Geoff Mynett's debut book, Service on the Skeena: Horace Wrinch, Frontier Physician (Ronsdale 2020) is about the man who built the first hospital in northern British Columbia and started what was likely one of the first forms of health insurance in the province when in 1907, for a dollar a month, a member could obtain a ticket entitling them to medical and hospital services.

His second book, Pinkerton's and the Hunt for Simon Gunanoot (Caitlin $24.95) is a true crime tale of alleged murderer Simon Gunanoot, evading and outwitting the famous Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. The book throws new light on the extensive manhunt for Gitxsan trapper and storekeeper Gunanoot in northern British Columbia in the early 1900s. After a double murder in 1906, Gunanoot fled into the wilderness with his family. Despite lack of proof, the police pursued Gunanoot for nearly three years, sending search parties and police operatives into the wilds of northern B.C. The hunt was covered by numerous newspapers at the time, describing a melodramatic cat-and-mouse chase -- a not-entirely-accurate account. Frustrated by Gunanoot's ability to evade capture, the Attorney General of B.C. asked Pinkerton's National Detective Agency in Seattle to assist in the pursuit.

After a career in law, Geoff Mynett turned to writing. Research for Service on the Skeena took him to archives and libraries in Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Hazelton, and Smithers. Mynett lives in Vancouver.

Pinkerton’s and the Hunt for Simon Gunanoot: Double Murder, Secret Agents and an Elusive Outlaw by Geoff Mynett (Caitlin $24.95)

It took Geoff Mynett three years to research and write the relatively unknown story of Dr. Horace Wrinch, Service on the Skeena: Horace Wrinch, Frontier Physician (Ronsdale, 2020).

Now Mynett, a former lawyer (whose wife, Alice, is Wrinch’s granddaughter) has set his sights on the remarkable life of another largely overlooked northern B.C. figure, Simon Gunanoot, the highly-respected Gitxsan man who became a notorious outlaw from 1906 to 1919, evading capture for thirteen years until he was finally acquitted of murder charges in 1920. Lawyer David Ricardo Williams’ Simon Peter Gunanoot: Trap-Line Outlaw (Sono Nis, 1982) has long served as the standard reference. Forty years later Geoff Mynett has produced an alternative study, Pinkerton’s and the Hunt for Simon Gunanoot: Double Murder, Secret Agents and an Elusive Outlaw.

