Author Tags: Biography Fiction Gold


Articles: 2 Articles for this author

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Born in 1813, American ne'er-do-well Ned McGowan was a bon vivant with a fearful temper and one of the most notorious characters in pre-colonial B.C. history. "He was supposed to be a murderer, a pimp who ran a brothel in a San Francisco hospital,"; writes Donald Hauka in Ned McGowan's War (New Star $24), "the inventor of the false-bottomed ballot box, a shoulder-striking bully-boy, corrupt politician and magistrate, a disgraced police superintendent who masterminded a bank robbery, and an all-round cad.";
But according to Hauka, McGowan has been given a bum rap by history. Yes, McGowan was involved in a knife fight in the Pennsylvania legislature. Yes, he did run a roulette wheel on the second floor of a whorehouse before he became a San Francisco County judge. And yes, in the mid-1850s, he did have to disguise himself as a Mexican in order to escape from the Vigilante Committee, using a corset to push in his substantial stomach.
But in those days California's first legislature was known as 'The Legislature of a Thousand Drinks.' When the little-remembered American Party, known as the 'Know-Nothings,' rose to power in California, McGowan lost his patronage appointments and tried to salvage his reputation with a book called The Narrative of Edward McGowan, Including a Full Account of the Author's Adventures and Perils While Persecuted by the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856.
Hauka makes a good case that McGowan was mostly the victim of a vicious and fraudulent era requiring extreme combativeness. A skilled and witty writer, McGowan published 25 issues of his scandal sheet, the Phoenix, followed by 18 editions of its follow-up, the Ubiquitous, in 1857 and 1858, but he fled Sacramento and, after a failed murder attempt on his life outside a San Francisco courtroom, he made haste for the Fraser River gold rush.
McGowan unfortunately first arrived in Victoria in the company of some American mercenaries who had helped William Walker to assume the presidency in civil-war-torn Nicaragua. To celebrate their arrival on July the 4th, they fired a 100-gun salute, thereby earning the enmity of Governor James Douglas. It also didn't help that McGowan's bad press had preceded him.
When the influx of unruly Americans threatened the autocratic regime of Douglas, McGowan was eventually brought before pro-British judge Matthew Baillie Begbie in a log-cabin courtroom in Yale in 1859. Hauka provides an account of the battle of wits between Begbie and McGowan. In dramatic terms, Begbie lost the battle but won the war.
Ultimately the 30,000 American insurgents along the Fraser River failed to annex the British Columbia mainland to the United States and McGowan fled the Fraser Canyon gold rush for good in 1859, thereby missing the 1862 smallpox epidemic that claimed the lives of approximately one-third of the indigenous First Nations population. Back in the American mid-west, McGowan tried to resurrect his reputation, successfully suing the Californian historian Hubert H. Bancroft, but not gaining a penny. He dabbled in journalism but never advanced in society, having backed the losing side during the American Civil War. After McGowan died a poor man in San Francisco at age 84, on December 8, 1892, only two friends attended his funeral cortege. At a time when full-fledged biographies from B.C. are few and far-between, screenwriter Donald J. Hauka has produced a lively account. Well researched, it's the stuff of a prolonged historical mini-series, with sub-plots and bizarre characters aplenty. 1-55420-001-6

[BCBW Summer 2004]

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Margin of Terror: A Reporter's Twenty-Year Odyssey Covering the Tragedy of the Air India Bombing, chronicles Salim Jiwa's and Donald J. Hauka's relentless pursuit of Canada's worst terrorist tragedy. This insider's account of the origins of Sikh militancy and the conspiracy that resulted in the twin bombings is compulsively readable. Jiwa, the only reporter on a first-name basis with the terrorists, the police and the victims' families, sheds new light on a dark chapter in Canadian history.

Three hundred and twenty-nine innocent people were killed when a bomb exploded on Air India Flight 182 more than twenty years ago. On the same day, another bomb exploded at Tokyo's airport, killing two baggage handlers. The victims' families, friends and loved ones were promised justice. After the longest and costliest criminal investigation and trial in Canadian history, they are still waiting.

In a riveting "insider's"; account, investigative reporter Jiwa - the first and only reporter on the Air India story continuously from the very beginning - explores the complex underworld of the accused terrorists from their obscure beginnings in Vancouver all the way through the criminal investigations to the trial that ended in a verdict that shocked the country: not guilty.

Jiwa explains in riveting eyewitness detail how the plot originated and unfolded, and who was responsible for both masterminding and carrying out the bombings. Some of the new evidence uncovered includes:

- Air India probe suffered when bug failed: a faulty listening device in the back of a police car failed to record a potentially damning conversation between Inderjit Singh Reyat and Talwinder Singh Parmar, which resulted in the RCMP not being able to press conspiracy charges.

- U.S. law enforcement office owned two guns found in hands of B.C. terrorists: gun found at the home of bomber Reyat and another used to shoot newspaper editor Tara Singh Hayer tracked to a weapons collection owned by California-based Sikh deputy sheriff.

- False assumptions blinded Canada's spy agency to unfolding Air India plot: Sikh extremists were not even at the top of CSIS priority list of terrorists to watch even as Sikh militancy in Canada rocketed into a major problem.

Balanced and fair-minded, Margin of Terror never fails to indict what were inexcusable missteps and mistakes on the part of law enforcement and the prosecution. It is a compulsively readable portrait of the innocent victims and of the heartbroken families and friends for whom dreams of justice and closure remain bitterly unfulfilled.

Salim Jiwa is an award-winning senior investigative journalist with The Province newspaper in Vancouver. The first reporter to introduce the world to Talwinder Singh Parmar - the primary suspect in the Air India Case - Jiwa is an authority on terrorism, appears regularly on television and radio and is a regular consultant on terrorism issues for ABC News in New York. Please visit his Web site: www.flight182.com.

Donald J. Hauka is a journalist, screenwriter and playwright. For twenty years he has been a political reporter and colleague of Jiwa in Vancouver.