The Notorious Georges: Crime and Community in British Columbia’s Northern Interior, 1909-25

Review By John Douglas Belshaw

December 10, 2024

In the mid-1990s, visiting the very new University of Northern British Columbia, a taxi picks me up for the airport. I’m impressed by the Prince George campus. The cabby isn’t. But across the city, as we pass the even more new and massive Regional Correction Centre, the cabby effuses. Jobs, jobs, jobs. Visitors from all over the north will fill hotels, crowd restaurants, generally boost the economy. Jonathan Swainger notes that a century ago locals had similar visions when their town got big enough to attract a County court, then the Supreme Court assize.(128) The downside is that new jails, additional policing, and bigger juridical machinery means more: more crimes reported, charges laid, neighbours tried, and people incarcerated. It is a little like hanging the laundry out on a line for all to see and this, of course, contributed to PG’s reputation for too much liquor, violence, and sin.

The Georges of the title are a cluster of embryonic and bickersome settlements at the forks of the Nechako and Fraser Rivers: Fort George, Central Fort George, South Fort George, and the Pacific Great Eastern Railway’s own Fort George (established on the reserve from which the Lheidli T’enneh were disgracefully expelled). These villages eventually glommed together like drops of mercury, but not before there was an ill-tempered war of words involving Fort George 1.0 and South FG. In one page we learn why: the city’s founders were fractious, skeptical, uncertain, fickle, manipulative, anxious, and mulish.(22) By 1914, their poison pens convinced other British Columbians and Canadians that “there was ‘something’ about the Georges.”(168)

The Notorious Georges plumbs the city’s early existential crises of respectability. Rival newspapermen pitch the virtues of their respective villages to attract settlement and maybe a railway; they sling accusations of immorality and duplicity like punches thrown in a drunken brawl. Rather than establish one police force, PG is awash with cops from the BC Provincial Police, the Mounties, and a problematic city force; they do just enough work to keep crime front and centre (when not breaking laws themselves). A civic administration that gets too intimate with the running of the police force does not help and the establishment of dignified courts in deplorable buildings adds further drama and awareness of community shortcomings. All of this plays out in print media locally, provincially, and nationally. Swainger argues convincingly that the white settler population deflected blame for their own faults, failings, and crimes to outsiders, Asians, Blacks, Indigenous people, and ethnics (mostly Greeks and Eastern European immigrants). Doing so did not improve community stature.

This begs the question: did outsiders think of the Georges at all? Just as a single swallow is a poor harbinger of summer, a couple of bruising lines of press in Saturday Night magazine or a very localized spat between rival publishers/boosters does not necessarily prove the existence of a reputation of any kind. Swainger twice points out that “the whole of British Columbia was a boozy, truculent, and unapologetically racist place.”(15,65) PG just lived down to that standard. Why then think it was particularly vilified? Why not consider, too, that a record of inebriated melees among white supremacists might be appreciated, if not nurtured and applauded by the Georgians? To paraphrase the immortal bard – Joan Jett – perhaps they just don’t give a damn about a bad reputation. Swainger closes with a review of public conflicts since the 1930s, including violent labour disputes in the 1980s. Evidently citizens continued to fret that their town’s luster would be tarnished. “Culture,” Swainger writes, “comprises stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves,” a wise insight.(203) On the page opposite, however, newspapers in Vancouver are quoted as reassuring northerners that their plights were not unique. In other words, the reputation issue maybe only exists in the Prince Georgian mind. The call is coming from inside the house.

Swainger goes boldly out on a limb early on, perhaps with saw in hand. His goal is “an accessible and engaging book” that seeks an audience beyond the academy. He complains, rightly, about “jargon-laden language and performative writing” that “obliterates the human centre of legal and crime history”(9) and then launches into a four-page long literature survey. This is a project as ordered, detailed, and thoroughly researched as any, with some great narrative flourishes but also a sense that the author and publisher need to pick a lane and stay in it. Swainger alludes briefly to his solid work on juvenile delinquencies and ‘moral panics,’ which maybe is an example of that “jargon,” but it is also a very useful concept that could have been applied throughout. After all, much of what Swainger describes is a rolling moral panic about race, poverty, urban corruption, rural depravity, and personal morality.

Now, some bullet points on production. Abbreviations for more than seventy newspaper names are enumerated, most of which are never mentioned in the text. Meanwhile, PLP, RNWMP, BCPP, and NRSC appear throughout but are not listed. The footnotes are extensive and UBC Press did not scrimp on the index…bravo. I seldom judge a book by its cover, though some might. Swainger himself asks, “Should a sentence, paragraph, or anecdote be elaborated, trimmed, or eliminated entirely?” and the answer is always trimmed. Definitely trimmed. Finally, in Canada we put ‘u’ in labour.

In closing, the Georges tell an important story about British Columbian settler culture and racialized communities. It tells us more about how discourses regarding the law, respectability, crime, and punishment create perceptions of order and disorder, regardless of or despite the facts. Was PG worse than Quesnel, Coquitlam, or Kamloops? I am not convinced. That’s not to say the Georges were not special. Ask yourself, how many F’s in ‘Fort George’? The answer, of course is, there is only one effin Fort George.