BC BookWorld: Why did the story of Simon Gunanoot need to be revisited.
Geoff Mynett: Finding a forgotten treasure in an archive is an historian’s dream and joy. I was in the B.C. Archives doing research for my book Service on the Skeena when I came across one such treasure. This was the collection of reports that two operatives of the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency sent to their head office in Seattle while searching for Simon Gunanoot in 1909 and 1910. David Ricardo Williams referred to these reports in Trapline Outlaw, and doubtless others have come across them. But these reports have, in my view, never received the attention they deserve.
Pinkerton’s and the Hunt for Simon Gunanoot is built around these reports. They provide a fascinating picture not only of the hunt for Gunanoot but also of life in Hazelton in 1909. They also give us a new picture of the divided loyalties and personalities in town.
In Trapline Outlaw, David Williams gave a broad picture of Gunanoot’s life and of the murders of which he was accused. Pinkerton’s and the Hunt for Simon Gunanoot describes the nitty gritty of their hunt and offers a fresh perspective on why Gunanoot was never caught.
In 1909, Hazelton was a small frontier town in northern British Columbia. It is a place of great natural beauty. There were no roads and there was no railway. To get around you walked, rode a horse or used canoes and, in winter, used snowshoes or dog-sleds. Sternwheelers did come up the Skeena River but not in the six months when ice and bad waters made it unnavigable. To the east were the lakes and mountains of the Upper Skeena. The region where Gunanoot took refuge was an area half the size of England. A great traveler, he went as far north as the Yukon border.
BC BookWorld: So, what happened? And why was Pinkerton’s, an American organization, involved?
Geoff Mynett: In June 1906, Simon Gunanoot, a popular Gitxsan trapper and store-keeper brawled with a local thug named Alex MacIntosh. They were in a bar in the hamlet of Two Mile, near Hazelton. Gunanoot left the bar at four in the morning, threatening to get a gun and fix MacIntosh. When MacIntosh was found shot dead on the trail the next morning, the sole policeman in town quickly decided that the murderer must be Gunanoot. While collecting his posse, he learned that the body of Max LeClair, a hunting guide new to the region, had also been found on the trail. He too had been shot dead. After a fraught week of evading the police, Gunanoot escaped with his family and brother-in-law, Peter Himadan, into the forests and lakes of the Upper Skeena.
Superintendent Hussey, head of the provincial police in Victoria, directed the many searches for Gunanoot. He sent his own men on the hunt, as well as special parties. He posted a reward to encourage bounty hunters. Some searchers were competent, but unlucky. Some were incompetent. Others were dishonest. When all failed, the police in Victoria hired two Pinkerton’s men to go to Hazelton, disguised as prospectors. Their job would be to locate Gunanoot and to bring him in.
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency at this time was considered one of the premier detective organization in Europe and North America. It achieved its reputation by being able to cut across jurisdictional boundaries, by being utterly discreet and secret, and by using modern methods of detective work. Pinkerton’s was one of the first agencies to keep files on known criminals and their modus operandi. It championed the use of mug-shots and fingerprints. In detective work, Pinkerton’s was the best. In the hunt for Simon Gunanoot, would they succeed when all the others had failed?
Before the First World War, the B.C. Provincial Police did not have a detective branch. On numerous occasions, including in one hunt for the train robber Bill Miner, they had turned to Pinkerton’s for assistance. Using Pinkerton’s to catch Gunanoot was rather an odd decision, because what the police needed in this case were expert trackers and outdoorsmen, not detectives. Why Pinkerton’s men were chosen for the hunt in B.C.’s north is one of many unanswered questions in this saga. Is the answer that the police in Victoria did not entirely trust the locals in Hazelton? And if so, was this suspicion justified?
For almost a year, two Pinkerton’s men searched the Upper Skeena, returning to Hazelton to recuperate and gather more information. Always trying to maintain their disguises as prospectors and trying not to be too interested in Gunanoot, they spoke with everyone they met and reported on their travails, the rumours and the gossip. They spent a difficult winter in the snows of the Upper Skeena. As we now know, they failed.
In 1919, after thirteen years as an outlaw, Gunanoot gave himself up to the police in Hazelton. He said he did this because he wanted his children, who had been with him, to have an education. Taken to Vancouver, Gunanoot found he was a celebrity, a “Robin Hood of the North.” He became the source of many a myth, a heroic figure. He was also tried for murder.
What would a Vancouver jury decide? We now know the answer. The big question is, was the jury right?  In this book I tell the story and ask the reader, what do you think? 9781773860503

BCBW 2021-22

***

River of Mists: People of the Upper Skeena, 1821–1930 by Geoff Mynett (Caitlin Press $26)

Review by Mike Selby (BCBW 2023)

Once, long ago but all too recent for some, Simon McGillivray stood at the crossroads of not only two rivers, but two worlds. In what would become Hazelton, BC, McGillivray—an employee of the Hudson Bay Company—was the first white person to have reached the forks of the Babine and Simpson’s Rivers. As Geoff Mynett notes in River of Mists: People of the Upper Skeena, 1821–1930, the “largely undisturbed way of life” of the Indigenous population “would change forever.”
This is Mynett’s third book on the Skeena; one is tempted to call it a trilogy, but he probably has more stories to tell. In River of Mists, which is the term the Gitxsan called the Skeena, the author has collected a series of bizarre, tragic, humorous and all-too-human profiles of people pulling against themselves as much as they pull against this most hostile of environments. While each chapter is a stand-alone story (perfect for dipping into now and again), the author has primarily arranged them chronologically, providing the reader a much more satisfying experience when read as a whole. Yet Mynett’s work has a definite arc to it, and certain characters overlap between pages, resisting the author’s structure and refusing to be bound by a timeline.

