Editor’s note: If you like local heritage, paddling or just a true life mystery, then this story about a tragedy on the Madawaska River 150 years ago is for you.
On April 26, 1867, which was a Friday, James Smith Bangs and his companion, a man only identified as “Oram,” loaded their canoe to travel the Madawaska River from Bangs’ trading store at Combermere to his home in Arnprior. About 15 miles downstream they came to the rushing spring water at the Snake Rapids, and their canoe upset. Oram swam to shore; Bangs sunk, never to rise again. He was 41 and left behind his wife and seven children, ranging in age from 1 to 18, one of whom is my great-grandmother. Above: Snake Rapids on the Madawaska River April 30, 2012 (photo courtesy Steve Manders, with permission)
Bangs was wearing a belt loaded with silver. As a result, there were immediate “suspicions of foul play” about the circumstances of his death and the survival of his travelling companion. Investigators sent to the area found nothing of Bangs or his precious belt.
The Madawaska River is 230 kilometres long, beginning in Algonquin Park and draining an area of 8,740 km2 until it joins the Ottawa River at Arnprior. Its sharp descent of 224 metres gave it a dangerous reputation; even today it is one of the best white-water rivers in Eastern Ontario. Bangs lived in Arnprior, the village on the Ottawa River about 40 miles from Ottawa.
Only two weeks before, Bangs wrote to his wife from his Combermere store complaining that he “cannot get down now until the river opens.” A newspaper article noted that it had been an unusually wet season and at least six men had “been consigned to a watery grave” by the Madawaska’s “swift and dangerous currents and rapids.”
Bangs was an independent fur trader during the mid-1800s, plying the Ottawa, Mississippi and Madawaska rivers. In 1867, he was also operating a trading store about 85 miles up the Madawaska where it narrowed at Combermere. His brother, Chauncey Ward Bangs, was an Ottawa alderman (and later mayor).
James S. Bangs’ nephew John Bangs had helped him in the fur business, which also involved trade in canoes and other items with the Indigenous peoples of the area. They supplied various furs from the upper Ottawa River area mostly to the shipping house of Freeman Dodd in New York City and buyer James Coates in London, England.
Conflicts with the Hudson’s Bay Company
Previously, Bangs had endured several difficulties. In the 1850s Bangs’ activities came to the attention of Hudson’s Bay Company Governor Sir George Simpson, who wanted him stopped.
During this period, the HBC claim in the Timiskaming district was being eroded by both the government and by independent traders, such as Bangs and his nephew John. One commentator noted:
In the autumn of 1857, however, James Bangs of Arnprior and his nephew, John Bangs of Pakenham, took two canoes to Lake Timiskaming to make a direct assault on the Fort’s trade and Sir George was forced to give in. Instructing Hector McKenzie [chief factor at Fort William] to assemble a large and well-equipped party at Lac des Allumettes to follow the interlopers, and to go himself to Fort Timiskaming to consult with John Simpson [chief factor at Fort Timiskaming] on measures to defend its trade, the Governor promised to send up a supply of cash, including the gold and silver coins which the Indians preferred. The Company men, he emphasized, must remain alongside their opponents all winter, watching their every move, keeping them from the Indians as much as possible, buying furs as they were hunted and outbidding all other offers, but on no account were they to resort to physical force and they must avoid any breach of the peace which might bring odium on the Company. The fact that a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the Company’s affairs was currently sitting in London no doubt lent urgency to Sir George’s strictures but he was also wise enough to realize, as McKenzie apparently was not, that the time for strong-arm methods had long gone.
Bangs’ version of the affair is quite different. He wrote to The Globe editor (and later Father of Confederation) George Brown complaining about two years of attacks by the HBC against John Bangs, resulting in the destruction of Bangs’ packs and the burning of parts of the trading post they had established on Lake Timiskaming by the HBC men. He added bitterly that Chief factor McKenzie and a “strong gang of men” had tyrannized them because they were legally encroaching on the HBC’s “monopoly.”
The tension between Bangs and the Hudson’s Bay Company continued:
It was the Bangses’ invasion, too, that first brought Canadian customs officers to Fort Timiskaming. In the spring of 1858 James Bangs informed the Ottawa office that the Company was importing English goods, by way of Moose, without paying duty, and a party under an officer named John Heaney was immediately dispatched to the Fort. On his arrival, Heaney announced that he intended to confiscate and remove all goods on which no duty had been paid, to which John Simpson spiritedly replied that although he would not resist the seizure of the goods, he would shoot the first man who tried to take any from the store.
… The Bangses continued to maintain several stations in the neighbourhood of Fort Timiskaming during the winter of 1858-59 but by the autumn of 1859 the partnership had split up and the Company had hired the nephew, John Bangs, for Mattawa.
The Combermere Store
In 1864, James Smith Bangs had acquired 25,200 square feet of land from “John Dennison the younger” at the Madawaska River and Peterson Road in what is now the village of Combermere in Renfrew County. (In December, 1870, the land was granted to his widow, Agnes Bangs, who also purchased a nearby 199 acres by Crown sale.)
By June 1865, however, Bangs signed himself as “Indian agent,” on a concerned letter asking that land be granted to Indians on the Madawaska River in the Township of Lawrence (in present-day Algonquin Park), although it is unclear whether he was an official government agent or interceding personally as a friend on their behalf. At that time, he was the only person listed under “Hatters & Furriers” for Arnprior in a Canadian business directory.
Going home from Combermere
Bangs’ daughter Zebba, who was 18 at the time of her father’s death, still remembered years later at age 79 that when her father was leaving Arnprior to go up to Combermere, “passing through the room where I was he said he never felt so disinclined to go. [I] wonder if it was a premonition, for he never came home again.” She added that he was “an expert swimmer and had saved several lives. Father said he never feared drowning, but one of his horses kicked him in the leg in the spring of this year, so perhaps that was the cause, probably caused cramp in his leg.”
Two years after the drowning, in May 1869, men driving timber at the Snake Rapids for lumber manufacturer Samuel Dickson discovered some skeletal remains. They were identified as James Smith Bangs by his familiar necktie and boots, which clung to the bones. A Coroner’s Inquest was said to be necessary before his life insurance monies would be released.
There was no money belt.
Bangs is remembered on two tombstones, one with his wife in Cumberland, Ontario and another where his remains are buried with the Bangs family in Ottawa.
Researchers at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum have recently rejuvenated a project involving archaeological finds of preserved underwater objects from canoe accidents during the fur trade. They are material reminders of the powerful and sometimes deadly roles of rivers driving Ontario’s fur trade. Perhaps Bangs’ belt will someday be found and added to that history.
Copyright © 2020 by Donald V. Macdougall. No part of this article may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the author, except in the cases of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
About the author: Don Macdougall is a retired lawyer in Ottawa and can be reached at donvmac@gmail.com. This article originally appeared in Families, November 2019.
Great article, thank you! Enjoyed the read.