Neil Waugh Outdoors: The Union Jack Bandits

By NEIL WAUGH

On the afternoon of Aug 23, 1886 — at precisely 12:45 p.m. — the Calgary-to-Edmonton stagecoach was pulling out of the coulee named for a frontier rounder called Addy McPherson in the vicinity of Dickson’s Stopping House when disaster struck.

“The stage from Edmonton,” North West Mounted Police Superintendent William Denny Antrobus wrote in his report to Parliament, “had been robbed.”

It had already been a busy summer for the commander of E Division.

He’d had to organize a spit-and-polish camp for Prime Minister John A Macdonald’s historic visit to Calgary four weeks earlier.

Then a report came in that two brothers called de Rainbouville had been stuck up by “masked men” on the Elbow River.

The “stage,” it should be noted, wasn’t a fancy Concord with the passenger cabin suspended on shock-absorbing leather straps.

But a converted freight wagon with the words “Royal Mail” stenciled on the side.

It was the mail the desperadoes were apparently after.

But after they cut open the postal bags and found nothing they relieved the passengers of their valuables. About $400 all told.

“The robbers were both masked,” Antrobus reported. “One being described as having part of a Union Jack over his face.”

Boots and saddles was sounded at Fort Calgary and at 6:15 p.m., the superintendent rode out with a patrol of 17 troopers making for the crime scene.

They picked up the trail in the long coulee grass but once the gang hit the prairie hard-pan, it faded fast.

Antrobus did find the Union Jack mask buried under a rock.

So he split up his force, sending one squadron east of the trail, rode the C and E back to Calgary himself and dispatched Sergeant-major John Richards and seven troopers to ride west to the Dogpound then swing south until they hit the CPR’s historic Twin Bridges over the Bow.

Nothing.

Two days later a gold boomer called Scott “Clinker” Krenger was found shot dead in his Shaganappi Point cabin.

The Mountie put two and two together and came up with three.

“I do not think there can be any doubt,” Antrobus informed the commissioner in Regina, “as to the parties who stopped the Edmonton stage, robbed the de Rainbouville brothers and murdered Scott Krenger being the same.”

Although with Clinker it may not be that simple.

Along with the old Fort Whoop-up whiskey trader Joe Healy, he was reportedly involved in the great Silver City Swindle where they salted the mine up the Bow at Castle Mountain with high-grade Montana ore. Then ran up the share prices.

I suspect there were folks in the Bow Valley back then lining up to put a bullet in Krenger’s belly.

Running west of Didsbury, the Devil’s Head stood out from the Front Range like a sore thumb.

But Dogpound Creek was fat and mellow.

It’s one of a handful of little rivers that dance out of the foothills then swing north through the west central Alberta ranchlands to the Red Deer River that constitute the Brown Trout Kingdom.

Brown trout being brown trout, they can sometimes be cantankerous.

There were no bugs on the water, which can be expected in late summer, so I knotted a large black Foam Beetle on my 5-weight fly rod on the theory that the brownies may be up for an opportunistic terrestrial.

Then worked upstream casting to the glides, undercuts, poolheads and anywhere else trout likely lurk.

Even with my polarized Oakleys, the dazzle from the low-slung sun was impenetrable.

So when I saw a fish rise I lifted the rod tip to cast to it, only to realize too late it had eaten my beetle.

A couple of hearty head shakes and the trout was gone.

“Although the most diligent search was made throughout this district,” Superintendent Antrobus’s report concluded, “the criminals have not yet been brought to justice.”

The same can be said whether it be Dogpound Creek brown trout or Union Jack Bandits.