As with his previous works, the author’s description of BC’s wilderness of the past remains impressive: “On the riverbank behind him grew a profusion of hazel bushes and flowering paintbrush. White fluff-like balls shed by the cottonwood trees floated in the air and fell to the ground like loose snow. Swarms of mosquitoes, emerging after the recent downpour, were buzzing around their ears. An eagle swept smoothly from a branch of a tree and, talons down and trailing behind, swooped across the water to snatch a fish.”

Whether or not the author is consciously aware of it, the more people who pour into Hazelton, the less the surrounding wilderness is described. One can feel it being squeezed out with each succeeding chapter. But, as with his previous works, Mynett is at his best unearthing the varied personalities which occupy his work.

The sheer breadth of time and place covered reveals the known and the unknown inhabitants of BC’s history. Edgar Dewdney—our province’s most prolific trailblazer—affixes a flyer early on officially demarking the lots and layout of Hazelton. That he does so without any directives, permission, or even knowledge of the government pretty much says it all about the man, this place and Victoria. At the same time, gold prospector Jack Gillis is putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger after receiving a “Dear John” letter from his sweetheart back in PEI. That his grave has been kept in pristine condition for decades afterwards is a genuine mystery, which Mynett may or may not have solved.

Alongside the historic photos and maps that are peppered throughout are excerpts from the Hazelton Queek, a short-lived weekly newspaper, which, although completely handwritten, was printed on a gelatin press owned by an Anglican bishop. “The Skeena just above the town was frozen across last Wednesday night …” and “Mr. Owen, while skating the other day, broke through the ice and had a narrow escape from drowning” are indicative of the dispatches to be found in the Queek. (UBC librarians refer to it as “one of the most unusual British Columbia newspapers digitized” by them.) At least this bishop (William Ridley) appeared well-liked; not so in the case of Father Adrien-Gabriel Morice—a Catholic priest whose arrogance and sense of entitlement had fellow priests beat the tar out of him.

A chief constable arrives along with the new century, bringing with him a handful of policemen and a stellar arrest record. His diary entries have him “getting drunks out of the streets” and stopping the illegal sale of liquor to Indigenous people. These entries are a fantastic peek into the day-to-day struggles of Hazelton as well as what today would be called an abuse of 911.

In other stories, Americans, British and even Russians appear all interested in furs, gold and telecommunication. There is the mystery of the Swedish balloon; a complaint letter from a yesteryear “Karen” whose young son had been exposed to “filthy conditions,” “drunken men” and “bawdy women” while visiting Hazelton. She didn’t write it to the town’s chief constable, but to his manager in Victoria.

A not-yet-famous Emily Carr arrives to make paintings of totem poles, which most of the town’s settlers at the time found grotesque and disturbing. The First World War draws heavily on Hazelton, and four airplanes land—something unthought-of when Simon McGillivray first arrived in 1833.

“I have never yet seen the want and misery,” an American complained in 1871 about his visit through Hazelton. The miserable people he saw were “trying to drag out an existence in hopes that something might turn up.” While he meant gold, Mynett’s expertly researched and accessible stories illustrate something else entirely. 9781773860930

Mike Selby, deputy director of the Cranbrook Public Library and award-winning author, has published more than 900 book reviews.

The Eventful Life of Philip Hankin: Worldwide Traveller and Witness to British Columbia’s Early History
by Geoff Mynett (Caitlin Press $26)

Review by Tom Hawthorne (BCBW 2023)


After 15 years in the Royal Navy, which he joined as a lad of 13, Philip Hankin decided to leave his native England in 1864 to return to a bucolic land he had enjoyed during his service. The journey back to Vancouver Island took weeks.

He endured third-class passage to Panama aboard a West India packet steamer, arriving to discover he had just missed the steamer to San Francisco. Twelve days of tropical heat and insect misery passed. Conditions were little better when he finally steamed north. Steerage passengers ate while standing at a swinging table to which knives and forks had been chained to avoid thievery. Robbery and pickpocketing were constant threats aboard ship.

