at the age of sixty-nine.
The Bryan homestead would never again be home to any member of the Bryan family. In the years following the murders, it would be leased to a series of tenant farmers until 1896 when it was finally sold.
Dr. William Stoten Francis was living with his brother’s family in Owen Sound in 1872 when he was commissioned by the government to attend to the medical needs of the indigenous community at Manitowaning. Dr. Francis was the only medical doctor on Manitoulin Island for several years. As such, he attended to the island’s European settlers and tales abound of him assisting victims of gunshots, mill accidents, heart attacks, and infectious disease outbreaks. He would continue to work as a physician in Manitowaning until 1891 when he and his wife, Annie, moved to Gore Bay, where he took up a position as town clerk, an office he would hold until his death in 1901 at the age of sixty-seven.
Scottish-born Charles Boyd was a respected member of Manitoulin’s early settler community, having moved to Tehkummah from Bentick, Ontario in 1873. Boyd soon purchased a second lot not far from the first and there are numerous suggestions he may have been involved in illegal lumbering. True or not, Charles Boyd helped found one of Manitoulin’s first schools in 1876 and served as its trustee for many years afterwards. During his decades on the island, he oversaw road construction projects, served as Tehkummah town councillor and, in the months leading up to the murders, was appointed Justice of the Peace, a position he would hold for the rest of his life.
Boyd was also a staunch ally and supporter of George Amer, and court testimony implies he may have been a benefactor of Amer’s shady business dealings. It’s hard to determine, more than a century later, whether there is any truth to these innuendoes, but from the time George Amer was arrested, Boyd did everything in his power to get his neighbour released. He signed every petition that came his way. He wrote letters to officials. He was relentless. In sworn statements, Boyd would assert that on the day following the murders, Arthur Bryan claimed not to have witnessed them, despite later giving some of the most damning testimony against George Amer. Boyd would further testify he’d overheard prosecution witnesses conspiring to fabricate testimony against George Amer with the intent of seeing him hanged.
It’s possible that all of Boyd’s claims are true. He was, after all, a Justice of the Peace and it’s reasonable he would’ve felt it his duty to set the record straight if others were hell-bent on setting it crooked. We’ll likely never know. Boyd died of the flu in 1898 at the age of sixty-seven. At the time of his death, he stood accused – not for the first time, but most certainly for the last – of illegal lumbering.
Andrew Porter came to Tehkummah from Greenock, Ontario in 1872 and there is plenty of evidence he and George Amer hated each other. Several of their disputes would catch the attention of the law. Porter variously tried to have Amer charged with placing a gate across the government road, illegal logging, and maliciously setting fires that damaged Porter’s property. Not surprisingly, he testified against George Amer at the murder trial, claiming to have witnessed key parts of the fight. And yet there remains some question whether he could have seen and heard all that he claimed from the distance of his homestead. There is little question, however, that he coached the testimony of his young son. Some of things the boy claimed to have witnessed, which conveniently corroborated his father’s testimony, seem unlikely unless the boy possessed supernatural powers.
Regardless, Porter, his wife, and their nine children appear to have prospered on the island and, as each of his sons came of age, Porter parcelled off portions of his land to them. Everything appeared to be on track for the family to establish a dynasty on Manitoulin Island, and yet by 1892, no Porters resided in Tehkummah and all of the lots that had once been in the family name were now owned by others. Some, if not all, of the Porter family appears to have relocated to Hannah, North Dakota, in search, no doubt, of greener pastures.
Sam Sloan arrived in Tehkummah in 1873 as a first-time land owner, having previously worked as a farm labourer in Manvers, Ontario. He would struggle to earn a living on Manitoulin Island while he and his wife, Mary Ann, raised their nine children. He made ends meet by taking in lodgers, including George Amer during his early days on the island. In 1888, Sloan’s debts finally caught up with him and he was forced to sell off one of the two lots he had purchased fifteen years earlier. The second lot was put up for auction that same year and although Sloan succeeded in retaining ownership, he would ultimately end up forfeiting his land. Sloan died in 1920 at the age of seventy-five and is buried in Hilly Grove Cemetery.
Born in Mono Township, Ontario, Ellen Sim was brought to Manitoulin Island by her stepfather, Robert Sim, as early as 1868, making her one of the first permanent European settlers on Manitoulin Island. She spent her early years living with her mother, stepfather, four brothers, and a sister in Michael’s Bay, where Robert Sim made his living labouring in the local mill and working in the notorious lumbering camps. He spent his free time ferrying new settlers from the mainland to Manitoulin Island. His stepdaughter entered the Amers’ service as early as 1873 and was living and working in their home at the time of the murders. In her deposition, she claims not to have witnessed the murders, but her testimony appears to have been heavily coached, possibly even coerced. She disappears from the public record soon after the murders. Like so many women of her era and class, her life went largely unrecorded.
