On 1 March, 2006, the Washington State legislature passed a resolution that sought to make amends for a flagrant injustice that occurred in British Columbia 122 years ago. The resolution was formal acknowledgement that a Canadian Aboriginal was the victim of the only recorded vigilante hanging in BC history, and that the state government was complicit in covering up the crime. It is a dramatic story, featuring a frontier lynch mob, the murder of an innocent young Sto:lo boy, undercover police agents, and the threat of a cross-border war.
Still from the movie The Lynching of Louie Sam |
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Near the end of February, 1884, Louie Sam, a 14-year-old member of the Sto:lo Nation in the Fraser Valley, received a job offer to repair a telegraph line just across the border at Nooksack, south of Abbotsford. When Louie arrived at the site, the man who had hired him, a telegraph operator named Osterman, apparently told him there was no work and to go back home, which Louie did. It is believed that Osterman then shot and killed a local shopkeeper, James Bell, and burned his store.
When local residents heard that Louie had been seen on the road heading back to Canada, they quickly decided he was guilty of the crime. A mob of about 100 men took the law into their own hands. Dressing themselves in makeshift disguises of women's clothing and painting their faces, the men rode north to the border. Meanwhile, BC law enforcement officials, alerted to the murder, had taken Louie into custody and planned to transport him to New Westminister. But the vigilantes got to him first. They kidnapped the young Sto:lo from the farm where he was staying and, just short of the border, they put a rope around his neck and hung him from a tree.
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The Sto:lo people were enraged. They gathered from villages up and down the Valley to decide what to do. Sto:lo leaders had learned from their own sources that William Osterman was responsible for the murder and had made it look like Louie Sam was guilty. Some argued that they should take revenge on the Americans, and it seemed possible that a cross-border war might break out over the incident. But cooler heads prevailed. At length, the Sto:lo agreed to allow Canadian government authorities time to investigate.
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Both the provincial and federal governments asked officials in the Washington Territory (it did not become a state for five more years) to take action against members of the lynch mob, but nothing happened. Meanwhile, the BC Provincial Police sent two undercover officers south of the border to the Nooksack area to investigate. They quickly identified at least some of the gang--it wasn't hard, the men boasted about it-and found evidence that incriminated Osterman and another man in the murder. Yet without the cooperation of American officials, the BC government would not act, and the matter was dropped. The Sto:lo felt betrayed, but took no further action.
And there the matter rested until historians began looking into the incident. In 1996, Keith Thor Carlson, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, published an article in BC Studies that revealed the details of the case. Carlson and Sto:lo historian Sonny McHalsie provided research for a documentary film called The Lynching of Louie Sam which appeared in 2005 and argued that Sam, and the Sto:lo, were the victims of a great injustice. When BC Lieutenant Governor Iona Campagnolo learned of the case, she asked her Washington State counterpart, Lt.-Gov. Brad Owen, to press for some kind of redress. The result was the resolution passed by the Washington State legislature in March.
To find out more about the Louie Sam case, see Keith Thor Carlson's article, "The Lynching of Louie Sam", in BC Studies, no. 109 (Spring, 1996), pp. 63-79. For more on the Sto:lo, see the entry in the Encyclopedia of British Columbia.