Talk:McGowan's War

Still needs work, also map, portraits maybe

Thanks to User:Norum for getting me back to going on this; hopefully I'm not overlong with what's there and, in fact, there's better detail that could be added in; bios of Dixon and other protagonists need to be written (Col. Moody, who I haven't mentioned, and Ovid Allard, the HBC man in Yale, and Isaac Dixon and more). The last paragraph I didn't expand as the denouement to the "war" was fairly complicated and I can't summon it from memory; legalistic sleight-of-hand by McGowan, actually impressing Begbie (who invited him to naturalize and become a British subject, which McGowan turned down because all the boatmen were Irish Catholic and didn't like the crown and he had his loyalties to them first), and a post-court drinking party with Heidsick and caviar in Hill's Bar....gonna make a great movie some day, if I ever condense it into a script. My comment-outs I'll move to this page later; I have to go out right now; but the last bit is quite wrong, or at best misleading (not Norum's fault, but his Digital Collections source's) as McGowan was fined for assault on Fifer, as I recall, and there's more to this court proceeding and McGowan's talks with Begbie and Col Moody that needs saying, but I don't have the book handy; all else here was written from memory. But definitely the British troops did NOT surprise the miners, as Hauka's book makes clear.Skookum1 18:02, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

I am sorry for getting back at you this late. I am myself living in Ontario and to be honest, I did not know about Ned McGowan and the Ned McGowan's war. It just happened by accident as I was reading a western entitled "Golden Creek" and it happened that some of the characters in the book turned out to be real persons. I looked up more info and created some new pages: Barnard's Express, Francis Jones Barnard, Spence's Bridge and Chartres Brew.

Norum 07.08.2006

Note on Digital Collections link

I just read through it; it's written for school curriculums and not only oversimplifies the events but has a number of errors; such as the British troops lining up at "Yale and Hill's Bar"....that would have been a lot of troops, given the five miles separating the two settlements and there only being something like 50-100 of them; the muster was in Yale and was a show of force; but the troops had been seen passing by Hill's Bar in the night, so McGowan and his boys knew what was up; but they hadn't fomented rebellion anyway, only been accused of it by the Vigilance Committee types; so it all ended in a courthouse scene which I'll eventually add in here once I re-research it. But NB in general Digital Collections heritage/history sites are NOT to be taken at face-value and cannot be trusted; partly because they are amateurly written and researched, often by schoolkids, and partly because they are often overtly political, or their chosen sources are.....and in general they're full of "sloppy facts" as well as "fuzzy history"Skookum1 18:08, 15 July 2006 (UTC)