I’d like to thank the Access Copyright Foundation for providing research funding for this book through the Marion Hebb Research Grant. Without that funding, this story would have been short many key details.
Several books were instrumental in helping me to understand what life on Manitoulin Island would have been like for these early European settlers. By far the most valuable were two self-published titles by Derek Russell: Tehkummah: A History (2011) and Michael’s Bay: The Rise and Fall of Manitoulin’s Forgotten Town (2016). Both books are included in the historical records at the Little Schoolhouse Museum in South Baymouth.
Also valuable were W.R. Wightman’s Forever on the Fringe: Six Studies in the Development of Manitoulin Island (University of Toronto Press, 1982), Paula Mallea’s From Homestead to Community: A Women’s History of Western Manitoulin (Scrivener Press, 2013), and Shelley J. Pearen’s Exploring Manitoulin (University of Toronto Press, 2001).
Records relating to the murder trial of George and Laban Amer were located at the Archives of Ontario. They contain witness testimonies that helped me to understand who these people were and the extent to which they were willing to lie in order to secure (or prevent) the convictions of George Amer and his son. As a result, we will never really know what happened on that fateful night in June 1877.
Records relating to the appeal of the murder convictions, including signed petitions, letters of support for George and Laban Amer (and a few of acrimonious dissent) and other materials associated with Anne Amer’s dogged and ultimately successful efforts to get the convictions of her husband and son overturned are located at Library & Archives Canada. Also found there were records relating to the births, marriages, and deaths of many of these settlers as well as the nineteenth-century land sale records of the Manitowaning Agency, which give excellent insight into when these settlers arrived in Tehkummah, when they left (if they left), and what their financial and legal realities may have been.
I’d like to thank the staff of the Centennial Museum of Sheguiandah for allowing me and my assistant to spend half a day in their back room, sifting through binders full of family histories, local censuses, cemetery records, and many other documents compiled by the Manitoulin Genealogical Society. I’d also like to thank the staff of the Little Schoolhouse Museum in South Baymouth for being generous with their time and memories and for granting me access to records compiled by the Michael’s Bay Historical Society.
Important insights into George Amer’s character came courtesy of an 1861 Globe & Mail article I found at the Toronto Reference Library. Entitled “The Proton Murder,” this article gives salacious details about the lengths to which George Amer, then a constable with the Owen Sound police, was willing to go in arresting a murder suspect. Violent, ruthless, and scurrilous, his behaviour on that occasion was never far from my mind when contemplating what really happened on the night William and Charles Bryan were killed.
Owen Sound: The Port City by Paul White (Natural Heritage Books, 2000), details what life would have been like in Owen Sound during the decades that George Amer resided there and includes an anecdote about rampant counterfeiting that had been going on for more than twenty years. The rumoured involvement of city leaders and the inevitable crackdown by Ontario’s Attorney General came around the time George Amer abruptly relocated to Manitoulin Island. What, if anything, Amer had to do with any of this is unclear. But he served as a constable in Owen Sound during the counterfeiting years and was elected to the town’s council just months before his abrupt relocation to Manitoulin Island. It’s likely he would have been aware of the crimes, the corruption, and the crackdown even if he was not an active participant. But chances are he was involved, and his sudden departure for Manitoulin Island was likely an attempt to avoid the consequences of his crimes.
Most importantly, I’d like to thank my family for bringing me this story. William and Eleanor Bryan were my great-great-great grandparents, a fact I would not have known if my grandmother’s cousin, George Skippen, hadn’t had a lifelong fascination with these murders. He is the sole source for many of the more interesting details of this story. It was George who first shared this story with my grandmother, who then shared it with my mother, who shared it with me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vanessa Farnsworth’s literary fiction has been published in journals across Canada and in the United States, including The Dalhousie Review, dANDelion, The New Quarterly, PRECIPICe, Qwerty, and Reed Magazine, and she has published more than 100 columns and articles in national and regional publications, including Canadian Gardening, Canadian Living, Cottage, Garden Making, The Creston Valley Advance, The Grower, Harrowsmith Country Life, Kootenay Life East, Route 3, and Vitality Magazine. She holds a degree in English from Toronto’s York University, a diploma in print journalism from Oakville’s Sheridan College, and she studied creative writing at The Humber School for Writers. She lives in Creston, BC.
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