Gangs of criminals in rural and isolated areas were a feature of life in old Upper Canada in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
In the local records, there accounts of several such gangs terrorizing settlers in Garafraxa and adjoining townships in the 1840s and 1850s. In the absence of anything resembling an adequate police force, such gangs seldom faced an accounting in front of a judge and jury.
One of the most infamous of such criminal gangs in this province was known as the Brook’s Bush Gang. It was a loose assortment of vile characters and hangers-on who holed up in a rough 20-acre plot of uncleared bush along the Don River, near the city of Toronto. They preyed on city people and businesses with petty thefts and robberies. The members were especially fond of attacks on isolated travellers on the roads through the Don Valley during the 1850s.
The gang included men and women, and it appears that most of the members mixed their criminal activity with legitimate employment and other activity. Interestingly, at least three of the members were women, and they were alleged to be part-time Toronto prostitutes.
Only a couple of the members the gang, which probably numbered a dozen or so at any given time, ever faced apprehension and prosecution. One of them, James Brown, was the last man to suffer a public hanging in Toronto. That was on March 10, 1862. His crime was the alleged murder of the MPP for Grey County, an Irishman named John Sheridan Hogan.
On Dec. 1, 1859, MPP Hogan, probably the worse for liquor, received a blow on the head while crossing the Don River. Members of the gang rifled his body, the pushed it off the bridge and into the ice-filled river. Fisherman discovered what was left of the body in March 1861.
Hogan’s disappearance and death aroused the public into outrage and the authorities into action. The result was the execution of Brown after conviction on the flimsiest of evidence. His fate sent a shock through the Brook’s Bush Gang, and they effectively disbanded.
One of the members, a woman who used the name Jane Lewis, left the Toronto area in the mid 1860s and took up residence in Guelph. There she lived quietly, saying little about her origins. No one was quite sure of the source of her income, but her expenses were low. She lived in rented rooms of the lowest sort. Her two self-indulgences were tobacco and cheap whiskey.
She was rarely seen in public without a pipe in her lips, and trailing a haze of smoke from the cheapest and strongest tobacco she could find.
She was known by sight by everyone in Guelph. No one wanted to get on the wrong side of her: her eyes looked at the world with a frightful stare, and despite her short stature, she gave the appearance of possessing the strength of a husky man. That was confirmed when she occasionally helped merchants move heavy barrels and crates.
Several times during her years in Guelph she let her guard down, always when she had been drinking. Jane would recall her time as a member of the Brook’s Bush Gang. She even admitted to a role in the demise of MPP John Hogan, claiming that she had accosted the man as he started to cross the bridge, and warned him about slippery spots and icy patches on the road and bridge. When his guard was down she hit him on the head by swinging a stocking with a stone inside it.
Jane’s health began to decline in the mid-1870s, and by then anything she had salted away from her years of crime was long gone. She attempted to support herself by panhandling and begging for alms in downtown Guelph. A couple of times, when she had too much to drink, she got into scraps. Men who were her victims never wanted to tangle with her again.
By 1878, the authorities in Guelph committed her to the newly-opened Wellington County House of Industry. Her health was failing, and she had no obvious sign of financial support and no relatives in the area who might care for her.
At the home, today the Wellington County Museum and Archives, she soon “adopted” a young orphaned child. Visitors were astonished to see Jane, whose facial features had become ever coarser and even ferocious with the passing years, contentedly smoking her pipe while feeding the child with a bottle. She was reluctant to let anyone, even the matron of the institution, Mrs. Parker, near the child.
Her kindness toward the infant was in stark contrast to her appearance and her background as one of Canada’s most notorious criminals.
Jane Lewis remained at the Wellington County house of Industry for the rest of her life. She died there on Nov. 22, 1904. Some newspaper accounts gave her age as near 100. She certainly looked it, with her hardened features and facial hair. She had never been forthcoming about her age and family background, and had given various ages at different times in her life. It is more probable that she was in her early 80s when she died.
Though she talked about her past only reluctantly, and then only when the worse for whiskey, over time those around her assembled something of a biography of her, though there were obvious gaps. Occasionally she betrayed signs of having at one time mixed in much higher social circles than the criminal gang she was with for more than a decade.
As the years went on Jane Lewis (if that was in fact her real name) had become more social and talkative, enjoying chats with visitors to the home, especially when they could offer her a little tobacco. But she still remained largely tight-lipped on her personal details.
Newspapers in Wellington County, as well as the Toronto dailies, carried short accounts of her passing. Many had garbled accounts of the Brook’s Bush Gang and its activities a half century before.
The newspaper accounts generally agreed that she was the last surviving member of the Brook’s Bush Gang. Had she been inclined to write them, her memoirs would certainly make interesting reading, revealing a side of our history that seldom makes the pages of history books.
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Author at museum June 2
Fergus author Pat Mestern will be the guest speaker at the annual meeting of the Wellington County Historical Society. Her subject, Fergus at 175, will highlight the history of the town that is passing its century-and-three-quarter mark this year.
In addition to a series of historical novels, she was author and editor of the two-volume Looking Back, published in 1983 in connection with the sesquicentennial of Fergus.
It begins at 7pm on June 2 with refreshments and the first distribution of the 2008 issue of Wellington County History, the society’s journal. The evening’s featured talk and the business session will follow. Admission to the event, at the Wellington County Museum and Archives, is free.