Hankin eventually arrived in Esquimalt, then made his way to nearby Victoria, which he had left several years earlier. Friends greeted him warmly, though he realized “there was a difference between being a lieutenant in the Navy and a working man trying to make a living.” He was determined not to become one of the city’s dissolute failures. “I would never be seen in a drinking saloon or be persuaded to play cards,” he wrote in his memoirs. Unable to find work, he took the last of his dwindling savings and made his way across the Strait of Georgia and up the Fraser River to Fort Yale. Out of options, he was going to seek a fortune by working the gold streams of the Cariboo.

At Yale, he could not afford the stagecoach, so he began walking. He carried two blankets, a haversack of bread, cheese, cooked meat and drinking water from the Fraser or springs along the way. At night, he slept on the roadside, his boots and coat serving as a pillow. When opportunity arose, he’d grab a meal of beans and biscuit with thick coffee at a roadhouse.

After 20 days tramping, he arrived in Barkerville with a half dollar in his pocket. He spent it on bread and butter, which he ate with coffee while sitting for hours beside a stove. There was still snow on the ground at that elevation in May and he would have to sleep outdoors, as he could afford no hotel bed.

Months later, he would return from his sojourn in the gold fields just as he had arrived—penniless. Yet, in a remarkably short time, through hard work, a charming personality and lucky timing, he rose in just five years to become the administrator of the entire colonial government of British Columbia.

His unlikely rise is told in entertaining and informative style in Geoff Mynett’s wonderful, understated and thoroughly enjoyable biography, The Eventful Life of Philip Hankin, which uses Hankin’s memoir as a building block.

Mynett, a retired English-born lawyer who has written several well-received BC biographies and histories to his credit, including Murders on the Skeena (Caitlin, 2021), has done the hard slog of filling in the details as best as possible in a remarkable life filled with surprising cameos.

Here is Hankin cooking curry for the Queen of Hawaii. Here is Hankin escorting Lady Jane Franklin, the world-famous widow of the Arctic explorer, up the Fraser River. Here is Hankin in India befriending the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, who presents him an autographed photograph.

And here is Hankin aboard the screw frigate HMS Sutlej to negotiate the surrender of the members of Ahousaht who were suspected of having killed the captain and three crew members of the trading sloop Kingfisher. The showdown ends in bloodshed and death.

Mynett has a lawyer’s attention to detail and a writer’s appreciation for the telling anecdote. When Hankin once told an admiral he was thinking of quitting to become a waiter in San Francisco, where real money was to be made, the senior officer thought him mad to resign a commission as a Royal Navy lieutenant for a task so menial as food service. To keep him in the navy, the admiral set off a series of favourable appointments where Hankin wound up as first lieutenant of the paddle steamer HMS Hecate, which was to be the primary surveying vessel for the Colony of Vancouver Island (at that time not joined with the Colony of BC).

The maritime aficionado will find much here to enjoy about 19th-Century ships and their operation, while those like me who are not immersed in the subject will not object to these informative digressions.

Today, Hankin Island rests in Barkeley Sound and Hankin Range runs between Nimpkish and Bonanza Lakes on northern Vancouver Island, but otherwise Hankin has been a forgotten figure. The names of many of his contemporaries grace streets in downtown Vancouver and Victoria.

From chasing slavers off the coast of Africa to hobnobbing with royalty, Hankin’s incredible, improbable, yes, eventful life is well captured in Mynett’s biography. 9781773861197

Tom Hawthorn is the author of The Year Canadians Lost Their Minds and Found Their Country (D&M, 2017) and Deadlines (Harbour, 2012). His anecdotal history of baseball in Vancouver will be published next year.

Books

Service on the Skeena: Horace Wrinch, Frontier Physician (Ronsdale 2020) $21.95 978-1-55380-575-5

Pinkerton's and the Hunt for Simon Gunanoot (Caitlin 2021) $24.95 978-1-77386-050-3

Murders on the Skeena: True Crime in the Old Canadian West, 1884-1914 (Caitlin, 2021) $24.95 9781773860671

River of Mists: People of the Upper Skeena, 1821–1930 by Geoff Mynett (Caitlin Press, 2022) $26 9781773860930

[BCBW 2023]